Fact every company has failed to compete against microsoft has choosen not to repond to microsoft competitive response
Remember the Network Computer, SUN's answer to the PC. When they announced they could save companies thousands in TCO costs. Companies who invested in them could save thousands in the first year alone.
Microsoft responded by creating the managed pc spec. Using a combination of system policies, log in scripts and SMS (system Management Servers) you were able to reduce the TCO to within $152 of the NC
Sun had a proposal to build a PCI card for PCs that had an embedded functionality of the Pico Java chip on it. You could have run Java Apps on your PC with the same speed as you would have gotten on the NC. All for a tiny fraction of the cost of an NC but it did not did not allow sun to take over Sun to take over the chip market from Intel
They could have re written Java to cache the apps on the local machine and added a hard drive for that purpose so that if network connections were lost the program could still work. While it can now do that if they had done that back then Java would not have lost the steam it did for desktop apps
Code improves by having different people try out different things. Some are dumb ideas and go nowhere and some are good. Until tried, it is difficult to tell the good from the bad ideas. In closed source, a pre-selection filter prevents people trying ideas. In open source anyone can scratch an itch and try things out, hence open source is more likely to experience breakthroughs than closed source.
That unfortunately is a very big oversimplification, the fact is that many companies including microsoft have research and development labs, within these labs people are paid to try out different ideas even if they potentially didn't have any commercial application.
The classic example given is 3M posted notes story, the guy who invested post notes was looking for a way to create a book marks that you could make notes on and that would not fall out of his song book at church.
3M actually approved this non business related use of company resources in their development lab and while it resulted in a lot of usesless crap, the success more than paid for the failure. Companies like microsoft, sun and ibm have dedicated research labs just this
That is the crux of the matter. Gee, if I modify gpl code and then redistribute it under gpl and the accompanying source, I'm going to get sued for copyright infringement?
Actually the point is if you are hired to make a modification of an open source program which is specified not for public release but to be used in a hosted app only. But go back on your contract and release code under GPL should you get sued
The only film I can remember that does use either fallacy is "12 Monkeys" (prehaps also Terminator 1). It supports a fully predestined theory of time-travel, where the only "changes" the traveller makes are exactly what was required to reach the future he came from.
Actually the "12 monkeys" started with the premise that you could not change the past, they were looking for information to help deal with the consequences of the plague in the future
The spotty information about the past make them believe that the army of the 12 monkeys released the virus when all they did was release some animals from the zoo on the same day
Terminator was a perfect predestination paradox because john conner would never have been born if the ternimator had not been sent back in time to kill his mother
If the license they use is not compatable with use in an open source tool, and their system ends up taking off, then the end result is that all people using open source e-mail clients will be misidentified as "spammers" and thus unable to send e-mail to people who do participate in this system
distributing it as binary does not have the patent requirements, all an open source email client needs to do is have a plug in interface for the BINARY add ons that will support this functionality and THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN
No one in the history of business has managed to engage in any kind of relationship what-so-ever with Microsoft Corporation and not gotten screwed in the end. No exceptions exist to date.
your right the guys who sold the money losing hotmail for $400 million sure got screwed by microsoft
From the article, Netproject's Eddie Bleasdale says his consultancy was
used as a negotiating tool to get a better deal out of Microsoft. He argues
that the council never really intended to deploy an open source solution at
all - because it doesn't have the expertise to do so. This wouldn't be the
first time. How many times have we seen governments and large corporations
fake the move to OSS only to get a better deal from MS?
As long as open source consultancy proposals require you to replace existing
employees with new people that have the skill required they will never win
because any IT professional that makes that choice is CHOOSING to lose his
job. Self interest says they will reject any solutions that will cost them
their jobs.
It might be more cost effective to replace an existing person with a new
person trained on unix commands but it would be more effective to produce tools
that allow a windows administrator to manage the linux box with the same look
and feel they are used to.
Hmm. If I remember correctly, a bug that was in a tool used in 9 Linux distributions (for example) was also counted as 9 vulnerabilities as opposed to just one.
Take the numbers out of context and they really lose all of their meaning. Hence, the study comes to its conclusions with a lot more spin than relevant fact.
