Steve Ballmer's Thoughts On Free Software 263
An anonymous reader writes, "Steve Ballmer during a 3-day visit to India was asked about whether Free software is the future of India. And he effectively circumvented the question and answered that in the future, software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as subscription fees, lower cost hardware, advertising and of course traditional transaction. What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it."
Wrong Subject (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:5, Interesting)
As for extreme poverty, I saw a lot of poor people doing what they needed to do to get out of that situation -- caused by the high taxes and tyranny that existed within the socialist schemes. Some poor people recycled what they found in the trash (one lady we met with in a poor area actually bought her house by recycling water bottles over 10 years). Some poor people sold coconuts to tourists (very lucrative at 25 cents per coconut). Some poor people did horrific things -- but I've seen indebted Americans do horrific things, too. Overall, I saw people with their eyes glistening for opportunity rather than what I see in my own country -- poor people who submit to the State to take care of everything.
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with web services is that they are just that - services. You are not in control of your data. Granted, you can use gmail as a pop account and utilize encryption securely that way, but that's not what you mean and it's not what I mean, either. For many people this is all right, but for those of us who care about privacy, it is mandatory. Now, with that said, I use gmail for any communications that I don't care about keeping secure, because it is quite good. However, I also use thunderbird for other mail, and I have a work account and a personal account which I use with it.
Incidentally, if you find thunderbird frustrating, I'm interested in what you think of Outlook. Outlook is very unreliable itself. I was using it for a while so I could try out a Franklin-Covey planning application (which turned out to be pretty lame anyway) and I just sort of kept using it for a while because I was already using it - until one day, without any help from me beyond possibly allowing some security updates at some point, it stopped retrieving my mail and I went back to Thunderbird.
Firefox, by the way, may be a memory leaker, but IE7 is the least responsive IE yet (in terms of the UI) and its memory use has come down to practically nothing relative to how it has been. In fact IE often uses more memory than Firefox on my system now. But just as importantly, Firefox is standards-based, it receives security updates dramatically more rapidly than IE, it has a much richer architecture that allows much more powerful plugins to be donated by the community... No, there are many compelling reasons to use it over IE that have nothing to do with ideology.
Socialism is a red herring. (Couple decades ago, it was communism... ah, how the rhetoric changes, and how it stays the same.) Free software doesn't mean you can't make money. It means that you sell services. This only makes sense - over time there is less and less difference between software packages, not more and more; they all tend to pick the low-hanging fruit first with only limited exceptions which are driven by monetarily directed development, which is to say that some company commits to buying a zillion seats if it does x. Thus they all tend to converge on the same point, or at least wander more or less towards it. At that point the only differentiating feature is service. The Open Source community is in a better position to provide service simply because of its size.
In actuality, this model moves us closer to the ideal of the free market, because those who are best able to provide the service are the ones who are in the best position to profit from it. The person who is best suited to develop the new feature is the one who (ostensibly) gets the job. The people who need it the most pay for it.
I'd like to believe that, but my experience tells me different. In fact most commercial software gets worse and worse as time goes by, not better and better, until it is a big pile of crap that collapses under its own weight and is replaced by the new hotness. On the other hand, Free softwar
Re:Ballmer's Free Software (Score:5, Interesting)
Today you will. But tomorrow, economic principals strongly suggest it will be used by fewer and fewer consumers. In a few years, your
Take a look at this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Price_setti
A monopoly strongly tends to produce at a lower quantity (Qm) versus a competitive market. (Qc)
For you, and all other developers that translates into:
1. fewer organizations using
2. More
For you and all consumers, that translages into:
1. More expensive hardware. Microsoft is a price maker. They alone set the price for their OS and get to drive the cost of the computer package up accordingly. They will probably provide at Quantity Qm instead of Qc to OEM's like Dell who have no choice but to pass on that cost to you.
2. Fewer employers using Microsoft products. They will only provide their OS at successively higher prices and lower quantity. There is no reason to believe the price they demand will ever go down because the thirst for profit is unquenchable.
3. Lack of innovation on Microsoft's part. Since Microsoft has no competition, there is no reason to innovate. Like most big businesses they borrow or steal from the innovaters. This will drive many customers away as well.
I still feel like I paid for XP & not the Express tools.
1. As my previous comments point out, you already paid too much.
2. You are limiting your future revenue by adopting microsoft tools. There is no path where Microsoft becomes enlightened and lowers their prices to provide the quantity the market demands. History has proven this repeatedly.
3. You would do well to add GPL'd languages that -today- do not command a premium, but will indeed tomorrow because of Microsoft's monopoly position creating demand between points Qm and Qc.
To silence the quickie-mart economists and Microsofties who claim I just "proved" that the developer world is competitive, please note that economic theory also strongly suggests "consumer surplus" is -still- destroyed despite alternatives.
Today's lesson: There is no good that can come from Microsoft any more.
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:1, Interesting)
Um...I've been using Microsoft Windows and Office for the past 10 years. The only TIMES I've had to call for support was when their anti-piracy key code schemes broke my installers and I had to practically beg to convince them that I had legitimate copies. I'm sure I won't have to call someone to unlock my FREE software.
"I'd rather see ad-bloated "free" software like Google Mail than bug-ridden memory-leaking software like Thunderbird. I use Firefox, but it is still a memory leaker that competes well with IE in terms of falling apart over a few hours of work."
