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Bill Gates Bashes GNU/Linux and Out Comes His Fear

"Linux is a very complete and sophisticated operating system. And there is a lot of work being done to improve it in and of itself, particularly to make it easier to use and easier for people to set up on their personal computers."

Paul Maritz, Senior Vice President, Microsoft



A reader has just made a suggestion, one which he probably will nag us about repeatedly (albeit in a good and constructive way). "It would be smart to always include a reference and live links to the technologies Microsoft is trying to imitate or bury," he says.

"One obvious component of operant conditioning is that along with each and every criticism, there should be a clear push towards the desired behavior or knowledge. That's for the readers," he says.

“It is probably web 2.0 stuff and Java Server pages, J2EE, to guess wildly at a few that Microsoft is trying to bury”He continues: "For Microsoft, if one fails to mention the products and technologies they are trying to distract you from, then Microsoft has still gained a win."

A previous post on the subject which brought these suggestions spoke about Silverlight. "It is probably web 2.0 stuff and Java Server pages, J2EE, to guess wildly at a few that Microsoft is trying to bury," says the reader. "Someone into web application development should be able to give some real relevant technologies," he advised us.

Further: "Promoting MySQL, Postgresql, Apache (including Tomcat, Lenya, Lucene, etc), Java, Javascript, Perl, Python, NetBeans, Eclipse, Kdevelop, Qt, Qtopia, GTK+, wxWidgets and so on helps neutralize Microsoft's anti-media tactics of saturate, diffuse and confuse."

He gives an example: "I bet a lot of people don't know that they could be making GUI-based programs with native look and feel for 3-4 platforms at once. Qt does that."

Okay, so the reader appears to be right on point. We ought to advocate rather than negate. Watch, for example, the following new observations which are made on the very same subject in Bruce Perens' Technocrat:

"Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites."

...sounds like someone's in denial.


Bill Gates appear to be drawing attention to the technologies which worry him. He even includes (by name) the platform which Microsoft pretends to be negligible -- GNU/Linux. Microsoft's SEC filings suggest otherwise, but that's where we are. Microsoft keeps that infamous poker face on.

An analyst who studies Microsoft almost exclusively, Joe Wilcox, adds this:

Microsoft is looking to get a whole lot back from its program. DreamSpark isn't charity. It's business--protecting Microsoft's entrenched desktop-and-server software business model from competing products, and, most importantly, from the Web 2.0 platform.


Mind the fact that he agrees with us that it's only charity in disguise. There are expectation for something to come in return. Microsoft has mastered the use of charity as a business tool, but that's far from news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9].

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