Wouldn't that truly be one of the travisties of humanity? Ending the Information Revolution by returning to where we were before it... Let us just hope and act in such a way that this does not come to pass.

Free exchange of digital information (like Open Source Software) which defined personal computing (GNU did quite a bit of defining with gcc, emacs, &c) is ending?

Sounds like FUD aimed at open source software -- particularly because he uses the term "open computing" :)

On another note, my personal experience of .NET is that it seems to revolve around Visual Basic style API, buzzwords, and commercialism. I was thinking this morning that it seems like companies no longer have any interest in providing developer tools to people who develop for the sake of developing, but rather tools for rather poor coders working for large profiteering companies. It's a shame because it would have been so nice if it wasn't such garbage.

"The era of open computing is ending"

You bet your ass it's ending because they're ending it. If the universal pushing of Passport, .Net, and Palladium haven't convinced you yet, you need to do a little reading.

I am genuinely afraid of what personal computing will look like in ten years if Microsoft has their way, and I have never been too concerned in the past, so I am hardly an alarmist Microsoft conspiracy nut either.

I think the main problem with .NET is the marketing. .NET means somethind different to just about everyone.. To me as a developer it means the new development tools (ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, Web Services). I definitely don't think that was a misstep- it is 100x better than its predecessor (COM). However, I think branding hailstorm and all the new version of the enterprise servers as .NET was a mistake. MS was trying to put everything under the .NET umbrella, but since some of those products/concepts have failed (ie hailstorm) it is now going to paint all things .NET in a negative light especially to people who aren't totally familiar with it. I hope they learn the lesson. I can remember visiting the web site several times that talks about what .NET is, and seeing it change about every month :)

... because this quote is dopey no matter who said it:

Jim Allchin, one of the company's top vice presidents, acknowledged the shift in focus in the industry from personal computers to plumbing, and bemoaned the difficulty of getting Microsoft's traditional consumers to care about its new vision.

Well gee, Jim, you have it a bit backwards don't you. Shouldn't the company care about its customers' vision? I mean, if Porsche designed a kick ass lawmower -- I mean a innovative leap in lawnmower technology -- would you expect Porsche's traditional to care about Porsche's new vision?

"Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending."

That will happen when they pry the webserver out of my dead hands.

Seriously, what is going to happen? MSN will supply all the content for the world? I doubt it.

http://www.rahga.com forever, and I suggest you do the same.

I think when developers talk about .NET, we're talking about the .NET framework. Which does have many wonderful features and improvements to the languages (C#, VB.NET is a big improvement over VB 6.0), the ease of making web services. It's much easier to manipulate XML than in previous versions. In the developer community (at least the ones that make money by programming on the Windows platform) it is slowly gaining popularity and many web sites have converted over to ASP.NET.

When the general public thinks about .NET, I think they are referring to the nebulous cloud of "web services" that Microsoft has alluded to, "Hailstorm", ".NET My Services", etc... Those still seem to be up in the air and not many people see the need for them.

I don't think I'd pay Microsoft for a subscription to Word.NET when I can just keep using MS Word 2000 or OpenOffice 1.0, or AbiWord. I don't want to store my credit card info in my Passport (or liberty alliance or any other online identity service) account. Heck, I want the people in the checkout lane to ASK to see my ID when I hand them a credit card, I certainly don't want to hand over all the info that a thief needs to charge things to my credit card.

Well, I think we should see the writing on the wall for this one. No large monopolistic corporation can make good enough money on a free (as in Paul Revere) internet, so they are trying to divvy it up with proprietary systems and protocols to impose artificial monopolies.

Big companies may be able to undercut the competition at first, but the total cost of ownership will hurt you in the end.

I didn't say anything about ending Open Source. I said they're ending open computing. Two different things.

Open source is of course, freely available source code. Open computing is the basic interoperability and data exchange upon which we all rely to make things 'just work' together. Try just for a minute to tell me that MS wouldn't foreclose on any interoperability standard they could if it would result in increased sales of their products.

Open source isn't ending, and it never will. It's currently our best hope for keeping MS as honest as possible.

• Gates also acknowledged that confusion still reigns about .NET's very definition.

