Dave Stutz's Parting Advice To Microsoft 314
thasmudyan writes "Like probably many others I followed the recent link to Heise only to get a much more interesting story than the one about Mozilla/OpenOffice: Dave Stutz, an influencial guy at Microsoft, is resigning his position. He posted an open letter to his ex-employer and this rest of the world, explaining what MS is doing wrong in his opinion. I thought it made an interesting read, maybe Open Source projects should consider some of the key points (as MS seems to be too slow to adapt, it may be good time to move faster than 'the industry')." (Read this Slashdot post from 2001 to see an interesting interview with Stutz about "shared source" and .NET.)
Lots of reasons why I want Microsoft to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of reasons why I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
They do understand (Score:1, Insightful)
- Jalil Vaidya
The Egos' of M$ (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Summary: "Hey Microsoft: Embrace Open Source" (Score:5, Insightful)
To my reading, that sounds more like a side effect of the arguement he's making, that the golden age of consisting soley on delivering closed consumer-end software packages is wrapping up (no pun intended).
I think what he's suggesting, and what I've been telling people for a while, is that to remain successful in its traditional markets (as opposed to entertainment, 24 hour news, etc), MS will have to migrate into a services-related role. IBM is doing, or trying to do, something like this for its business clients (although IMO they're being symied by pushback from ground-level people who can't get with the program). If MS could do this for the normal desktop user, allow them to use MS to do the hard stuff with their computers and use online resources to work, they'd have found a whole new area of potential to expoit.
The real questions are (a) will MS recognize this shift sooner than later, and (b) will they be able to refocus themselves into a mindset very different from the one which has made them a very successful company up until this point (as I mentioned, I notice that IBM is having serious problems with this -- even if the management of a company sees the shift, there's the obsticle of the ground-level know-it-alls who want to keep doing things the way they used to).
MS might be able to avoid problems with this given the necessarily lower level of direct customer interaction -- they can't send consultants to all of our homes -- but it's still a big change. They got a lot of press for "embracing the internet" back in '94 or '95, but really they just bought some new products. Their existing line is still struggling, as the author of the article noted, to utilize the potential offered them.
The network is the computer. Film at 11. (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft cannot innovate (Score:5, Insightful)
"Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!"
That's just it: Microsoft has never invented anything. Everything Microsoft ever sold (with the possible exception of that first BASIC interpreter) they either bought or stole (sometimes both [com.com]) from somwhere else. Microsoft can't innovate because they've never known how.
He is NOT saying Open Source is "good" (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people seem to think that the letter suggests that Microsoft should embrace OSS or that the letter is saying something very positive about OSS. The letter does no such thing.
It's a very candid evaluation of what the threat of open source looks like from someone who is not really interested in the values and politics of the movement and doesn't see open source as innovative:
There you have it. His point, if you read the rest of the article, is that Microsoft is too focused on the PC-client side of things, and that's hopeless because anything Microsoft can create on the PC client document-centric side of things the Open Source "cloners" (his word) will just copy and give away for free, and this eats into MS's profit margin. He wants Microsoft to go into network-centric software that will presumably be difficult for open source to clone.
Basically, he sees OSS as cheap, inferior copies of MS's beautiful software (the "best client") not worthy of admiration except for the fact that cheap customers are willing to settle for the inferior thing.
Re:The Mozilla Phoenix Browser (Score:2, Insightful)
It's offtopic because the topic is a story on why a guy left Microsoft. NOT Mozilla or web browsers in general. If he wants his question answered, he can post it as an ask slashdot question!
On this topic, I hope M$ continues to ignore this guy. It could be very scary if they actually do anything he says
Re:Truth can be painful... (Score:1, Insightful)
that the amount we paid a few years ago to renew is no longer sufficient even though we have not deployed any new software from them
that the $30 he forked over for Office XP was just wasted
So which is it? It certainly sounds like you're deploying new software. Do you think they'd sell Office for $30 without the additional contracts? Are you still running Windows 95 and Visual Studio 5 on all your machines or have you really been getting new software from them?
MS Linux/Office for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot of reasons Linux/OSS users don't use Microsoft:
Even if those issues were addressed, it doesn't change the fact that Microsoft's history has been one of "extend and embrace". Regardless of how good their Linux products would/could be, it would be difficult to accept them unless Microsoft changes as a company.
