Microsoft is pure evil (or should I say, eee-veeeel). One of
Microsoft's most recent activities is to plant a tag in Office XP files
so that it will give a warning message when imported by a non-Office
program. Imaginine your PHB who may be inclined to consider switching
to StarOffice but suddenly sees this warning?
A few years ago, if Microsoft wanted to knock down a competitor, it
would simplily make a small change in one the dlls on which its
competitor depended. Now Microsoft is so dominant, it need not play
that trick any more.
However, Microsoft has a distinct advantage: superior (relatively
speaking) quality control. Microsoft has an enormous financial
resource, an army of H1B slave-labored programmers, and tons of
able-and-willing beta testers. Most of Microsoft's products are
thoroughly tested b/f they came out.
No proprietary software companies can compete against Microsoft. A
friend of mine who used to be CEO of Corel (but was kicked out after
bankrupting the company by foolishly trying to develop WINE) once told
me that product testing constituted 90% of the cost of developing a
consumer software.
That's why the open-source model (or an open-source/proprietary
dual-licensing model) is the only way to have any hope of stopping the
eventual total Microsoft domination. Theoretically, the open-source
model can count on the world at large to absorb a big chunk of the 90%
of software development cost, thereby making software development
affordable.
In order for the open-source model to succeed, many of us must be
willing to spend a portion of our time trying those software.
But I am wondering how many of us are trying Mandrake 9.0 beta? Red Hat
Limbo? Or even Mozilla 1.1 beta?