Good -- they understand one problem. People can perhaps point to the CLR and assoicated libraries, but .NET has been touted as much more than that, especially to non-techies.

• On Wednesday, he hammered home a new definition: "software to connect information, people, systems and services."

Unfortunately, this definition doesn't help at all. Pretty much all internet-based software does this.

Wherever "open computing" survives will become the dominant cultural force of the next century.

The United States is in a position to maintain cultural hegemony over the whole world - if we don't kill the free exchange of culture in order to make a quick buck.

If we do, I predict, within a couple of generations, that other parts of the world will have outpaced us. Killing open computing will destroy our best way-out of the recent doldrums in popular movies and music.

He could be speaking of the end of open source in the business sense.

Where in the article did it mention him indicating the end of Open Source? The warning statement was about the end of "Open Computing," and I believe he was referring to Digital Rights Management and other cryptographic technologies being built into the hardware and operating system. Personally, I find this concept MORE frightening than ending Open Source, but he's doing nothing more here than repeating what all of the big corporate conglomerates (RIAA, etc) have been trying to convince us of. Sad really. As much as I don't like Mr. Gates, I would have hoped that the geek in him wouldn't have caved so quickly.

Then why I am seeing everyone is converting to Java in the last 2 years? No one is using .NET or planning to use it around. My firm tested it, tried to call some legacy activex controls and unmanaged C++ code, they of course rejected it after a biiiiiiig performance hit.
I know lots of developers who shifted to Java from MS platforms though. :)
.NET is new. Not tested, not trustable. Java existed 7 years ago. Why should I risk it? Why should I develop in .NET, just another VM based technology, but this time lock myself to Windows? I know that there will be other implementations of .NET, such as Mono on Linux, but those will not be cross platform compatible at all. Even they say it. One reason is that .NET's most important parts are not given to ECMA, such as WinForms and ADO.NET. Do not forget that. MS is still holding the patterns.
etc. etc.
.NET my BUTT. I will never use it.

Gates indicated that the company's software Promised Land will be a new version of its Windows operating system code-named Longhorn, which is still at least two years off.

Don't we hear this story every few years, but with a different product's name? Before that it was Windows XP, and before that it was "Chicago/Windows 4.0/Win95" and before that it was DOS 6 and before that it was ...

According to MSFT, the 'Promised Land of Computing' has always been waiting for us in their home just over the next ridge.

Thank God someone finally has something good to say about Java. I've been developing java based solutions for the past 3 years and I honestly don't see any reason for this .Net crap. Seems like more and more people are moving their server side code over to Java and not looking back. But all you here is Java is dead. Maybe no one is using java on the client but Java seems to be surging forward on the server. Chris

There are two main potential .NET targets:
1. Companies who have not yet started to deploy solutions using J2EE or Java and are trying to decide which to use: Java or .NET
2. Companies who have a need for some software that is only as a .NET application.

I won't address issues involving getting companies to deploy the .NET environment to their PCs... Microsoft is most likely going to have to force people-- which may not be popular.

a1. If you already have a substantial investment in software written in anything but a .NET language, chances are you aren't very motivated to switch paradigms.
a1. Regardless of how you view .NET the fact is java has been here for quite a while and has a good following. I have yet to meet a serious java developer who has any interest in .NET
a1. Regardless of all the claims Microsoft makes about C#/.NET maturity, nobody in their right mind is going to bet the company on a new MS platform just because the pay-for-plundits say it's sexy. .NET has to earn the industry's trust-- not an easy hill to climb these days.
a2. There is little imperative to adopt something for which there are no major none-Microsoft commercial offerings.
a2. Either way, I suspect difficult part of the sell for .NET is in convincing CEOs that they aren't further limiting their licensing choices and options in order to adopt something they just don't need-- at least not yet. The wait-and-see approach is a tried and true paradigm with respect to version 1.0 software from Microsoft.

Personally, I find it hard to get excited about something from a company whose major call to fame these days is the latest way it is reaming its customers.

"There's also a Reuters report and a NYTimes story on the same subject, which includes the interesting line: "Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending." It isn't clear if Microsoft is talking about something happening beyond their control, or if they're boasting about ending it."

