We warned about this a couple of weeks back, the context being Yankee Group FUD, but it’s worth repeating and presenting this alongside some more material and background, as well as new supportive stories.
“By Microsoft’s own confession, “analysts sell out” because “it’s their business model.””At this very moment, the press is once again getting filled with suggestions that migrations to Windows Vista are “inevitable” (hyperlinks omitted on purpose, but a quick search on “Forrester Vista” might get you started). Remember the "buy Vista or die" article (tactics that are based on fear)? It’s an attempt to fulfill a prophecy, which gets echoed by more than one major analyst. They validate each others’ claims in a suck-puppet-like fashion, as was witnessed many times before (the illusion of a peer-condoning crowd). It typically occurs in bursts of releases, fueled by public relations agencies that push out the promotional messages manufactured by analysts.
As some readers may or may not know, IDC is working closely with Microsoft, but it’s only one among this authority of the “Big Five” (5 or thereabouts) who comment on the area of desktop/enterprise/server computing — as oppose to say — devices, embedded devices, programming or hardware performance. They earned a status which is undeserved (or been corrupted once they earned it) and they are quoted widely in the media and trade journals despite the fact that their business model relies on corporate investments, commissioned studies and invited talks (to promote the agenda of one company or another). By Microsoft's own confession, “analysts sell out” because “it’s their business model.” Microsoft has always sought to exploit this.
As far as Windows Vista goes, the deception continues. It hardly matters if Steve Ballmer tactlessly called it “work in progress” 15 months after its release and Bill Gates acknowledged the problem. The marketing machine shows no signs of weakness and cannot afford any rest. It’s a game of perception-shaping. To give a quick example from Glyn Moody, this one was published a couple of months before the Novell/Microsoft deal. It talks about Vista just months before its overly-hyped release.
Microsoft’s Masterpiece of FUD
I’ve been tracking the evolution of Microsoft FUD for nearly 10 years now, and wrote a short history of the subject a few months back. But even I was impressed when I came across Microsoft’s latest effort in this department: it’s truly a masterpiece of its kind.
Whereas previous FUDs have revolved around details like the relative speed, price and legality of free software compared with Microsoft’s own code, its most recent offering takes a different tack, and purports to look at the bigger picture.
It’s a white paper from IDC, “sponsored” by Microsoft, on “The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista”. But this is not some abstract ivory-tower analysis: on the contrary, it is highly targeted, and aimed at a very particular audience – the European Commission – that is proving to be annoyingly unaccommodating when it comes to letting Microsoft have its monopolistic way. Not content with slapping some juicy fines on the company for past misdemeanors, the European Commission is now starting to make unfriendly noises about the forthcoming Windows Vista.
It is probably difficult for Microsoft critics to find themselves agreeing with somebody like Mike Maples, but in this case Mr. Maples is correct. Rob Enderle needs to consider just how ineffective “monitoring” of Saddam Hussein has been. The idea of “monitoring” leaves the perpetrator’s power intact. Empirically, that doesn’t seem to work very well. If the only thing the power can be used for is to violate agreements or laws, failing to destroy that power is asking for trouble. The best way to prevent Hussein’s repeated misuse of his power is to get rid of that power, not to “monitor” it. And the best way to prevent Microsoft’s misuse of monopoly power is to get rid of the monopoly, because under U.S. law there is not really anything you can do with your monopoly power that is legal. Furthermore, proponents of a monitoring solution are failing to do anything to address two root causes of the problem: the power to violate the law still exists, and the will to exploit that power still exists. If either of those two things did not still exist, there would be no need for the monitoring.
Why was Rob Enderle worthy of being refuted anyway? Is it not yet known (or was it not known at the time) what vested interests he has? Enderle is nowadays attending cocktail parties in Redmond (drinking the Kool-Aid from his client, almost literally), as reported very recently by Mr. Perlow. █
“In the face of strong competition, Evangelism’s focus may shift immediately to the next version of the same technology, however. Indeed, Phase 1 (Evangelism Starts) for version x+1 may start as soon as this Final Release of version X.”
What’s increasingly found these days is diplomacy that leads to reformation of old-age Trust, where companies like Novell are invited to join the Microsoft ecosystem provided that they share the same pool of software patents. It makes these two an “Intellectual Duopoly”.
