Drew Gibson wrote:
Interesting rumors starting to float about the upcoming update to
Microsoft
Office Communication Server. Apparently new features include ' easier
Asterisk phone integration'.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1604
Those who have been in the IT business for a while will recognise this
as part of a familiar pattern .
In a way, it's a compliment but you might not enjoy the aftertaste...
Step 1. Play nice and make friends with everybody
Step 2. Once you are established, introduce attractive "enhancements"
(that won't inter-operate).
Step 3. Cut off competitors' air supply (TM)
Step 4. Business as usual
It's known as "embrace and extend",
I think of it as "embrace, absorb, and destroy". A friend calls it
"embrace and crush". These are closer to how it plays out, at least.
an implicit acknowledgment that Asterisk is the current market leader
in the small to medium business space and that Microsoft intends to
put Digium out of business.
Reminds me of the last meeting - talking about how effective Exchange
worked
alongside FreeSwitch.
Reminds me of Digital Research, Lotus, WordPerfect, IBM's OS/2,
Novell, Netscape, Real Networks, etc., etc.
Don't forget FoxPro. I've seen some of this first-hand in my 3 decades
in computing; big companies like to lead you along, sign non-disclosures,
say they'll buy into your product, then suddenly they stop returning
your calls, and the next week they announce that they've invented a
whole new technology. And you find
it looks *really* familiar...
The history of computing is littered with the carcasses of smaller
companies whose
bones were picked clean by much larger ones devoid of any ethic other
than "get
rich at any cost".
The Microsoft Partner program is a fairly affordable (about $400/yr)
way to
run pretty much the entire Microsoft platform (Office Enterprise,
Exchange,
SQL Server, OCS. - usually 1 Server & 10 CALS) if you are into
recommending/installing solutions for clients.
Shouldn't they pay YOU to market their products?
That would cut people out of the fun of feeling like they're
contributing something.
I'm no psychologist but maybe it's a variant of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Look at it another way: Open Source is a very affordable ($0/yr) way to
run pretty much the entire suite of useful software (including PostgreSQL or
MySQL, OpenOffice, Linux or BSD, Asterisk or any of its competitors,
many tools that are compatible with Exchange/Outlook (see Zarafa?), and
just about
any other software you can imagine), on as many machines as you like, if
you are not
into making unethical companies rich and can hopefully
find a way to give something back to the projects you benefit from - cash,
code or creativity.
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