It seems to me that Microsoft ought to try to follow IBM's path. They should accept the world that they live in -- a world with multiple vendors, and open standards -- and be the guys who own lots of really key assets, and who are really good at making things work well together.

First, they should accept Android and build a stack on top of that OS, rather than trying to push their own system. They have to be hard nosed enough to accept reality, and the reality is that a second rate locked down proprietary phone OS ain't going to win.

They should produce a value added stack that sits on top of android and that's targeted really squarely at corporate customers -- it should include sync and access to office docs, active directory integration, an incredible exchange client, etc. Pretty much everyone with a good job would buy that, because almost everyone lives in a microsoft universe at work. There should be apps that let you control your SQL server from your phone, that let you monitor servers, etc.

All of this stuff should be extensible and scriptable by anyone who wants to write code. They should be all about open scripting and glue between components.

On the consumer side it will be harder and more competitive, but they should probably be pushing a tight desktop integration stack there as well. They need to tie the desktop and the phone together using the cloud as glue. You should get your songs, your photos, your docs, your apps. You should be able to pull up your desktop via RDP and do anything you want, and there should be separate phone friendly GUIs to do the most useful things.

Almost none of the really awesome stuff we'll be able to do with these phones has been built yet. Microsoft is in an incredibly good position to build out huge chunks of it, because they're the guys who know the most about so much of what we want to reach back and talk to. They still own the legacy world, and that's a huge, huge advantage.

But it's like they're thining in 1993 terms, and they need to control the OS, and they're going to fight that pointless battle that they can't win anyway. They have to accept the new world -- an open platform that everyone shares -- and they have to leverage all of their assets to thrive in it.

I never would have thought I'd be in this place. I love linux. I want computers to be open. And now I really want Microsoft to stand up and push back against the closed Apple iPad model. I want them to come out really hard, and push something more open, and I want them to run ads explaining why Apple's way is a bad idea. And instead they just seem to be floundering.

That's really interesting. I didn't know that. I ran Debian for a long time -- what you've said really sounds like Debian. :)

Yum and ruby's gems system are integrated. I tended to credit the yum people for that, but from your comment maybe it has more to do with the gems people.

I really dig yum -- I love the plugin that just grabs the diffs. I love that they have plugins at all.

Fedora isn't as polished as Ubuntu, but it really feels like engineers are front and center, and that they're working on the infrastructure.

And it feels like geeks are the target audience, rather than the proverbial grandmother who can't do anything on a computer. I'm glad the grandma has a good distro, but I'm also glad that I have Fedora.

I really like the ruby packages -- it's easier for me to make ruby and rails work easily.

I'm sure lots of people get by just fine with Ubuntu, and I haven't tried it for awhile, but it seemed to me that the package manager and the gems system were always tripping over each other.

It's great that we have options, though. I've been running Linux for awhile, and in my experience, distros eventually melt down. They make bad decisions, try crazy schemes to monetize things, get too bogged down in ideology, chase off developers with fights, or whatever. Nothing lasts forever.

So I'm glad that Ubuntu is out there if Fedora caves in, and Ubuntu people should be glad that Fedora exists in case Ubuntu goes way off track. That's why Linux is cool -- it's distributed enough that no single pinhead can break it.

Exactly.

One counter-example is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", which came out in volumes between 1759 and 1769.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman

The problem is that you don't get the advantage of having an unlocked phone, which ought to be portability.

The ideal situation for me would be a world in which I buy my phone, and sign up for monthly service with my carrier. If the carrier sucks, I can cancel my service and go to another one without paying any penalties.

That doesn't work for lots of reasons. Some of those reasons seem to be policies that deliberately create lock-in (termination fees, even if you buy a phone for $579!), and other reasons seem to be reasonable technical realities (T-Mobile and Sprint use different kinds of networks).

The government has imposed number portability on the carriers, and that works well when your contract is up. But we still live in this 2 year contract/carrier subsidized phones/early termination fees universe.

I get dropped calls on my iPhone every day, too. And it would cost me a fortune to leave.

If we're not going to buy into net neutrality, why does it follow that google should pay the telecoms? Why shouldn't they pay google for enhancing their service?

If google stopped serving pages to people connecting through specific ISPs, those ISPs would go under. Who here wouldn't change their provider if they couldn't get google? You wouldn't really be on the net without google.

I wish Apple would open a hamburger stand.

I sure could use an insanely great cheeseburger right now.

Google owns a company called Postini that you can use to archive your email -- they can keep you in compliance with email retention rules.

Privacy is a big concern. I sort of feel like it's over anyway -- google already knows everything about everyone.

I found the admin tools to be a little lacking. If A is out of town, and B needs to get into their email, that sort of thing. It's harder to go in and tweak a user's settings for them than it is with our current system (notes).

I don't think Bing will ever out-Google Google. So it's strange that they don't try to identify problems with Google and address them. They seem to start out with the assumption that Google is perfect, so the best path forward is to do everything just like Google, only more so.

