Replies

Bush2000,

Look we all know you love MS, and you live in Seattle and probably are paid directly or indirectly by them. Hell wouldn't suprise me to find out you are paid to do nothing more than to post MS spin on boards all over the internet and that's your entire job. That's fine, but please. MS is in a tizzy over opensource, because the writing long term is on the wall.. the day of commercial software and operating systems as it exists today is coming to an end. MS is a stagnant company only drawing revenue from its existing products and customers, it has not pushed technology ahead in years, and every attempt to break out of its Core OS/OFFICE has failed miserably. And OFFICE is at the end of its cycle so there is little if any reason to upgrade like MS wants its users to do as often as possible, and its OS in on the same path... hasn't had truly major upgrade of significance since 95.. just hack and add ons, and likely what? 2-3 years before a real upgrade occurs there too, at BEST.

Its not happening overnight, and MS is not going out of business anytime soon, but even the laymen are wising up to the reality. Cost, and stability are prohibitive.. proprietary software, beyond niche markets, cannot compete with effectively run opensource communities.

MS "limited" opensource expirements are like the democrats "targeted" tax cuts. Same mentality as any large company or organization... we know better than you do... it is inherently flawed. These smaller european organizations are actually showing the way... it does not take a genious to say, we want to pick a standard, a standard that ANYONE can use, and free of charge, so information can be shared with everyone, and won't have to deal with them not having a commercial piece of software or that... I can create a CD that contains everything, migrate everythign to that platform and then give away copies of that CD to everyone, and we can all interoperate with no compatibility issues and zero costs going forward. I don't need 500 licenses of OFFICE and 500 licenses of MS 2000 and I don't have to worry about handing a file to a parent who doesn't have OFFICE not being able to read it etc etc... The writing is on the wall... its not going to happen overnight, and MS is certainly not going to go out of business, but the opensource concept is definately going to make MS far less influencial as time goes by. Its simple economics... you can keep pretending and act like IBM in the 80s and think you can dictate the existance of the world... but it won't happen.

The writing is on the wall... its not going to happen overnight, and MS is certainly not going to go out of business, but the opensource concept is definately going to make MS far less influencial as time goes by. Its simple economics... you can keep pretending and act like IBM in the 80s and think you can dictate the existance of the world... but it won't happen.

I seem to recall guys like Che Guevarra and Kruschev trying to sell the same BS: "We will bury you." The epitaph of both of these losers has been written. You have a helluva nerve saying that MS hasn't "innovated" anything in the past few years, particularly in light of the fact that Linux is a ripoff of Unix and appropriates anything it can get its grubby hands on. Linux only recently added SMP. Nice "innovation" there.

Here's the way I see the future. Windows will continue to thrive and grow on the desktop. And Windows will continue to battle Linux on the server. Linux will make inroads into cheapware accounts that have existing Unix installations. Look at the marketing data: Linux is hurting Sun a helluva lot more than MS. That's precisely why Sun is moving into the lowend x86 server market to stem its market losses. Meanwhile, MS will move increasingly into more vertical business applications (like Great Plains and Siebel: accounting, CRM, etc) where Linux has zero presence -- and probably never will. The future doesn't belong to one OS. It belongs to any OS that fills a need, and I don't see Linux as a one-size-fits-all solution.