It seems clear enough to me. Microsoft and the entertainment industry are in bed together. Both have something to gain from DRM.

The entertainment industry can stop music and movie pirating, take away our fair use rights and set the stage for a future market. That market being the sale of digital video and music which will be streamed directly to hardware. It is important to the entertainment industry that we are not allowed to record the digital data because once recorded we, as individuals, could illegally swap the files with others. Obviously, that would greatly reduce the incentive to pay again and again for the privilege of having the entertainment industry stream it to us. So say good-by to your fair use rights.

Microsoft has a lot to gain here also, on an entirely different front. They are fighting for their Corporate lives against a foe unlike any they have had to deal with before. Linux can not be made to go bankrupt, it cannot be sued into oblivion and it is steadily gaining popularity. How can Microsoft deal with this specter of doom? They must use any weapon available to them.

1. FUD. Yep, good ol' fear, uncertainty and doubt has always helped Microsoft in the past. It hasn't worked very well against Linux because their FUD has been too transparent. People just weren't buying it. They need a more complex strategy.

2. The Law. Make open source illegal. Hmmm... I'm sure they thought about that one... but how?

How about using FUD, a grain of truth to paint open source users as pirates, thieves and other assorted forms of lower life. Then join together with the entertainment industry to buy a senator like say.... SENATOR HOLLINGS FROM SC. And have him draft legislation that will ram DRM down our throats.

One all hardware is DRM enabled, only the entertainment industries bed partner will be allowed to receive digital data that will be streamed by this industry. Microsoft will do it's part to ensure that as few applications as possible will be allowed to run on Linux and have access to this new market. Definitely not open source. Thus they prevent competition. Typical strategy for Microsoft. Being afraid of competition they don't go head to head unless they can ensure themselves an advantage.

Unfortunatly, this is how the IT industry works (or has worked). I guess all marketing departments do this to an extent, but IT is really the worst.

A. Promise the moon, to be delivered within two years
B. Spend 6 months talking about the Moon, but never really getting into details beyond buzzwords.
B2. If new and interesting technology comes along within those 6 months claim the Moon will contain it as well
C. Come out with alpha software (Moon v.1 Preview) that has little functionality built in but looks nice
D. Slip schedule ('We're adding new and exciting features')
E..Y Wait
Z. Deliver something that could quite possibly be useful and innovative, but deliveres about 1/10th of the orig. promise.

I would have to disagree that Java is dead on the client. I think it suffered a major stroke with AWT and then again with the first versions of Swing.

However with the release of 1.4, there have been vast improvements made on the client side (read GUI) that makes it much more viable as an option. The company I am currently with is designing an entire GUI with Swing and so far things have been very positive.

On the server side, however, Java is king. There are very few "single" technologies that can do as much as smoothly as Java does. Yes you can do everything that Java does with other technologies, but using a single technology, Java owns this arena currently.

.NET is new. People are suspicious of it. A large number of developers out there view it as a clone and say "why do we want it". .NET does give you less in the interoperability department (basically windows only) than J2EE does plus it still has to prove itself.

Give .net a couple more years. It will either get a foothold or die. Personally, I hope it dies.

I think that MS may see this as an opportunity to garner control along with RIAA via things like the DMCA. MS has practically embraced the idea of more control over content and media. Legislation like the DMCA simply reinforces their further control of "innovations" as they call them. If things like proprietary encryption and the like come down the pike, MS will be the medium. The fact that this will further alienate the Open Source community is a huge bonus for them. >

While open source is a subset of open computing, the two are in no way synonyms. The idea Microsoft is trying to convey is that business models are finally beginning to catch up to modern technology. Open computing could be taken to cover everything from internet access (where business models are already beginning to evolve from unlimited monthly access to capped transfer/bandwidth or pay-by-MB) to P2P file sharing systems (no explanation necessary). Personally, I still believe technologically open solutions are evolving faster than traditional business models, but certainly the industry is now actively aware of this open computing -- not "problem" -- but "opportunity" to make more money. (Or, after the latest string of quarterly losses, make ANY money). I've always found it interesting how gargantuan companies can lose millions (or billions) of dollars each year, yet the CEO's of said companies still manage to turn a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars and live in houses with six hot tubs and three pools (at least one indoor) and other such ludicrously excessive luxuries.