Re:The first paragraph: (Score:5, Insightful)
might be referring to James C. Christensen's book, "The Pelican King" having to do with the growth or aging of organizations related to becoming obselete quickly in a very innovative climate. Just quickly did some searching on this so I might be off though it seems like what he was getting at. Also, IIRC, Windows 95 was released and the Y2K scare was in sight at this time and so there was a massive upgrade cycle going on though network fed upgrades were not the norm.
That was also the time of the Internet wave, a phenomenon that Microsoft co-opted without ever really internalizing into product wisdom.
Microsoft was able to win the browser war and get Exchange and LookOut dominant but didn't/haven't been able to proprietize it or enable all their software to effectively use the network. That with the exception of their virus platform.
While those qualified to move the state of the art forward went down in the millennial flames of the dotcom crash,
Many of the innovative ideas and people had their business's collapse around them when the dotcom bust removed much of the funding. Again, a Christensen like reference to better/faster innovation happens in the smaller organizations.
Microsoft's rigorous belief in the physics of business reality saved both the day and the profits.
Might be realated to Microsoft owning the OEM channel and therefore maintaining profits because nobody else could sell their products directly into the channel. Profits keep flowing to Redmond while others lose them left and right.
But the tide had turned, and a realization that "the net" was a far more interesting place than "the PC" began to creep into the heads of consumers and enterprises alike.
It's the network stupid... And finally, that concept is getting accepted throughout the industry.
IMO, this is VERY important to Microsoft because 30% of it's profits come from a PC OS and another 30% come from using that PC OS monopoly to sell their office suite. Because Microsoft is losing the server war to Linux, their plan to make the network proprietary has been foiled while at the same time, their PC OS is becoming less and less important to consumers and the business world.
That's MY take on what that means.
LoB
Great Quotes: (Score:4, Insightful)
Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years.
Linux is certainly a threat to Microsoft's less-than-perfect server software right now (and to its desktop in the not-too-distant future)
My absolute favorite: Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results.
There are many clever and motivated people out there, who have many different reasons to avoid buying directly into a Microsoft proprietary stack.
I like how he doesn't judge people who go against MS - he respects their intellect and their decision making process. OSS folks should do the same for those of us who make the decisions to use MS in certain areas.
Why start now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft always made its money as a replicator, not an innovator. Why would they want to change that formula when it's gotten them so far?
Re:Is OS so good ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I don't like some things in Windows and I cannot easily change or replace the things I dislike.
2. I don't have to use any specific, Windows-only apps.
3. I have the luxury of letting politics influence my choice in software. I'd rather use OSS then stuff from a company that has been shown to usedispicable bussiness pratices.
A Windows GUI on top a Linux kernel may fix #1, but #3 is a far more important point.
Not impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
The network is the computer - yes, we all learned that several years ago. Microsoft lagged like crazy and ALMOST lost a lot of mindshare and control in their failure to catch up. In fact, they did lose a lot of mindshare and control, and provided the opening for commodity software running on commodity hardware to take over a lot of the low end server market and a lot of development mindshare. This was all the past. This was several years ago.
Mr. Stutz seems to be still looking at this stuff that happened in the past, and looking at Java v.
Mr. Stutz fails to realize that Microsoft's business leadership is as bright as he is and as bright as some of us are, and know perfectly well that large portions of the software world are become commodities. Software just ain't what it used to be. That's why Microsoft has been moving inexorably to take over your living room.
That's right. Microsoft is betting the boat (or perhaps the future earnings) in large part on their X-Box/WebTV/UltimateTV strategy. Shrinkwrap PC software and enterprise software alike are suffering from big hits on margins. The open platform of x86 makes it too tempting for those Open Source people to get their hands into the mix. Though it's not popular to mention it here, companies like Lindows and the like are doing a decent job at taking a Unix-like core and wrapping a Windows-like front end around it, and even making something pretty close to compatible with the Win32 API using Wine. This is, I believe, inevitable. A nice clean desktop environment will likely not be entirely free, at least initially. Though each of those component apps can be developed using the Open Source model, pulling it together, bringing in nice fonts and graphics, and a well-packaged desktop experience does cost money to produce, especially with its non-software components. This can't be prevented by Microsoft in the long run.
