Nikhil Marathe wrote:
Today's economic times(pg 13) has an interbiew with some microsoft guy
about
the companies outlook to open source. It seems he didn't know what he was
talking about.
There are a few things which stand out.
1. "We see open source as a software development method"
He undoubtedly has still not opened his eyes to the revolution
2. "We compete with OSS products"
He continued to mention red hat, ibm and oracle. THey don't realise
that the
bigger threat is from the stuff that matters to the majority of the
people.
its projects like KDE and ubuntu leading to their gradual fall, the ones
that matter to the common people, not products made by some company.
3. "OSS is at its peak"
I thought we are still at the foot of the mountain (or a plateau since we
never go down) while microsoft is finished climbing and now going down
4. "99% of devs work on drivers and such"
Yes i suppose kde/gnome/etc are all device drivers offering a protocol to
communicate with the user's brain. its not the kernel thats starting to
matter these days, its the software on top of it. I have always been
one who
doesn't give a damn about enterprise level software. its not a big
problem
if linux doesn't reach there, it is almost never seen by Average Joe. the
place where it matters on the desktop, the DE's, the search tools, the
browsers, the multimedia. That is what is going to reinforce linux on the
desktop, that is m$ biggest threat since most of their revenue comes from
windows. M$ seriously has to wake up and reassess the situation, they are
still stuck in the OSS situation of say 5 years ago.
It is better for the FLOSS community if Microsoft does not wake up and
continues to think at the level indicated by the article. In spite of
all that FLOSS community would like to think, Microsoft is a very
competitive company. In each case where it missed the bus, it caught up
very quickly later.
However, I work with few microsoft people and what is in the article is
mainly PR tripe. They know what is happening and are working on counter
action strategy and products. Look at things like speech recorgnition.
They are way ahead. Look at pure tablet pcs, which is where the future
of computing will go....again microsoft will be there before FLOSS.
And do not foget they have a fantastic benefit of a powerful and popular
RAD tool called Visual Studio.net 2005. Finally, what will drive the
market is availability of products and ability to create business
applications at an acceptable cost.
Regards
Saswata
What are your views on the article.
--
http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
