gonvaled's Journal: Microsoft loves cooperation

We all think that Microsoft (and other privately held companies, for that matter), hate open communities: they continualy attack the open source developmente method, they characterize GPL as being a cancer ...

But what it is really interesting, is that MS is the one receiving the most beneffit from open cooperation: how have they been able to improve their programs? Thanks to the huge amount of beta testers that get to use their SW. These testers do not contribute code (as some of them do in open source projects), but they contribute test reports, customer requests ... With the automatic reports being sent to MS each time a windows application crashes, the amount of data available to MS and being generated by the end user has dramatically increased.

The model is the following:

- MS develops a product
- MS releases it
- people contribute time and effort to test it (use it)
- people send test results to MS
- MS uses this information to improve a propietary product

That looks like a good deal. They proffit from the work of others and they do not give anything back. Well, that's not true, they give the product to the customers. But the customers already pay for it, so that their "testing efforts" remain basically unpayed.