Microsoft knows they have to shore up their powerful market position, and knows they have to find ways to sell new products. They really want to be the king of the media stream flowing into your home. If they control the set top box, they can charge for placement of media. They want to beat AOL/Time Warner at their own game. This is a large complex strategy, and the first step in it is spending BILLIONS (well, nearly a billion) of dollars on X-Box development and marketing, and selling the boxes at a loss. If the gaming consoles made by Microsoft dominate the market, the next steps are easier to enact. The integrated media console, connecting the PC to the set top box, bringing in media to the television using the Internet, all with MS-controlled DRM. The X-Box, Media Player DRM - these are the first steps in producing secure boxes controlled by MS. Do they have to be truly and absolutely secure? No, they just have to be good enough that MS can sell the media players on playing nice with them, and if they have a box on top of everybody's TV that talks to everybody's computer, and allows secure media transmission, they'll get a huge cut out of the in-home entertainment business.
Creating new markets, adopting their strong market position (i.e. monopoly on the desktop) and using their immense cash reserves to finance the process - on the contrary, I'm still quite scared of what Microsoft can do. Hopefully we won't all sit on our laurels thinking the hulking behemoth is dying. How many times have people thought that about IBM?
Re:Microsoft cannot innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
To the average Luser? Nope. They may get the software for free, but they'll still need help, training, and maintenance (even the most robust system will break eventually).
BG
Talent pool (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the #1 reason Linux et al will achieve the famed world domination in the not too distant future.
It is like a rite of passage for the best and the brightest. Look at the cost benefit ratio to your CV (cost measured in time, benefit measured in getting a desirable job) of having some of your code accepted into a key high profile OSS. There is no better way to spend your time. This will secure that the very best this world has to offer will add value to OSS. No corporation however rich can match that. No one.
There is currently 1000+ people working on the various aspects of the Linux kernel. (source IBM) How can anyone organization match that. It is like NASA in the 60's or the Manhattan project during later part of WW2.
The idea of MS innovating its way out of this is silly. Innovations will arrise at the grassroot level and continue to rise to the level the initial idea merits. Attracting the skills needed at the appropiate levels thru a natural selection process from an endless pool of talents.
He is right (Score:2, Insightful)
So he is proposing Windows to become network-centric, just like Unix.
I am wondering though, what Microsoft's
perhaps you have misread... (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious example, following the main thread focus, on microsft, where millions of people have noted that they did, in fact, abuse their position, that they got to a dominate position via some pretty questionable means, and that their security models combined with this position have put people in the "pretty much stuck" position of spending a lot of money to be abused on an ongoing basis. yes, I am aware of "don't use their stuff", well, this has been answerd over and over again by noting it's pretty hard to not be affected by "their stuff" whether you use it or not, especially if your clients and cuistomers are still using it. Catch 22 there, so we will get past that sticking point, it's been answered. We all use the net, and all of us are affected when a significant size hole appears and gets exploited, and once a pattern of many years time and of noting exactly where those holes appear and exactly who is responsible for them and how much money they continue to make by this inclusion into the internet world of this swiss cheese approach to expensive software, well.... I mean, really.... the sky IS really blue.
As to "corporations", recent revelations over the past couple of years have proven there is a lot of outright lying, obfuscation of finances, over hyping to small investors to shill up stocks worth to absurd and reckless levels-fraud in other words, and so on. It's not a true black and white issue, it's more a pick an example (examples again, say microsoft, enron, etc) and point out data and take it from there, normal empirical analysis. the gestalt is, there sure is a lot of criminality going on, and people are beginning to wonder exactly how widespread this is, after example after example comes to light. It's endemic, and probably epidemic, if you would allow a small amount of anthromorphism to be used to describe it..
Of course this can be called bashing, but to millions of people it's "bashing" based on the reality of an obvious need to bash. Blaming the victims for a crime committed against them is not considered to be an intellectually viable form of expression that is valid, at least not amongst rational civilized people.
Now for me, a regular old 'murican capitalist, and a proponent of self-reliance and independence, and ALSO a proponent of above board rational and ethical business behavior, there are some corps I think do a good job, and others I can see as being..well.. crooks is the word. Serious crooks, crooks who not only need some fines, but some jail time. Want an example? any of the corporations who sold weapons of mass destruction materials to saddam back in the 80's, when he was obviously using them in warfare. any of those corpos officers, chucked in the pokey. the corporations dissolved. Well now, that would sure be an interesting set of bignames now, wouldn't it? I have more examples, that is "enough" for ocnversational purposes. And yes, I could name names, but anyone with google access can find out as well.
And to add to the stewpot in the fines and jail list some of the more bribed politicians who behind the scenes and in collusion with other industry heads (and being conflict of industry heads themselves) and semi-faceless regulatory bureaucrats, who have allowed this sort of behavior to become a lot more of the "norm" then what people are comfortable with. Yep, fines and jail. Yep, their businesses dissolved, as being "not in the public interest". Cross the line, do the time. It's like that for joe little guy, should be the same for frederick fatcat.