However the same rules applied with different flavors of windows (windows 98,
Me, XP) too so it really wasn't that unfair a comparison
However, if our involvement were held by a court to be in violation of
the Securities Act of 1933, we could be required to repurchase the shares sold
to purchasers in this offering at the original purchase price for a period of
one year following the date of the violation,
If I was one of Google's competitors (with deep pockets cough
Microsoft) I would bid up the price of the IPO and then dump the stock
right after if they get convicted. It would be a good way to deplete their
cash reserves from the IPO.
Is what is the criteria to determine if the articles are equal. MSNBC and a lot of other sites like
NEWS. COM zdnet Syndicate a lot of their stories from the associate press. The articles are
identical the only difference is the ads that are embedded around the story
If these equal articles show the MSBC syndicated version and none
of the other syndicated versions, it would be better than google's unbiased
newsbot because completely redundant articles would be eliminated. And Microsoft
could do this by using the Associate Press's feed as a baseline for comparison.
You must listen to a lot of right-wing talk radio. Explain to me how this
money is being taxed twice. By the logic that
right-wingers use to justify lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains,
that is to say the statement that this money is being taxed twice, could be used
to justify tax free status for Bill Gates chauffeur, after all, Bill already
paid taxes on the money he's using to pay the chauffeur, so why should the
chauffeur pay taxes on that money?
No it could not
Dividends are taxed twice because they are not deducted as an expense from
the corporations balance sheet, they are paid after all expenses are paid and
deducted from retained earnings. Once they are paid out they are
considered income again getting taxed again under the income tax laws.
Conversely when bill gates pays his chauffer he gets to deduct it from the
pre tax income as an employee expense, meaning he never pays tax on that
salary. It is not being double taxed because Bill never paid taxes on the
money paid to the chauffer.
I really want to see what is done to get 'Venom' into the movie Marvel
Universe... Will there be a few 'Secret Wars' scenes or will that be played out
in a 'comic styled' opening sequence? Will they even attempt to bring 'Venom'
into the picture? If so, will they bring in the Fantastic Four, whom helped
Spidey more then once with the symbiote.
I really hope they don't do the venom thing like they did in the comic
book. They should do it like they did in the spidey cartoon. With
the symbiotic being found on the mars, by john Jameson.
It is surprising that MS is scared enough of Linux and the
open-source/free software movement to be releasing some of their source code
while their market share is still so ridiculously high.
Why? Microsoft modes operandi is list of all the benefits of its new
competitor and systematically duplicate as much of the benefit as possible
without giving away the crown jewels. As a result the benefit of switching
from windows is reduced while the cost stay the same.
The benefit of the NC was the lower administration cost of these machines
because the applications were downloaded from central servers. Microsoft
introduced the active X update (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) the ability to
duplicate this site internally for large organization combined with ZERO PC
initiative reduced the TCO cost of a managed PC to within $100 of the NC from
over $1000. All of a sudden the $800+ cost of moving to NC did not have
the same ROI.
Releasing the source gives developers who would normally have to go to Linux
because they wanted the ability to modify the source to meet their specific
needs could now stay with windows and not have to endure the learning curve of
adopting Linux. Considering that these devices are substantially more
stable that standard windows installations excess device driver information is
eliminated and the absolute uniformity, given the form factor design of these
devices, even the normal penalty of windows starts to disappear.
And, what about problems that Microsoft deliberately creates, which can
only be solved by their software? Remember how they sabotaged Windows so that it
would not run with a competitor's version of DOS? Exactly what customer problem
did that solve?
A more accurate statement was would be while beta testing their own internal
product (windows 3.11) instead of support competitors DOS product which they did
not own or have source code review rights they blocked flagged the product as an
invalid product version and used the SAME CRYPTIC ERROR message that invalidated
older versions of MS-DOS which were also not supported by beta version of
windows.
Dozens of companies have made the same choice when dealing with unsupported
dependent products. Given the fact that Dr. DOS had compatibility issues
with the older versions of windows as well, and other companies were disabling
unsupported dependent products Microsoft thought they had a right to do
that. They settled the issue with Caldera (who basically bought DR-DOS
just for the right to sue).
Try downloading gpl software modify it and then refuse to release the source code and see how quickly you get sued by the FSF as well. Both have restrictions to your freedom. The point is what freedom do you want?
Just because the freedom you want not the same freedom i may want does not mean that is any less valid.
In terms of an organization which wants source code access so they can review the code for security purposes, or have the ability to tweak it for their own internal use shared source is actually more free than GPL because it is explicitly allowed, where in GPL (depending how you define distributing) it is implicitly allowed.