The big problem with Google is privacy. Why not try to make a search engine that doesn't track what you do? I'd pay a subscription for such a thing. Maybe most people wouldn't, but I would. Search is such a big market that 5% of it is still huge. Maybe 5% of the people in the US would pay for private searching.

MS has had a kind of bullying culture for a long time, and they've declared war on open source, so we've viewed them as the bad guys for a long time. But windows is a heck of a lot more open than the iPad, and their business model isn't based on data mining. In a lot of ways, they've been left behind by many of the most toxic trends in the industry. They should listen to some of the things that we linux folks have been saying, and try to fit them into their pitch when they can. Talk about the value of controlling your own data, of privacy, of letting anyone who wants to write a program and distribute it, of being able to install your software on whatever hardware you want. That's not snake oil -- it's good stuff.

The strange thing is that they've missed those toxic trends not because they value the good alternatives, but because they're big and sluggish and not very agile. They've just been left behind. And all they want is to catch up so they can turn the same screws on us that Apple and Google turn. It doesn't occur to them to make the kinds of arguments I'm proposing here.

Microsoft had a really bullying culture back in the day -- when everyone was locked in, they seemed to really enjoy turning the screws. They were almost like villains from comic books or something.

But Windows was always comparatively open -- they have the most open of all the proprietary ecosystems. You can write you own programs and install them wihtout anyone's permission, you data lives on your disk, and anyone can write a device driver. It's more open than OS X (which only runs on Apple's hardware), and it's a lot more open than platforms like the iPhone/iPad, which only run programs Apple approves.

When Google released Buzz, it was a reminder that if they wanted to break gmail pretty badly, they'd be able to, and we'd have no recourse. With software on your own computer, you can at least refrain from running the upgrade.

It would be great if MS started pushing their openness as a selling point, and if they differentiated themselves from google in the cloud by being scrupulously responsible with our data. For example, I'd love to see MS roll out a privacy enhanced Bing -- no records kept, no targeted ads, for $10/month (or whatever).

Gmail won't even put marker tags in the Gmail HTML that would make it easier for FireGPG (a firefox plugin that supports GPG encrypted mail) to parse your mails, so FireGPG breaks all the time. They should do that instead of making empty threats to pull out of China.

The power concentrated in all of these companies is pretty troubling. Google at least has the sense not to be flamboyantly abusive with their power. Microsoft used to be almost theatrical in their bullying. That's dogging them now.

I don't know if you're able to move or not, but the situation isn't the same in every state. Maybe you could move to Hawaii, for example.

It might be overkill, but if you really want to go out on your own, that could be a path forward.

The OpEd basically says that people inside the company screw each other over.

That's always the way they seemed to me from the outside -- there was this sort of thug culture there in the 90's, when they'd threaten to cut some company's air supply if they didn't buckle under, etc. I mean, they just came across as obnoxious bullies. And it turns out that's what it's like on the inside.

If they would just start dealing with everyone in good faith, it would do them a lot of good. Gates is a close friend of Warren Buffet, and Buffet knows the value of straight shooting as well as any business leader in the US. Microsoft should emulate Buffet on that point. You really can do well by doing good.

But just to take a recent example, that business with selling patents off to a troll company that would use them to harass Linux users leaves a bad taste in people's mouths. It makes you want to use someone else's products if there's anyway you can.

It must be a pretty depressing place to work.

Well, he figured if he was going to scam folks, why not scam folks in style?

I live in Manhattan, and I own an iPhone. Believe me, I know about all the problems. I complain a lot to my friends.

But they're clearly trying to climb on top of this. They're opening up about the problems, and they had that incident a month ago or so when they stopped selling iPhones. They're trying to figure it out.

I ran a dial-up ISP in the 90's. Tons of people came on to the net, and everyone in the business was trying like crazy to grow their phone banks and their networks to handle the new people. Back then everyone complained about their ISP -- it was hard to keep up.

That's what's happening now with wireless. Everyone is starting to use lots of data. Three years ago, almost no one used wireless net access. Three years from now, almost everyone in the city will want to be able to stream video to their phones at the same time. All of that infrastructure has to be built, and all of it has to be financed. Imagine if some other major chunk of infrastructure had to be built from the ground up -- electrical wiring, or roads, or whatever. It's a big job.

The transition is inevitably going to be bloody. We just need AT&T to be open about it, and to really step up and try to keep up with the growth. When they come clean like this, it's a very positive sign. And once everyone's online, and the growth stabilizes, things will get a lot better.

(I realize that no one will buy this. But I figured I'd put it out there anyway.)

Isn't that awful? I can't understand why they did it.

Moving stuff on web pages sucks. Especially on that web page.

The bad thing isn't the fade in itself. It's that Google used to be run by people who knew what sucked and what didn't. Now it seems like there are people who don't know in positions to call some shots. It's a bad omen.

They're probably about 10 years away from their own version of Microsoft's "Bob".