MICROSOFT'S exacerbating financial performance (see analysis of the latest results in [1, 2, 3, 4]) may explain its increased racketeering (last example from yesterday). With ever-decreasing margins, Microsoft must find an alternative business model. So far, Microsoft has failed to mimic Google's model (Microsoft loses over $2,000,000,000 per year in this area), so it decided to use regulators and lawsuits by proxy to hurt Google. Microsoft did the same thing to GNU/Linux by funding SCO, for example.
“When some single firm from the UK hailed the Microsoft brand last month, nobody dares to question the data, the methods, and the population questioned.”CNN/Fortune has just released a list of "The Most Admired Companies in the World". Apple and Google top the list and Microsoft is not even in it (it is not among the worst brands, either). In any case, it is clear that Microsoft dropped sharply and this agrees with 3-4 similar surveys from 2008. They have all shown that Microsoft's reputation was declining rapidly.
"Windows breeds fear and ignorance," said this one blogger a couple of days ago. "And I put the blame squarely on Windows," he added after explaining an experience with an indoctrinated individual. A few days ago we also cited a post from Jeremy Allison -- one where he speaks about his days in Sun Microsystems. Here is an example of a company that was once so gigantic and formidable. Where is it today? It is in Oracle, which some notable people whom we cannot name just yet are about to leave (we received private communication about it).
"Sun Fell Prey to Open-Washing," says BNET in the headline that continues: "Who's Next? Microsoft?"
Here is a key part of the argument:
Openwashing is similar to greenwashing, in which a company markets itself as environmentally friendly but is actually faking it. A high tech firm openwashes itself when it makes noises about open software but is really interested in preserving its proprietary offerings and hampering free open systems practices.
Meanwhile, I'm less optimistic than Jeremy on the future of Oracle. I have paid attention to Oracle's contributions to btrfs in light of recent events. Amusingly, btfs exists in no small part because ZFS was never licensed correctly and never turned into a truly community-oriented project. While the two projects don't have identical goals, they are similar enough that it seems unlikely btrfs would exist if Sun had endeavored to become a real FLOSS contributor and shepherd ZFS into Linux upstream using normal Linux community processes. It's thus strange to think that Oracle controls ZFS, even while it continues to contribute to btrfs, in a normal, upstream way (i.e., collaborating under the terms of GPLv2 with community developers and employees of other companies such as Red Hat, HP, Intel, Novell, and Fujitsu).
A Microsoft-seeded, open-source organizer picked a Headspring Systems project for its first non-Microsoft sponsored effort.
Developers in India are not much aware about open source technologies and there aren't much good development tools and support for them, says Joydip Kanjilal, ASP.NET professional at Microsoft, in conversation with CIOL.
With much fanfare, Microsoft first submitted said drivers to the Linux kernel way back in July (its first, and so far only, contribution to Linux, for obvious reason). Those drivers were already tested to work with Red Hat and, of course, SUSE. And in October, Red Hat and Microsoft announced that they were joining each other's virtualization partnership programs, and validated that their products worked on each other's virtual machines. So what took Microsoft so long to release these Red Hat drivers to the public?
Red Hat is funding a new research centre at Newcastle University that is looking into areas such as grid and cloud computing, virtualisation and middleware.
Red Hat sees the virtualisation market developing into a three-way fight between itself, Microsoft and VMWare as the technology is increasingly taken up in the business space, Red Hat's senior director of virtualisation, Navin Thadani, said today.
However, he said, the advantage would lie with the two operating system companies, adding that although Novell and Citrix had teamed up to contest the same space, they stood more of a chance in the desktop virtualisation arena.
--Bradley M. Kuhn (SFLC)
Comments
Needs Sunlight
2010-03-05 17:40:58
Microsoft has always made garbage products which have been, at best, laughed at, along with the dweebs that peddle or apologize the One Microsoft Way. Sure it puts food on the table, but so does selling crack, that's not an excuse for what the dweebs are doing to the country.
Roy Schestowitz
2010-03-05 17:44:36
Needs Sunlight
2010-03-05 20:16:32
The talk of server consolidation is in no small part the result of the mess created by drifting away from Linux / Solaris (both open source) on SPARC (open architecture: http://www.opensparc.net/) Wintel can't handle the work load. Go into a Windows shop's server farm and you'll see 3:1 or worse hardware to service ratio instead of 1:16 or so. Some places have almost one Wintel server per every two staff members. At a global level, a small country could be powered by that wasted electricity.
Roy Schestowitz
2010-03-05 22:15:01
Robotron 2084
2010-03-06 06:29:45
Granted, it's not a whole lot different than a sports fan rooting for his favorite team while badmouthing their opponents, but it still seems far out of place.
your_friend
2010-03-06 07:13:56
Roy Schestowitz
2010-03-06 08:35:29