"If I'm building a box, am I going ot include a Palladium component"

Well, that sounds good until a couple years from now where your video card is getting really doggy, and the CPU's that are available are 4 times faster than what you've got, and no one is using CD-r's anymore, and the 27GB blue disc DVD's are looking nice and cheap.

If Palladium passes and they enforced making the sale of non-Palladium hardware illegal... then all the companies will start making Palladium compliant hard ware. Sure, you can find hardware form the pre-Palladium days, but every year, those will seem so slow, it won't be worth it.

Yes, Java! Because: - Java is cross platform compatible. .NET may never be cross platform compatible %100 including Mono project etc., since MS is holding patents of very important parts of .NET, such as WinForms, ADO.NET. They did not submitted all the parts of .NET to ECMA. They kept the most important parts.

- Java was there 7 years ago! :) Think about it. Now it is matured, reliable. There are millions of Java programmers (still there will be %50 more need for in 2003 according to Gartner research), thousands of open/close, ready to use, matured programs, frameworks, libraries written in Java. .NET is a newbee, need at least 3 years to become reliable. During this time, Java will be much better.

- Java is working already. Its doing everything I need. Why should I change to .NET? :) There are many programs written in Java, basically working on many different platforms already.

- Performances of .NET and Java are not very different. Both are VM based. .NET might be faster than Java on Windows, especially in client applications, but, it is not very important, since CPUs are fast enough, and Java is getting better optimized with every release. In short, Java is fast enough.

- All the big companies other than MS, such as Sun, Oracle, Sybase, IBM, BEA, HP, Fujitsu, Nokia, Sony/Ericcson, JBoss, etc. already rolled their dice and chosen Java. They have many products based on Java. Why should they burn their investments and move to MS's .NET? Of course they won't.

- Java is not from the most unethical company in the history of mankind. Some people believe in ethics and don't use it. Such as me.

It's actually quite ingenious on the part of Gates. Admit that MS hasn't done as well with .NET as they would like. Everyone knows that to be true, but Gates' honesty shocks and surprises everyone.

In the next breath he mentions that not everything is going to be so open and free in the future. But since he just scored "honesty points" by admitting a less-than-great performance by his company, the general public automatically attaches a little more credibility to his comment about "open and free."

If Gates just comes out and spews FUD about open source, etc. it's just more of the same. If Gates makes an out-of-character negative critique about his company and THEN spews FUD about open source, it sounds like its part of a fit of honesty.

Your taxpayer dollars are paying good money to port from one completely propietary platform (2k/ASP) to another (ORACLE/SUN). The only difference? The latter costs more.

This is a bit trollish. Oracle on Sun offers tremendous flexibility, it can be extemely reliable, and it is much simpler to administer well. Conversely, I've seen Oracle on Windows NT, and it was an embarassing travesty.

I really wish people who see only up-front costs would take off their blinders and have just a little insight into the future. UNIX, believe it or not, is still cheaper in the long-term than Windows, and going with non-Microsoft applications may actually reduce risk. Perhaps this is a good thing for the taxpayers?

Microsoft has been very successful at making people put all their eggs in one basket and at providing an operating system that requires what seems to be a one-to-one ratio between administrators and computers. Is this really what you want?

Shouldn't the company care about its customers' vision?

Some columnist recently pointed out that Apple achieved in one stroke everything MS is trying to achieve with .NET, by announcing iCal [apple.com] and iSync [apple.com] last week at MacWorld. Those two programs allow users of Mac OS X Jaguar to connect their PDAs, cell phones and desktop PIM software to a single database and publish them on the Internet, connect with the calendars of others, and resolve conflicts between the two.

In other words, while Microsoft spent two years talking about Web services and technologies, Apple quietly went about actually building them into a program its users will want to use. MS has been announcing and releasing software for other people to build these Web applications, but Apple decided to lead by example instead.