Sega Dreamcast died in part because microsoft stabbed them in the back.
Sega made a deal to use Window CE as the core OS for their console expecting microsoft to back them. (That is the main reason i bought it because the port of MAME for windows CE works on the dreamcast)
SEga demanded concessions from microsoft expecting microsoft to cave instead microsoft said screw you an produced their own game machine.
Developers would take full advantage of advanced hardware they provided.
The addition of a hard drive was a great idea but only one game took full advantage of it everyone else used as a really big memory card because it make it easier to port their games to PS2.
If microsoft is smart they will release a PS2 emulator for the Xbox 2 and then promise to release a PS3 emulator when it comes out.
As long as they keep promising or show progress of developing the emulator people will put off buying PS3 and stick with XBox 2.
Of course DOJ may come after them for that, but since they don't have a monopoly in the game market it might be a hard case to prove.
Since they bought connectix (spelling could be off) this would not be to hard for them.
by our logic i should be allowed to infringe on P&G by making a toothpaste called crest protect.
with big bold letter saying crest and small letter protect.
lots of generic words have been trademarked by limiting the scope of how they are being used in a brandable way for a specific industry or product line.
quite a few of these tech stupidities are really a problem with the customer. For example this one makes. I would fully expect an isp to want a paper record when destroying potentially important points of contact for a company. Especially when it was a consultant and not the companies direct representative who was calling.
As a networking consultant called in to a new client, one of the things I like to do is go over their bills to make sure they are getting what they are paying for from ISPs, telcos, etc. On one occasion, I discovered that a client was paying an ISP for 20 email mailboxes that they hadn't used in years. I called the ISP's customer support to cancel the mailboxes.
Me: "Yes, I notice I'm paying $100/month for 20 email boxes I'm not using. I'd like to cancel them all."
Tech Support: (after verifying our account information and getting the details of the account displayed) "No problem, sir. What I'd like you to do is fax me a list of all the boxes you'd like to cancel, and I'll do it this afternoon."
Me: "Well, I can't really do that, because I don't have a list of these email names. I just have a bill. We haven't used these names in probably two years. Just cancel them all."
Tech Support: "It's all right, sir. I have them here. I'll read them to you."
She proceeded to read me names, and like an idiot I jotted them down until it dawned on me what we were doing.
Me: "Hold on. You're going to read me all 20 names?"
Tech Support: "Yes."
Me: "So I can write them down and fax them back to you??"
Tech Support: "That is our policy, sir."
Me: "Am I the only one who thinks this is absurd?"
Slashdot Mirror
Fact every company has failed to compete against microsoft has choosen not to repond to microsoft competitive response
Remember the Network Computer, SUN's answer to the PC. When they announced they could save companies thousands in TCO costs. Companies who invested in them could save thousands in the first year alone.
Microsoft responded by creating the managed pc spec. Using a combination of system policies, log in scripts and SMS (system Management Servers) you were able to reduce the TCO to within $152 of the NC
Sun had a proposal to build a PCI card for PCs that had an embedded functionality of the Pico Java chip on it. You could have run Java Apps on your PC with the same speed as you would have gotten on the NC. All for a tiny fraction of the cost of an NC but it did not did not allow sun to take over Sun to take over the chip market from Intel
They could have re written Java to cache the apps on the local machine and added a hard drive for that purpose so that if network connections were lost the program could still work. While it can now do that if they had done that back then Java would not have lost the steam it did for desktop apps
That unfortunately is a very big oversimplification, the fact is that many companies including microsoft have research and development labs, within these labs people are paid to try out different ideas even if they potentially didn't have any commercial application.
The classic example given is 3M posted notes story, the guy who invested post notes was looking for a way to create a book marks that you could make notes on and that would not fall out of his song book at church.
3M actually approved this non business related use of company resources in their development lab and while it resulted in a lot of usesless crap, the success more than paid for the failure. Companies like microsoft, sun and ibm have dedicated research labs just this
Actually the point is if you are hired to make a modification of an open source program which is specified not for public release but to be used in a hosted app only. But go back on your contract and release code under GPL should you get sued
The only film I can remember that does use either fallacy is "12 Monkeys" (prehaps also Terminator 1). It supports a fully predestined theory of time-travel, where the only "changes" the traveller makes are exactly what was required to reach the future he came from.