Err...I use both Thunderbird and Firefox daily. I have yet to see tangible and real world examples of how these alleged leaks affect my workflow (which I might point out is NIGHT AND DAY more trouble free since dropping Outlook and IE).
"Some Americans care about Open Source because they're anti-corporation, but that isn't the reason for Open Source, not really."
HAHAHAHAHA...sorry. I believe that Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices were a major catalyst in the open source movement.
"But if you go to countries where people don't like to work for free -- they want SOMETHING for their time and to make their lives better -- you won't see a social drive to giving away their labor."
Your inability to realize that the WORLD, and all of the countries that make it up, is now ONE global market makes the above statement true in your eyes, but completely irrelevant to the rest of us that know better. As a result of the internet, NO ONE with a connection to it can ever again be enslaved to the money grubbing, greed worshipping, monopolists that create closed source software with one goal in mind- profit.
But Linux is more pro free market than MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Then India will love Linux, because Linux is more pro- free market than Microsoft is. You need to stop thinking of copyrights like a property right, and start thinking of them like a communist regulation that controlls how people use information in the information age.
Let me give an example, at one large data center I worked for they had these NT servers that ran a database application for 1000's of locations. Sure enough the things would crash every day, and sure enough it would cost them over a million dollars per hour of down time. They bought the best x86's that money could buy, they custom re-wrote the tcp/ip stack, but still the computers would crash every single day and still it would cost them over a million dollars per hour. Finally, they flew in experts from all over the planet. The experts came back and said that there was a bug in the OS that was causing it. So my company then went to Microsoft and demanded that they fix it. Microsoft in "business speak" basically said "screw off and FU".
So please tell me that if they had the source, and ownership of that source couldn't be controled. Would they have refused to pay for a fully backed support contract? Would they have said "no were not going pay developers to fix it, because someone else could copy our fixes?" Hell no, that code would have gotten fixed, and every body would have benefited.
In things like software, free riders are not a burden because their copy deosn't deprive me of my copy. But rather, spreads exposure and therefore the chances soneone elses fix will be my fix. So the forces driving Linux forward and pushing Microsoft back are pure unadulterated free market forces and that is that.
Re:India and free don't go well together (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ballmer's Free Software (Score:4, Interesting)
A former boss of mine, who had dealt with the Microsoft of the 80s once said, "the issue is that Bill has a Vision. One vision, and that vision is frozen in the 1970s".
On the other hand, I find that I am less and less interested in the political fights, and more and more interested in getting work done. So, I use a mix of proprietary, but highly-functional, desktop apps under a mostly proprietary, but highly functional, operating system, and rely on Free software (of one sort or the other), for specialized tools, compilers, and things that the Free community has taken a real interest in. (except for the 9-billion IRC clients. One for each name of God.) So, if uSoft cares to offer cross-platform development tools, less annoyingly licensed operating systems, etc, I'll talk to them. Otherwise not, but it's a decision these days made mainly on suitability to the tasks at hand. This being said, all they make that I use is Word, and that's because it interfaces to my reference manager. However, that decision is a technical, not emotional or political decision. Some time spent by the FSF making their software more functional would convert far more people to their side than all of the songs in favor of Software Libre ever will.
Re:Which free are you talking about? (Score:2, Interesting)
Free trade means more money for Ballmer. Freedom (for Microsoft) means more money for Ballmer. Trust me, this is what runs through his mind.
Re:How much support do you need, honestly? (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as the "support" goes, it is not the same type of support that home users are looking for. Rather it comes in a couple of flavors.
1) Future product development. Businesses look for software that is actively be invested in. It allows them to know that revisions will be on the way to support new technologies, support their existing business functions, and add efficiency. Even if the software does everything they need it to do today, why would a business invest in training their staff, which is very expensive, only to discover that in 5 years the software isn't evolving with the rest of the ecosystem? In addition to looking for evolving solutions, businesses rely on backwards compatibility for Line of Business apps built on other software. They also look for compatibility with future platforms and LOB apps. Even if this means purchasing a new version, as long as it supports data, api, and ui compatibility / similarity, this allows a business to move forward without software becoming a business roadblock.
2) Sales and Feedback support. With commercial software, about 50% of the cost to businesses pays for "selling" the software in the first place. Sales relationships in the business world are not the same type of relationship a consumer has with a store like Best Buy. Sales staff work with the IT dept of a business to determine what solutions would be most effective, how to deliver and integrate those solutions, and how to build a full system out of many different pieces of software. Integration is key, additionally the IT departments can apply pressure through the sales staff to the commercial software provider for feature requests. Commercial software vendors actually do respond to these requests in future versions because if a good percentage of customers have asked for it, they know it will help drive sales.
3) Consistency, consistency, consistency. This is a reiteration of 1 and backwards compatibility in a way, but a business that is not software centric, should remain unfocused of software. It should only be a tool to enable them in providing services or products more efficiently and quickly. Business choose to pay for software that provides them with this consistency, and if it's not provided, they'll quickly take their money elsewhere.
All that being said. "Free" software can manage all of these things to a degree, for a price. 1 and 2 are most easily done and companies such as Red Hat and Oracle already provide these services. 3 though, is a little harder to come by when talking about Linux. Look at Picasa, a valiant effort to make a Linux version has been made, but for ever Linux distro there are if's, and's, or buts.