I think it's perfectly acceptable to "bash on crooks". I think it's perfectly acceptable to go back to the original founders ideas on state chartered corporations, wherein they were tasked with not only following normal business laws and ethics in order to do their business and accumulate "profits", but they also had an additional duty to be of the public interest and benefit, and if it can be shown a continuuing pattern of unethical behavior, that said corporation should be dissolved, with no thought to whatever "profits" are involved,no more than any petty gangs busting would involve consideration of their "profits", and that officers of said corporation should be brought up on criminal charges, as well as civil charges. No one really much cares what the "financial considerations" are when the local crack house gets taken down, this exact same philosphy should be applied on any scale, because, well, a crime is a crime is a crime. I know as joe littleguy that the system cares not about my profits if I should be convicted of a crime, they are more than happen to seize or incarcerate. It's "funny" to note the regardings these very large enterprises the almost total lack of significant level fines and significant numbers of corporate officers who fail to make it to the pokey once busted and convicted. It isn't the bashers' fault that we notice this, in fact, it's an ethical and moral and common sense stance to take..
This doesn't happen enough to suit my tastes, and I maintain that if it did, we wouldn't be seeing near the bad business that occurs, nor the amount of boom and bust cycles, and practically speaking on a tech oriented forum, the IT and internet world would be more robust, more profitable and not less, and much more secure. That it doesn't happen enough is just obvious-thee is no provision for a "who watches the watchers" in our modern "system". We have a theoretical way to do that, but with the seizure of our governmental system by two for-profit organizations, who operate in a "scratch my back and I'll scratch you'rs" mode, a lot more than what they will admit to, you can see how this system is broken and how abuses will continue. Occassionaly, in order to show they are "doing something", they will "sacrafice one of their own" in order to throw a bone to the "bashers", but it really is more of a busywork facade than any true expression of "cleaning up business and it's partner government".
please excuse remaining typos, spent enough time on this post for now
The desktop is the computer. The net is the data. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Networked computing" has been through several generations of this idea, most of which suck. Diskless workstations, application servers, and X-servers are examples. Most of the current proponents of the concept have a concept of "networking" that includes a direct connection between the user's wallet and their bank account. This is called a "revenue stream" by them, and a "rent" by everybody else.
The business-model version of this idea was "application service providers". Remember them? Where are they now? Remember those schemes for running pay-per-view Java programs on the desktop? Much of this stuff attempts to emulate the RIAA and telco view of the network - they own, you pay, repeatedly. It's not going to happen.
The data needs to be out on some server somewhere. That's why we have database servers, file servers, and HTTP servers. Those work fine, everybody uses them, and the division between client and server is clear.
Transaction servers, that do something to the data for you, are also key components. But this works best if transactions are relatively infrequent. "Buy ticket" is an appropriate transaction. "Update line in text buffer" is not.
Most of the corporate thrashing in this area is a desperate attempt to avoid the inevitable - mass-market software is going to become a commodity, and a very cheap one. Browsers are free. OS kernels are free. Office suites are becoming free, or very cheap. And you buy computers at WalMart for $299. There's no reason for the computers used by 90+% of the population to cost very much, and they're not going to.
Big problems remain, but at the network level they involve finding your data (typically when you're on a machine different from your usual one) and keeping it secure.
Re:Truth can be painful... (Score:2, Insightful)
This industry will tend towards one monopoly or another. If it was not Microsoft it would be Sun or Apple, or someone else. We like standards, even IF it is a propritary one. We like to be able to pop a disk out and hand it to our buddy and it 'just works'. It doesnt have to be perfect, 'just works' is fine.
Microsoft is now one of its OWN worst enemys. Its software is 'good enough'. The only real reason these days to 'upgrade' is so you can get the latest service packs and patches. They have fairly mature products that have thousands of features in it. There is not a lot of other reasons for people to upgrade.
Open source has a HUGE daunting task. For some reason they have taken it upon themselves to dethrone Microsoft. Well someone else will step in and take their place. Be it Red Hat, IBM, or someone else. We customers LIKE support. Microsoft has given us enough support that we like. Sure open source fixes its problems 'faster' than microsoft. But all we the customer care about is, 'IS IT FIXED YET'. We care nothing about models or politcal infighting at your company. All we care about is 'does it work', 'is it fixed?', 'how can I use this to save me some money'. All Open source does is save you some money. But not enough to answer the other questions in a way we like.