Actually the "12 monkeys" started with the premise that you could not change the past, they were looking for information to help deal with the consequences of the plague in the future
The spotty information about the past make them believe that the army of the 12 monkeys released the virus when all they did was release some animals from the zoo on the same day
Terminator was a perfect predestination paradox because john conner would never have been born if the ternimator had not been sent back in time to kill his mother
it was an hour long tv show
The best part is that after he leaves the room donuts start raining from the sky and marge says oh look it is raining again
If the license they use is not compatable with use in an open source tool, and their system ends up taking off, then the end result is that all people using open source e-mail clients will be misidentified as "spammers" and thus unable to send e-mail to people who do participate in this system
distributing it as binary does not have the patent requirements, all an open source email client needs to do is have a plug in interface for the BINARY add ons that will support this functionality and THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN
No one in the history of business has managed to engage in any kind of relationship what-so-ever with Microsoft Corporation and not gotten screwed in the end. No exceptions exist to date.
your right the guys who sold the money losing hotmail for $400 million sure got screwed by microsoft
What is stopping them from letting it catch on and then asking for $1 from each project?
The licience that they are currently offering
what about ice tea
when they attempt justify why they should not be forced to include quick time media player as a default instead of windows media player
Interesting that Apple is using the same justification against someone else
As long as open source consultancy proposals require you to replace existing employees with new people that have the skill required they will never win because any IT professional that makes that choice is CHOOSING to lose his job. Self interest says they will reject any solutions that will cost them their jobs.
It might be more cost effective to replace an existing person with a new person trained on unix commands but it would be more effective to produce tools that allow a windows administrator to manage the linux box with the same look and feel they are used to.
However the same rules applied with different flavors of windows (windows 98, Me, XP) too so it really wasn't that unfair a comparison
It looks like Google's IPO would be great for deal for investors
According to News.com
If I was one of Google's competitors (with deep pockets cough Microsoft) I would bid up the price of the IPO and then dump the stock right after if they get convicted. It would be a good way to deplete their cash reserves from the IPO.
Is what is the criteria to determine if the articles are equal. MSNBC and a lot of other sites like NEWS. COM zdnet Syndicate a lot of their stories from the associate press. The articles are identical the only difference is the ads that are embedded around the story
If these equal articles show the MSBC syndicated version and none of the other syndicated versions, it would be better than google's unbiased newsbot because completely redundant articles would be eliminated. And Microsoft could do this by using the Associate Press's feed as a baseline for comparison.
You must listen to a lot of right-wing talk radio. Explain to me how this money is being taxed twice. By the logic that right-wingers use to justify lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains, that is to say the statement that this money is being taxed twice, could be used to justify tax free status for Bill Gates chauffeur, after all, Bill already paid taxes on the money he's using to pay the chauffeur, so why should the chauffeur pay taxes on that money?
No it could not
Dividends are taxed twice because they are not deducted as an expense from the corporations balance sheet, they are paid after all expenses are paid and deducted from retained earnings. Once they are paid out they are considered income again getting taxed again under the income tax laws.
Conversely when bill gates pays his chauffer he gets to deduct it from the pre tax income as an employee expense, meaning he never pays tax on that salary. It is not being double taxed because Bill never paid taxes on the money paid to the chauffer.
I really want to see what is done to get 'Venom' into the movie Marvel Universe... Will there be a few 'Secret Wars' scenes or will that be played out in a 'comic styled' opening sequence? Will they even attempt to bring 'Venom' into the picture? If so, will they bring in the Fantastic Four, whom helped Spidey more then once with the symbiote.
I really hope they don't do the venom thing like they did in the comic book. They should do it like they did in the spidey cartoon. With the symbiotic being found on the mars, by john Jameson.
It is surprising that MS is scared enough of Linux and the open-source/free software movement to be releasing some of their source code while their market share is still so ridiculously high.
Why? Microsoft modes operandi is list of all the benefits of its new competitor and systematically duplicate as much of the benefit as possible without giving away the crown jewels. As a result the benefit of switching from windows is reduced while the cost stay the same.
The benefit of the NC was the lower administration cost of these machines because the applications were downloaded from central servers. Microsoft introduced the active X update (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) the ability to duplicate this site internally for large organization combined with ZERO PC initiative reduced the TCO cost of a managed PC to within $100 of the NC from over $1000. All of a sudden the $800+ cost of moving to NC did not have the same ROI.
