On Apr 26, 4:23 am, Erik Funkenbusch <e...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:43:29 +0100, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > Do you really need Sun Weblog Publisher?
>
> > ,----[ Quote ]
> >| Suddenly, every application on the desktop seems to be adding a
> >| blogging extension. Sun Microsystems' offering is the Sun Weblog
> >| Publisher (SWP) for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
> > `----
>
> >http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/04/12/1912230&from=rss
>
> > Many other features and addons have been appearing recently. Suddenly it
> > seems like Microsoft Office is being left behind because it does not thrive
> > in an open development community that collaborates.
>
> Oh, darn... you're right...
>
> Oh wait, MS Word added a blogging extension a *YEAR* ago
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060512-6825.html
Guess he must have missed that. I know I did.
> Kind of makes your entire commentary pointless, doesn't it?
Not entirely. The core point is still valid.
OSS platforms, including Open Office and Open Document Format objects,
Eclipse, and Java frameworks, are gaining popularity while interest in
single-platform
APIs and development platforms such as Visual Studio and MS-Office,
are waning.
300 million copies of the latest version of FireFox have been
downloaded by users.
200 million copies of the latest versions of OpenOffice have been
downloaded from official mirrors.
This does not include corporate mirrors, some of which deliberately
stay 1-2 versions behind for the sake
of stability.
Today, Java 2 is installed on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.
OpenOffice is written primarily in Java.
Eclipse is written in Java.
Why write special code that will only run on Vista - if I can leverage
the same amount of time and effort and
get a solution that runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Linux,
Mac, and maybe even PDAs and Game consoles?
Microsoft has been fighting portability and interoperability and
industry standards for 25 years.
Their entire business model is BASED on their ability to set their own
standards (or corrupt existing standards
with proprietary extensions), and then change them "at will", without
having to get approval from customers,
vendors, and competitors. It is the primary reason that Microsoft can
"force feed" new software to nearly 1/4 billion
PCs every 2 years (even if they don't buy new PCs), at 85% gross
margins and 40-50% IBITDA margins.
Microsoft makes huge profits, often 8-10 times the industry average,
by resorting to fraud, extortion, blackmail,
sabotage, and obsruction of Justice to maintain a "pusher/addict"
relationship with it's primary OEM and Corporate
custotmers. If they get caught occaisionally, and have to pay a few
$billion in legal fees and settlements, they can
often even use those settlements to force-feed even more product to
further perpetuate the pusher/addict relationship.
So long as none of Microsoft's top executives are facing jail terms,
the $billions in settlements are just part of the cost
of doing business.
Imagine if the Crips and the Bloods were able to generate that kind of
concentrated wealth. Sell drugs at 80% profit,
use fraud, extortion, blackmail and sabotage to eliminate competition,
and when the police make an arrest, pull in
a $10 million/year legal team to defend the non-violent dealers. When
competitors do try to show up, provide full
information as an "anonymous informant" to make sure that the police
get successful arrests and convictions.
If these drug dealers did business this way, would we look up to them
the way we look up to Bill Gates?
Recently, some competitors have been hitting Microsoft in the
underbelly. They have been able to reduce
the demand for premium upgrades to Vista and Office. They have even
been able to reduce the acceptance
of new versions of IE. In fact, they have even shown how important it
is to disable the IE specific features such as
ActiveX controls and VBScript.
These days, people want to buy a PC with OEM Windows XP, install Linux
in dual-boot configuration, and boot the XP partition within a Linux
Virtual Machine client. Net result is a better Unix than Unix, and a
better Windows than Windows.
Vista is an attempt to fight this trend. I guess that Microsoft
figured that if it gobbled up 2 gigabytes worth of RAM and 80
gigabytes of hard drive, that there wouldn't be room for Linux
anymore. They tried to replace Symantic firewall and antivirus with
their own, but left a few "back doors" open, so that they can "take a
look around". If they see that the Vista license terms have been
violated, they can "Support" you by disabling your system.
Ray's point is completely valid. People are getting very tired of
Microsoft Malware. They are getting tired of layoffs, cutbacks,
unpaid overtime, and having to personally deal with the consequences
of Microsoft Malware. The corporations are getting tired of watching
Microsoft brag about their 80% profit margins, while they fork over
1/2 their company's net profits to pay for yet another round of
Microsoft shovelware upgrades.
The OEMs are getting tired too. They have had access to 64 bit
processors and dual-core processors for almost 10 years now, but
Microsoft has handcuffed them to Win32. Sure, there are now 64 bit
versions of Windows, but the applications are still 32 bit, and
performance still suffers even on 32 bit applications. Meanwhile,
Vista shovelware and memory pig objects have resulted in a system that
takes 4 times the resources to achieve slower performance.
The Mac ads really resonnate with people. Apple can't make enough
Macs to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, less than 90 days after the
release of Vista, retailers are already in a price-war, with pretty
much everything Vista on sale for 30% off. They are trying to clear
out huge inventories of unsold goods, and make room for something
else.
CompUSA has closed 1/2 it's stores, and cut the PC portion of the
remaining stores by 60%, offering consumer electronics, video games,
and entertainment systems - in some hope of attempting to subsidize
huge losses in the retail PC market.
HP, Gateway, and Sony know that people are now looking at Vista, and
going "Ho hum", then looking at Mac and going, "I want something more
like that".
If Retail PCs are to have any future at all, the OEMs will have to
start putting Linux machines on display at retailer shelves.
Let's face it, if Vista sales are flat compared to last year's sales
of XP machines, and profits are down because people aren't willing to
pay 3 times more for hardware that gets them no real improvement in
performance, then how eager do you think they will be to sign up for
another minumum commitement? If sales are even 75% less than what was
forcast by Microsoft, the OEMs could turn very ugly, and very hostile
to Microsoft and to Vista. Remember, they have been overpurchasing XP
licenses at the rate of 20%/year for the last 10 years (to get past
the cliff-tiered discounts).
Since it's pretty obvious that neither the courts, nor congress, are
going to do anything about Microsoft's business practices, it's quite
likely that the OEMs themselves may opt to push a Linux based
solution.
I've got a Linux system on one PC and a Windows system on another one,
less than 2 feet from each other. The Linux PC is very fast, very
responsive, and very reliable. The Windows machine is very slow,
keeps getting slowed down by an LUALL.EXE virus (started by another
virus that appearantly renames the files, and hides the program when
it is stopped using task manager).
At this point, if it weren't for the licenses to some still-needed
software, I'd just use the VMWare XP machine which I installed using
the OEM licensed software. XP uses a 4 gig "recovery" partition,
which is used to install the software into the 8 Gig VM drives. I can
then use SMB to share with the Linux host files. Net result, best of
both worlds.
The irony is that I think I would actually be better off with Windows
2000. There are fewer license restrictions, lower overhead, and it
runs nearly everything I really need to run.
If OEMs put together a configuration like THAT, I think they would
have the same problem Apple has. They wouldn't be able to keep up
with the demand. Windows would still be on the desktop, but now as a
VM client.
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