An interesting set of a well-crafted explanations were recently recommended to us. These speak about what’s known as “Intellectual Monopoly”, which is wrongly (and deliberately) called all sorts of other things to add a positive connotation. In the index you will find a succinct description of the fallacies and their negative impact.
It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.
A perfect example of this, which also fits the theme of this Web site, is Microsoft. As the following old essay states, Microsoft is resistant to change because of existing dominance; therefore it’s reluctant to disrupt its own market with improved and more cost-effective solutions. A decade later, the same arguments remain very valid.
Despite its reputation among some consumers as an innovative company, Microsoft’s number one goal is actually the opposite of innovation. Microsoft, like any other monopolist, can only succeed by preventing innovation. Here is a short summary of how they do it.
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The control of the demand for a product involves controlling perceptions, which usually involves controlling advertising. If you build the world’s best mousetrap, people will come to your door — if they can find it! So the monopolist’s duty in a high-tech industry will generally involve disinformation campaigns disguised as brilliant marketing.
This is where Microsoft’s favorite marketing practices come in, such as preannouncing products long in advance, overstating their capabilities, and occasionally even announcing products they have no intention of shipping. However, these lies are only the beginning; Microsoft also uses an even dirtier trick of raising the entry cost for small companies into the marketing arena.
With Novell’s helping hand, Microsoft is permitted to elevate the price of GNU/Linux, assuming you obtain it from the wrong places. Additionally, it wasn’t more than a fortnight ago that a Windows 7 vapourware routine got pulled to “freeze the market” [1, 2] (Microsoft’s own words). This harms the customer, which becomes misinformed and develops high expectations.
Overall, the main message to take from this is that whenever Microsoft boasts “innovation”, it is worth noticing that it abstains from affecting its existing revenue sources. It won’t, for example, permit Web-based applications to de-elevate the role of the operating system unless there is no other choice (Google, Salesforce and smaller players take the lead and take matters into their own hands, for example). Ever since the mid-nineties, when Bill Gates discovered the potential of Web-based applications in Netscape, Microsoft has viciously tried to squash this disruptive trend. It has been successful, until recently, but it continues to exclude rival operating systems in the process. █
“COM/OLE programming in C++ was declared a success in order to block language invocation.”
When companies control standards bodies and standards bodies instruct procurement…
It’s proving to be a busy day today and there are positives reports arriving from non-English-speaking countries. Among the more valuable bits which have relevance to this Web site, consider this comment “free SuSE now!”, which relates to yesterday's discussion about Sun and SuSE.
If Novell sells SuSE I would very much like to see SuSE and the Microsoft-Novell agreement end up in two unrelated corporations. That would solve SuSE’s problems with the rest of the open source community.
I think that it would also be in Novell’s best interest to sell SuSE unencumbered with the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Novell has already learned the hard way that SuSE encumbered with the Microsoft-Novell agreement is worth significantly less that SuSE free of the agreement.
According to the article Novell has tried to sell SuSE to RedHat and Sun with no success. I encourage Novell to keep trying. I would very much like to see SuSE freed from the Microsoft-Novell agreement.
Another item to keep an eye on is Bob Sutor’s (IBM VP) latest take on ISO.
I know that procurement laws may require international standards in some cases. Maybe it’s time to revisit those laws and instead have them relate to quality, openness, and transparency rather than historical working arrangements.
More face-saving in the comment from Alex Brown. There are some people whose name might become (and forever remain) synonymous with the desruction of ISO’s reputation (Roger Frost might be one of them). It’s a good thing for Martin Bryan that he retired at the right time and publicly said: “The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation””. He didn’t really intend for his comments to leak out of ISO, but there you go. Even discrepenabty inside ISO, acknowledged by ISO itself, was supposed to remain secret. But we deserve to know better. █
A reader has sent us a pointer to this new article from Glyn Moody at Linux Journal. The article described just what Microsoft intends to achieve using its deal with Novell and why many software developers get exploited in the process. It’s all self-explanatory really, but here is the ‘meat’ of the argument which speaks about Brad Smith’s explanation of the Novell deal (shades of OSBC again [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]):
…as well as all the respect and appreciation that Brad wanted to express, he also has an interesting explanation of Microsoft’s current world-view:
we believe in the importance of building a bridge that makes it possible for the different parts of our industry to work together. We believe it needs to be a bridge that respects the diversity of different business models. We believe in a bridge that is scalable, that is affordable, that is workable, and that doesn’t try to move people from one island over the bridge to another but let’s everybody do what they love to do and respects that.
