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.
- "We see open source as a software development method"
He undoubtedly has still not opened his eyes to the revolution
- "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.
- "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
- "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.