Releasing the source gives developers who would normally have to go to Linux because they wanted the ability to modify the source to meet their specific needs could now stay with windows and not have to endure the learning curve of adopting Linux. Considering that these devices are substantially more stable that standard windows installations excess device driver information is eliminated and the absolute uniformity, given the form factor design of these devices, even the normal penalty of windows starts to disappear.
4c. The act WAS UNIQUE. Microsoft did not sabotage any other version of DOS to be incompatible with Windows. Just one - DR-DOS.
Check your facts if you tried to run older versions of MS-DOS and PC-DOS you would get the same error message.
And, what about problems that Microsoft deliberately creates, which can only be solved by their software? Remember how they sabotaged Windows so that it would not run with a competitor's version of DOS? Exactly what customer problem did that solve?
A more accurate statement was would be while beta testing their own internal product (windows 3.11) instead of support competitors DOS product which they did not own or have source code review rights they blocked flagged the product as an invalid product version and used the SAME CRYPTIC ERROR message that invalidated older versions of MS-DOS which were also not supported by beta version of windows.
Dozens of companies have made the same choice when dealing with unsupported dependent products. Given the fact that Dr. DOS had compatibility issues with the older versions of windows as well, and other companies were disabling unsupported dependent products Microsoft thought they had a right to do that. They settled the issue with Caldera (who basically bought DR-DOS just for the right to sue).
Try downloading gpl software modify it and then refuse to release the source code and see how quickly you get sued by the FSF as well. Both have restrictions to your freedom. The point is what freedom do you want? Just because the freedom you want not the same freedom i may want does not mean that is any less valid. In terms of an organization which wants source code access so they can review the code for security purposes, or have the ability to tweak it for their own internal use shared source is actually more free than GPL because it is explicitly allowed, where in GPL (depending how you define distributing) it is implicitly allowed.
Sega Dreamcast died in part because microsoft stabbed them in the back. Sega made a deal to use Window CE as the core OS for their console expecting microsoft to back them. (That is the main reason i bought it because the port of MAME for windows CE works on the dreamcast) SEga demanded concessions from microsoft expecting microsoft to cave instead microsoft said screw you an produced their own game machine.
Developers would take full advantage of advanced hardware they provided.
The addition of a hard drive was a great idea but only one game took full advantage of it everyone else used as a really big memory card because it make it easier to port their games to PS2.
If microsoft is smart they will release a PS2 emulator for the Xbox 2 and then promise to release a PS3 emulator when it comes out.
As long as they keep promising or show progress of developing the emulator people will put off buying PS3 and stick with XBox 2.
Of course DOJ may come after them for that, but since they don't have a monopoly in the game market it might be a hard case to prove.
Since they bought connectix (spelling could be off) this would not be to hard for them.
by our logic i should be allowed to infringe on P&G by making a toothpaste called crest protect.
with big bold letter saying crest and small letter protect.
lots of generic words have been trademarked by limiting the scope of how they are being used in a brandable way for a specific industry or product line.
you gave quite a few examples of this
quite a few of these tech stupidities are really a problem with the customer. For example this one makes. I would fully expect an isp to want a paper record when destroying potentially important points of contact for a company. Especially when it was a consultant and not the companies direct representative who was calling. As a networking consultant called in to a new client, one of the things I like to do is go over their bills to make sure they are getting what they are paying for from ISPs, telcos, etc. On one occasion, I discovered that a client was paying an ISP for 20 email mailboxes that they hadn't used in years. I called the ISP's customer support to cancel the mailboxes. Me: "Yes, I notice I'm paying $100/month for 20 email boxes I'm not using. I'd like to cancel them all." Tech Support: (after verifying our account information and getting the details of the account displayed) "No problem, sir. What I'd like you to do is fax me a list of all the boxes you'd like to cancel, and I'll do it this afternoon." Me: "Well, I can't really do that, because I don't have a list of these email names. I just have a bill. We haven't used these names in probably two years. Just cancel them all." Tech Support: "It's all right, sir. I have them here. I'll read them to you." She proceeded to read me names, and like an idiot I jotted them down until it dawned on me what we were doing. Me: "Hold on. You're going to read me all 20 names?" Tech Support: "Yes." Me: "So I can write them down and fax them back to you??" Tech Support: "That is our policy, sir." Me: "Am I the only one who thinks this is absurd?"