No doubt the next release of Windows will include similar features, and of course they'll be more widely used than Apple's. But just think what might be happening right now if Microsoft had spent as much time creating Web applications for Windows XP as they did promoting them.

If a person could synchronize their PocketPC to their MSN account and Outlook at the same time, then reconcile with all their coworkers' calendars and documents, without having to do anything more than press a button, Microsoft wouldn't need subscriptions to sell the next version of Office or Windows. Instead they settled for getting halfway there so that they could sell more copies of Exchange Server and keep PocketPCs as expensive as humanly possible.

Face it:

People want open computing, otherwise we would all run Macs now.

In the last 2 weeks I've installed Linux for 2 friends and yesterday I was called by another one who is no longer able to rip DVD-movies with Windows XP after he did an online-update. (Yes, he wants to try Linux, too after this "experience".)

Pirated music, movies and software is what keeps the whole computer-thing going at home. Or do you really think that granny is going to shell out 400$ for MS Office to write 2 letter/month?

If you take that away, you immediately lock out the vast majority of home users which will accept great pain and suffering to escape (and switching over to Linux is not as hard as it used to be. But even if it was, that would not matter because a DRM-computer would be useless for most home users.)

Palladium and universal DRM are just not going to happen in a free market.

Of course semi-democracies like the US might force it by law, but just like Alcohol-prohibition, it won't last very long and nobody would care about it anyway. (Actually alcohol-prohibition reduced alcohol consumption only in the first 2 years while the market adapted. Then because of harder drinks (= easier to smuggle) and more aggressive distribution (no more youth protection) the alcohol consumption per head was much higher at the end of prohibition than at the start.)

Millions of users currently don't care about copyright, why should they care wether DRM is mandatory or not?

[dabbler.org]
".NET Signals an Industry Shift"
also referenced as the article about "Moore's Triple Crisis".

The author of the article (David Bau, who made the popular "Dave's Google Quicksearch Bar") writes about a three-way Moore's law crisis: crisis in systems, apps and development.

Systems: "the exponentially rising power of PC technology has started to overshoot the needs of the ordinary customer. This means people are starting to shop for cheaper computers instead of more powerful ones."

Development: "Moore's law crisis affects development costs just as dramatically as it affects hardware costs. As computing power gets cheaper and software becomes more ephemeral, it makes sense to save software development hours by wasting CPU cycles." The Garbage collectors and Intermediate Languages of .NET and Java are according with that. Scripting languages too.

Applications: "Microsoft is facing the problem of saturation. The widely recognied issue here is that almost everybody who wants to do something with their computer software can already do it. Why would you buy a new version of Microsoft Word or Excel?" "Microsoft is facing competitors like America Online that are using a new model for software applications."
That's why Microsoft introduced his .NET services.

The next big thing was supposed to be Applications Service Providers. Rent your key business apps. A hosting provider with a support staff would resell applications. Remember? Where are those guys now?

There are successes in that business, but Microsoft isn't one of them. PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, EDS, and Automatic Data Processing are the successful players. They're big, vertically integrated companies that build and service what they sell. They're not value-added resellers, and they don't usually work through value-added resellers.

Microsoft's model, that you download something, pay for it forever, and don't bother them much, isn't how it's done. The big service providers provide real service; they are in the business of outsourcing corporate support functions, not pushing software.

"Microsoft also warned today that the era of "open computing," the free exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer industry, is ending." It isn't clear if Microsoft is talking about something happening beyond their control, or if they're boasting about ending it.

Nothing new. Bill Redux: I remember hearing of an episode from back when GEM and Windows were still battling it out - at a conference panel where Bill and Gary Kildall were members, and Gary was going on about OSs, and how there'd be plenty of ways to run your computer. Bill grabbed a microphone and interrupted, with a clarification to the effect that "No, there will be one way to operate your computers. One. (uncomforatble silence) You may continue."

. . . PHP is also an excellent alternative to ASP.

I read somewhere that PHP is the fastest growing scripting language on the web, and has already surpassed the popularity of the more mature ASP.

Exellent development tools available for Java make it a good choice for some bigger web projects, but the downside is that the cost of setting up a server. Not too many people offer virtual hosting for java. You pretty much need your own server with root access to set things up.

