Goliath VS 5000 Davids
Microsoft will go down. Or they will radically re-consider their current strategies and pricing. Whichever comes first. What started off as a trickle (US vs M$), is now a cascading torrent of attacks at Microsoft on all fronts.
First you have lawsuits left, right and center. You have the settlement of the nine rebel states, resulting in Windows source-code being (privately) released for review. Ouch. That alone is a kick in Bill Gates' 'nads. Then you have whatever punishment the DOJ slaps M$ with, which at one time looked pathetic, but fortunately the honourable Colleen Kotar Kelly (sp?) isn't apparently corrupt and easily swayed, and seems capable of comming up with a just solution.
Then you have like a million other lawsuits pending against the convicted monopolist. Be, inc, Sony (!), AOL (aka Netscape) far too many to name, virtually all of whom have legitimate cases which they may very well win.
Then you have the huge bitchslap of wireless phone manufacturers deliberately shutting M$ out every step of the way. Ericcson, Nokia, Motorla and the other Symbian cats all coming up, as a team, with their own open alternative.
Then you have Sun, Apple and Ericcson teaming up to make wireless streaming media a reality.
Then you have Sun's StarOffice 6, coming out any day, which is a vast improvement over the clunky 5.2, a free M$ Office-compatible office suit. The sort of stuff M$ gets $400 a pop for.
Then you have the sneaky bastards, the anti-M$ geeks working IT jobs, pointing out the newfound viability of opensource desktop office solutions... Like KDE and Gnome. You have Korea, Germany, Britain (?), China, et al seeking to replace 100,000s of machines with the insecure, expensive MS bloatware with Linux.
And then you have one seriously sneaky (I'm assuming) open source developer, Miguel De Icaza. The founder of gnome, and on it's board of directors or whatever, Miguel is well underway with an Open Source project called Mono.
Mono is a reverse engineering of the C# APIs and Development environment. You may know it better as Microsoft .Net.
Mono is huge. Not only is it a fantastic IDE, with advanced features and support for pretty much every computer language out there, it's free. And portable.
Which means that linux will be able to run Windows apps, natively, possibly without even a re-compile on any X86 *nix. But it gets better. It's made under the X11 licence, which is similar to the BSD licence: Take it, and do whatever you want with it; you are under no obligation to release the source code of anything you do with it. Which is attractive to people like Intel and HP, who are backing the project alongside Ximian.
(Now what would Intel be doing backing a free open .Net IDE? Hmmm...)
To get to the chase, every *nix out there will benefit from this project, Apple included. As developers move to .net, the ease of 'porting' to other platforms will dramatically increase. The reason to stick to Windows, as either a developement platform or consumer platform, will drop.
Why use windows at all? All the major apps are windows only. But not for long. Why should manufacturers of PC's pay the huge M$ tax for every (increasingly cheaper) box they sell? Why should corporations, governments and second world countries get software audits, and huge fines to pay? Why should consumers tolerate the most wack-ass invasive registration policy? Why should schools purchase licences for windows even though the donated, old PC hardware came with windows installed?
Looking forward, why run MS PocketPC OS on your PDA, in a market where M$ is being marginalized? When all your apps are running on a different os, one that supports OPEN STANDARDS, you don't need M$ 'solutions'. How can these windows machines compete with machines sporting free OSes?
The tide is shifting against M$. It's own practices are landing it in ever increasing heaps of steamy legal shit, open software is slowly creeping up to consumer-ready standards, and costs nothing. Big corporations (IBM, Sony, AOL/Netscape, Sun, Intel, etc) with long memories and big budgets are mighty pissed at the Beast.
I have a feeling David amy yet slay goliath. Open alternatives are going to level the playing field, and level M$ while they are at it. M$ are going to be embraced and extended, and when the music stops, M$ isn't going to have any friends to play with.
First you have lawsuits left, right and center. You have the settlement of the nine rebel states, resulting in Windows source-code being (privately) released for review. Ouch. That alone is a kick in Bill Gates' 'nads. Then you have whatever punishment the DOJ slaps M$ with, which at one time looked pathetic, but fortunately the honourable Colleen Kotar Kelly (sp?) isn't apparently corrupt and easily swayed, and seems capable of comming up with a just solution.