OSS will not succeed unless it is way better that switching is no brainer. Other wise you will have to justify EVERYTHING to managers. Oh and woe be unto you if it screws up in even the slightest way. For 'that other microsoft stuff we had was much better' will be the mantra of managment. Currently both are about the same. Some things in one are better, and in others are better. Not exactly a reason to switch.
MS learned most of its 'bad' tactics at the whip of the OEM market. The likes of Sun, Apple, IBM, Novel, and many others. They learned how to beat them at their own game. They learned the art of the lock out, because they had been locked out. They learned price fixing, because they had it happen to them. The student was better than the teacher. We put them there because they got the job done 'good enough' with a price that we could swallow.
Another thing people do not realize is that companies are lazy. They do not want to fix it themselves. They want it to work. I have seen it hundreds of times. 'Why dont we pressure the vendor that made this crap to fix it. 'we have several thousand copies'. 'we can use the fact that we have thousands of copies to say we might help them in selling someone else, if they give us wizzy bangy feature X.' There are tons of little things companies can do to someone they bought something from to 'get it fixed' and not only fixed but fixed for FREE. They do not need to hire someone to do it. They do not need someone to maintain it. They do not need to get some group of people who like to work on 'cool' stuff to do it. Pressure on the vendor, It just works...
Don't worry, I'll tell you what to think ;) (Score:2, Insightful)
He clearly understands how big a force the Open Source community is becoming, and how it will affect Microsoft - but he doesn't seem to grasp the reasons.
To the contrary, it seems clear that he grasps the reasons, and points out that Microsoft isn't paying attention to those reasons. He doesn't say "requirements-driven, open source software" with nothing in mind -- this man knows exactly why open source software exists and thrives, and I believe this is main idea he's trying to get across.
He's saying "Wake up, Microsoft! You're so impractical that people have come down to making their own small software in leiu of buying your expensive bulky crap! Unless you change your closed-minded ways, the people will toss you aside in favor of the streamlined customized software they've always wanted, which the open-source movement will give them."
Value of Software (Score:3, Insightful)
The value of a piece of software is what it does for you. The sticker price is only what the vendor decided to charge you for it. This is why OSS won't destroy the software industry. If it's economically worthwhile to develop a program, someone will pay for it.
In the case of Linux, for example, the software is mostly paid for--in the form of time--by the volunteers who develop it because those people want the features they're adding. If, on the other hand, someone wants a program to run their milling machine, they're pretty much stuck needing to hire programmers to write it. The secret to making money writing commercial software these days is to do something the OSS developers can't or don't want to do.
Re:Truth can be painful... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only support you really get (for free) from Microsoft is downloading service packs and security fixes. When MS retires an OS, what happens to those fixes? You must upgrade.
After using RedHat 8.0 for 4 months, I have found the same ease and convenience of updates that MS has only I don't have to reboot unless the kernel itself is updated.
Sure, RedHat may eventually stop offering up2date packages for 8.0. That doesn't bother me because I can get updated packages and install them by hand if I don't want to upgrade.
When MS retires an OS, there is very little hope of fixing bugs and security problems because the source is closed.
As time goes on and that point becomes more and more obvious, look for closed source to go slide into the minority and open source to become the standard.
Re:Truth can be painful... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Talent pool (Score:3, Insightful)
Influencial? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the guy is so influencial why didn't MS follow his advice before he left? I can understand how you might want to give some parting advice to your employer, but releasing it to the world suggests his motive is really publicity for himself rather than any real concern about the future of MS. Looks like he's positioning himself for Guruism.
Sometimes (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm, last I checked, I can't sue most of the closed source companies for any damages to my data that their software may cause (indirectly or directly) as their "shrink wrap" license prohibits it.
OpenSource will never be able to program the way the customer needs the software.
Neither does closed source. When's the last time you could go to Adobe and say "I need suchandsuch feature right now, can you add it for me?" Nope.
If you look at commercial Companies such as Apple for example. Most of their applications look equal, feel equal and behave equal because they spent a lot of money into their design, their usability and their programmers. All this is missing on OpenSource.
They are different libraries providing different feels, yes. And this is the reason Red Hat included a theme for KDE and Gnome to make them look the same. Yet, there are a fair amount of complaints I have with the Windows Explorer and I'm not completely happy with the Mac OS desktop, although I like it now in Mac OS X more than I did previously. Thus, closed source isn't perfect there, either.
