On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 09:43:57 -0800, larry price <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Microsoft has always struck me as a conspiracy of effect rather than > one of intent. > IOW they don't have a five minute hate of Linus and RMS every morning > after the tai-chi; > it's just that everyone who works there and participates in the > culture knows that they have to be competitive, and acts to make that > happen within their horizon.
Sometimes I wonder if MS even knows HOW they're competing with Linux, Apache, Firefox, etc etc. They usually seem to figure it out late in the game. They should have had stuff like IIS 6 and Windows 2003 out at least a couple years ago. Perhaps this is due to their size as an organization and the subsequent bureaucracy involved. Small, autonomous teams make things happen quickly. This is a big strength of OSS. > Have they started to solve the mobile code problem in any significant way? mobile code? worms? .net mobile framework? > I'm not platform agnostic, I have a strong and clear bias for systems > that allow process visibility and error discovery, of the last few > times I've used windows in a work setting (XP SP2 ) it's gotten > better, but it's still not suited for direct exposure to the public > internet. It's all there in Windows, too, if perhaps not very obvious to those of us with a UNIX background. But it's all there. One could argue they have too many tools. Good for us systems internal hackers though :-) > The main technical criticism of Microsoft that has resonance for me is > their disdain of open file formats and their attempts to undermine > (embrace+extend) publicly arrived at standards. (I still think that > MS' treatment of w3c standards is a scandal that has set back > innovation on the user visible portions of the internet) I agree. Well, in the past few years they're fully into using open standards (XML everywhere, LDAP, Kerberos, IP-based protocols), unfortunately they still do a bit of the embrace and extend. > When the standard windows tools still screw up something as basic as > editing a plain text file, there is something deeply wrong. I've never encountered this. But one could say any number of the same things about Linux. I can even think of a few for the almighty OS X, as well. per _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