Then you have like a million other lawsuits pending against the convicted monopolist. Be, inc, Sony (!), AOL (aka Netscape) far too many to name, virtually all of whom have legitimate cases which they may very well win.
Then you have the huge bitchslap of wireless phone manufacturers deliberately shutting M$ out every step of the way. Ericcson, Nokia, Motorla and the other Symbian cats all coming up, as a team, with their own open alternative.
Then you have Sun, Apple and Ericcson teaming up to make wireless streaming media a reality.
Then you have Sun's StarOffice 6, coming out any day, which is a vast improvement over the clunky 5.2, a free M$ Office-compatible office suit. The sort of stuff M$ gets $400 a pop for.
Then you have the sneaky bastards, the anti-M$ geeks working IT jobs, pointing out the newfound viability of opensource desktop office solutions... Like KDE and Gnome. You have Korea, Germany, Britain (?), China, et al seeking to replace 100,000s of machines with the insecure, expensive MS bloatware with Linux.
And then you have one seriously sneaky (I'm assuming) open source developer, Miguel De Icaza. The founder of gnome, and on it's board of directors or whatever, Miguel is well underway with an Open Source project called Mono.
Mono is a reverse engineering of the C# APIs and Development environment. You may know it better as Microsoft .Net.
Mono is huge. Not only is it a fantastic IDE, with advanced features and support for pretty much every computer language out there, it's free. And portable.
Which means that linux will be able to run Windows apps, natively, possibly without even a re-compile on any X86 *nix. But it gets better. It's made under the X11 licence, which is similar to the BSD licence: Take it, and do whatever you want with it; you are under no obligation to release the source code of anything you do with it. Which is attractive to people like Intel and HP, who are backing the project alongside Ximian.
(Now what would Intel be doing backing a free open .Net IDE? Hmmm...)
To get to the chase, every *nix out there will benefit from this project, Apple included. As developers move to .net, the ease of 'porting' to other platforms will dramatically increase. The reason to stick to Windows, as either a developement platform or consumer platform, will drop.
Why use windows at all? All the major apps are windows only. But not for long. Why should manufacturers of PC's pay the huge M$ tax for every (increasingly cheaper) box they sell? Why should corporations, governments and second world countries get software audits, and huge fines to pay? Why should consumers tolerate the most wack-ass invasive registration policy? Why should schools purchase licences for windows even though the donated, old PC hardware came with windows installed?
Looking forward, why run MS PocketPC OS on your PDA, in a market where M$ is being marginalized? When all your apps are running on a different os, one that supports OPEN STANDARDS, you don't need M$ 'solutions'. How can these windows machines compete with machines sporting free OSes?
The tide is shifting against M$. It's own practices are landing it in ever increasing heaps of steamy legal shit, open software is slowly creeping up to consumer-ready standards, and costs nothing. Big corporations (IBM, Sony, AOL/Netscape, Sun, Intel, etc) with long memories and big budgets are mighty pissed at the Beast.
I have a feeling David amy yet slay goliath. Open alternatives are going to level the playing field, and level M$ while they are at it. M$ are going to be embraced and extended, and when the music stops, M$ isn't going to have any friends to play with.
Comments
Edit: Matsu: But what if the Davids form a massive Uber-David, PowerRangers-style, and duke it out with the fire-breathing Beast in the streets of downtown New York? What then?
[ 02-23-2002: Message edited by: stimuli ]</p>
[quote] But there are hidden costs to Linux, Microsoft argues. "I think a lot of customers are lured by the apparent low price of Linux," said Doug Miller, director of competitive strategy for Microsoft's Windows division. "They don't have a real issue with Linux, but it ends up costing them in the long run."
<hr></blockquote>
<a href="http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-275155.html"; target="_blank">http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-275155.html</a>;
Just thought I'd share that.
Edit: Mono is at version 0.9. Wow, that was fast. <a href="http://go-mono.com"; target="_blank">http://go-mono.com</a>;
[ 02-23-2002: Message edited by: stimuli ]</p>