Specially if you as developer work freely on your program and realize how other companies such as RedHat, Sun, SuSE and many others outsource your hard work and sell it for cash to other people.
Depends, some OS developers are getting compensated for their work, as there are project developers working for some distros.
- Developers seriously like to get money for their work.
Yes, people, in general, like to get paid for work. However, a good portion of OS programmers I am willing to bet are professional programmers who do this on the side because some personal fulfillment doesn't get met at work.
- OpenSource is a free ticket for companies to have your shit outsourced for cash.
Can be. Not always.
- You work hard on your own project trying to reach some big stuff with other community members such as in a GNOME project but you always fail to convince them because everyone plays as an individual instead in a team.
Team play is hard to achieve sometimes even in a closed source environment, that's where people get reassigned, let go, etc... Happens in the OS world, too. People have left projects, or in some cases, kicked out.
I'm not saying that OS is the perfect solution, but it works pretty well for some companies, and I would venture to say that there is room for more companies, if they can get it right. Red Hat manages to
And what has come out of this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"as MS seems to be too slow to adapt"... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you say networking, you mean LAN. When he says it, he means Internet. MS has beaten Novell in the LAN, but is beaten by free software in the Net.
Novell was a, not the, LAN pioneer, but not networking pioneer. ARPANet and other networking existed much before Novell.
.Net is still PC-centric. Despite Rotor and mono, it is still MS-centric, and that means PC-centric. See, this is the guy behing Rotor, and even him sees it. .Net is still built around proprietarisation -- AKA decommoditisation -- either by non-documentation a la AD Kerberos or by patents & copyrights.
XML is text markup, instrumental as it is to the human interface called Web. SOAP and WDDI are higly contentious, and IMNSHO are the wrong answer to the wrong question. They are mostly pigbacking on HTTP to bypass some inconveniences in RPCs, CORBA, distributed computing -- the problem is that mostly this are inherent issues, and bypassing them will only make things worse in the long run.
See, you talk about Web services. The problem is, the Web is just a human interface. Services are data and communications: we need databases with shared, agreed-upon relational schemas, and standard protocols. The human interface is orthogonal to that. Forcing protocols, formats and a mindset honed on Web onto services is bound to failure IMNSHO.
And even if all these protocols and formats eventually succeed, MS will still decommoditise them, and effectively isolate itself from free software, until it gets critical mass to eventually make MS irrelevant.
So yes, MS (and others) is paying attention to the Net. But it is getting it wrong.
Which was basically created to dumb down the much older, more capable SGML. So what?
Invented? Come on, MAPI is just a interface. You cannot invent an interface, any more than you invent a book. You craft, write, create it, but not invent -- no matter what the USNA patents system seems to think. And MAPI was not an unanimity, having (arguably better) competitors that would have given us a more open, level playing field.
Anyway, what has MAPI to do with all this? It is just a mail API. Never contributed to make MS less closed.
The ISP has repeatedly fallen short of its goals, and I still remember they trying to make it bigger than the Net when it was just another online service. Still has a bad taste in the mouth from those times. Hotmail was bought outside, and is still closed: no IMAP, no POP, vulnerabilities, all that. So what?
Which they bought elsewhere, and the effectively stole from its vendor.
See?
The quality and usefullness of MS Office 11 XML DTDs or schemas remain to be seen. If History is any good as a guide...
...because this would kill it, or at least its openness.
Not surprisingly, this is the part where failure would be most painful to users and companies alike. But for the rest, only the client they have in their hands, and even there they have free software as a potential competitor. All the rest is still up to grabs.
A lousy one, on which they are loosing loads of money they robbed from retirement plans and such thru creative accounting...
With resounding failure, as the BMW series 7 issues make patently clear.
Re:Not impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
The quote from the article (years old now) that still sticks in my mind today compares the cable magnates like Ted Turner, AT&T, whatnot to microsoft like this...."..These people (Ted Turner and others) INVENTED the idea of making money through small fees...do you think for one moment that they are going allow Bill Gates to take that away? There's no way they will allow MS to insert a toll booth before THEIR toll booth..."
Or an even better quote from Goodfellas..."...he's skimming our skim!"
In short, the idea that MS is going to end up controlling the living room is nonsense...there are already too many big players there. The cable guys are not going to allow anyone else into their game, unless it's some poor sucker they can shake down for a little extra cash. MS better look elsewhere.