Comment Re:TCO? (Score 1) 833
"We cannot price at zero, so we need
to justify our posture and pricing."
Strategically, that's a very desirable place to put a large company like Microsoft, because it levels the playing field, to force a qualitative basis for competition.
Like you point out, it will increasingly be impossible to "outsmart" a collective community of many highly-educated and experienced professionals and academicians [and of course the rest of us unwashed masses], who contribute to the Open Source community precisely in their own area of expertise. Also, for a corporation (even one the size of MS) to consistently have that calibre of people *programming* (rather than planning, designing, and managing) would be quite uncommon, to say the least. I think it's safe to say that most industry professionals, however experienced or talented, would generally be hard-pressed to compete with a PhD in his own area of specialization and/or research interest!
From a business perspective, Open Source is fascinating (to me) because development is largely the result of a community of individuals devoting leisure time to programming, as opposed to programming being 'work' - for whom coding is something they enjoy, and may or may not also be a way of making a living. Many of the problems traditionally associated with management of programmers - especially motivation to do more than the least which is required - become rather irrelevant. Self-motivation and internal incentive - a manager's dream!
Value doesn't originate in new features and bleeding-edge technology, it originates with concern for the customer and the desire [and ability!] to deliver a worthwhile piece of software. Sufficient advertising sorcery and good marketing and PR can usually fool the general populace, but if a firm adopts a strategic direction like this, they can't help but be forced into a more fair fight where market power becomes less of a factor.
At least, so we hope...
ps: I'm not sure I agree with you that MS is a dinosaur; I at least give it the status of an alligator -- the beasties date from prehistory, but have survived thousands of years with their primitive design and even today are a force to be reckoned with - effective, if brutal. :)
-brian
Strategically, that's a very desirable place to put a large company like Microsoft, because it levels the playing field, to force a qualitative basis for competition.
Like you point out, it will increasingly be impossible to "outsmart" a collective community of many highly-educated and experienced professionals and academicians [and of course the rest of us unwashed masses], who contribute to the Open Source community precisely in their own area of expertise. Also, for a corporation (even one the size of MS) to consistently have that calibre of people *programming* (rather than planning, designing, and managing) would be quite uncommon, to say the least. I think it's safe to say that most industry professionals, however experienced or talented, would generally be hard-pressed to compete with a PhD in his own area of specialization and/or research interest!
From a business perspective, Open Source is fascinating (to me) because development is largely the result of a community of individuals devoting leisure time to programming, as opposed to programming being 'work' - for whom coding is something they enjoy, and may or may not also be a way of making a living. Many of the problems traditionally associated with management of programmers - especially motivation to do more than the least which is required - become rather irrelevant. Self-motivation and internal incentive - a manager's dream!
Value doesn't originate in new features and bleeding-edge technology, it originates with concern for the customer and the desire [and ability!] to deliver a worthwhile piece of software. Sufficient advertising sorcery and good marketing and PR can usually fool the general populace, but if a firm adopts a strategic direction like this, they can't help but be forced into a more fair fight where market power becomes less of a factor.
At least, so we hope...
ps: I'm not sure I agree with you that MS is a dinosaur; I at least give it the status of an alligator -- the beasties date from prehistory, but have survived thousands of years with their primitive design and even today are a force to be reckoned with - effective, if brutal.
-brian