For smaller projects you can get a domain name, virtual host with PHP, and mySQL for about $20 US per month.

Of course you can design and test both technologies on your free OS, with your free web server, with your free database.

So why is anybody switching to .NET?

"Re:It seems clear to me... (Score:2)
by sheldon on Thursday July 25, @02:05PM (#3952551)
(User #2322 Info | http://www.sodablue.org/)
It seems clear enough to me. Microsoft and the entertainment industry are in bed together. Both have something to gain from DRM.

Microsoft's position on this is quite understandable. They aren't in bed together, but Microsoft feels that if they do not incorporate DRM into their applications and utilities someone else will and that application will become supplant Windows as a desired choice."

I'm not buying it. With all of the applications out there and over 90% of computers in the entire world running a Microsoft OS there is no OS poised to "supplant Windows as a desired choice."

In their recent FUD they claimed that the reason for their Palladium strategy is to protect customer's from evil hackers and "un-trusted" code. Yet it will not do a thing to prevent the majority of attacks. This initiative is mostly about hurting open source for Microsoft and about curtailing future P2P file swapping for the entertainment industry.

You bet Microsoft is in bed the entertainment industry.

One more partner that I didn't mention in my previous post was the hardware manufacturers. To pull this off they have to play along as well. All of them need to exclusively sell DRM enabled hardware because if any of them are not on board with this scheme then people will have a choice. Given the choice of hardware that the entertainment industry and Microsoft controls or uncrippled hardware, you can guess what people will choose. So we must not be allowed a choice.

And just in case some of the hardware companies are reluctant to play along Microsoft and the entertainment industry have bought and paid for SENATOR HOLLINGS FROM SC. This is one corrupt SOB that needs to be removed from the equation. If you are from SC I would suggest voting the bastard out.

As far as my opinion being FUD, I think not. It is by far more based on fact then fear, uncertainty and doubt.

".NET has nothing to do with COM. It exists as it is even if COM never existed."

Well that's pretty rich. I guess I was imagining all those GUIDs.

"Yes, just as you can't use a PHP function in Java. I'm not sure what your point is."

Not having to reinvent the wheel for a new paradigm was the point... you know.. reusing existing code... anyways..

"We had code in Beta2 that runs flawlessly on the 1.0 CLR less one minor exception (minor syntax change)."

I'm glad to hear Microsoft didn't redesign the CLR between beta2 and version 1.0 ... that must have been a big relief.

Working for a company that has the budget to redesign and re-code everything must be nice though. I'm glad not everyone is hurting in this economy.

...what, in your view, was Gates's motivation then in grasping the security nettle so publicly the other day...?

I don't know Mr. Gates personally so I can only guess based on what I was told, by someone who does know him, in a conversation that occurred last winter.

My friend said that Gates finally "got it" about two years ago as far as realizing that security is actually important, but still did not realize that security is something that must be designed in to a technology from the very beginning. He described Mr. Gates as a visionary who likes to dream up new stuff and believed that security was something that could be added on to a technology later -- by low-level underlings. Kind of like believing that you could make the Corvair safe by simply adding air bags.

He also mentioned that BillG considered security to be more of a PR issue than a real one.

The "Trusted Computing" letter to which you refer is consistent with that view. Most of the letter is pure PR and most of the rest is consistent with a viewpoint that security can be obtained by simply having coders go back through source code looking for bugs.

I don't think Gates realized until just recently that he has literally built Windows on a very dangerous foundation (ActiveX, for one example) that CANNOT be made secure. I think that's what Palladium is about: yet another add-on by underlings (hardware designers, in this case) so that he does not have to admit that he made some very fatal errors several years ago when he designed the Win32 architecture.

Gates is a betting man -- he played a LOT of poker in his college days and usually won -- and it shows in the way he keeps "betting the farm" on his company's products and technologies. If the world ever figures out what he's done, he's going to lose it all.

So to answer your question, I THINK that he believes that he really is on the track to better security. I think he's starting to realize that it ain't really true, but I think he also believes that he can bluff his way out of this one just as he has no doubt done in countless poker games in the past.

It will be interesting to see whether that actually happens.