Live and let live: what could be more reasonable?
But let’s listen to Brad again as he explains what that means in practical terms:
That is a hard bridge to build, and yet I will say I believe today more than ever that it is a bridge we need to build. And I very much value the work and the conversations we were able to have at Novell when we started to build that bridge in November of 2006.
Ah, Novell. And what lies at the heart of that joint bridge-building with Novell?
we believe that patents are best sorted out by industry leaders so that developers and customers don’t have to deal with these issues themselves. We as industry leaders should take it upon ourselves to sort these things out.
When we worked things out with Novell, we did it with an eye towards succeeding in ensuring that the developers who were creating the software for Novell would not have to worry about this set of things, nor would their customers.
So there we have it. You shouldn’t worry about those silly old software patents because Microsoft and Novell have sorted everything out for you: all you have to do is carry on coding.
Except that it’s not quite that simple. Microsoft’s vision of “live and let live” is predicated on its continuing use of software patents, and of the open source side letting Microsoft and Novell handle all the tiresome implications for open source. In effect, though, this amounts to recognising Microsoft’s patents, and accepting its “solutions” for the open source community. “Live and let live” turns out to be tantamount to accepting Microsoft’s right to file, own and use software patents, which, in its turn, means accepting they apply to the open source world.
This “live and let live” promise surely excludes all those whose wallet hasn’t the Microsoft strings attached to it? Although the author does not say this directly and explicitly, it seems evident that he condemns this deal and suggests that we continue to combat software patents. Here is how it’s summarised and concluded:
Above all, it will send a message to the company that the open source world is not falling for the old “embrace, extend and extinguish” trick, and that if Microsoft really wants collaborate, “live and let live” is simply not enough, because of the asymmetric bargain it implies. As a basic pre-condition of working together with open source, the company needs to accept free software’s absolute foundation – the ability to share all its code in any way and with anyone – and that, by definition, means no software patents whatsoever.
Interestingly enough, going as much as a decade back, you can find a similar term being used to describe this, namely a “government-granted authority.” Whatever term gets used, it’s always interesting to associate it with the context, antitrust action in this case.
…the federal government of the United States of America has intervened in the free market by granting Microsoft a legal monopoly through the patent and copyright processes. On numerous occasions, agents of the U.S. Department of Justice — the same DOJ that right now is taking shots at Microsoft in the courtroom — has intervened to arrest and penalize businessmen who attempted to ignore the federally-created right known as intellectual property. This right is a federally-mandated fiction, not a process of the free market. Copyrights were not invented by business, but by the government, who grants them and enforces them as a form of federally-sponsored monopoly.
Since Microsoft’s economic and intellectual property derive directly from government-granted authority, it is only reasonable for governments to have the power to review and modify how the beneficiaries of their shared power use that authority. Antitrust is one means by which governments attempt to reel in some of the power they delegated to companies and individuals.
It is rather ironic that the same establishment that grants monopolies is also the only means for undoing and regulating them. It’s like asking a gun shop to enforce the law in a barbaric nation. Something more effective will be needed to encourage fair competition which serves the customer. As things stand, Novell and Microsoft override laws proactively, using deals and deeds. █
Thanks to exceptional transparency of blogs, the story of Malaysia was told and echoed quite widely ever since the country endorsed ODF. Further progress is being made and validation of the facts arrives according to this little new scoop.
OpenOffice.org and ODF adoption in Malaysia – thumbs up!
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Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!
Microsoft has abused and corrupted this country like nobody’s business over the past year. Fortunately, the Open Malaysia blog has a lot of the fine details and stories documented.
Let’s just press on and consider some other related news. Here you have a summary of things to come, so by Friday we should expect something to come from ECMA.
As the deadline of the 2nd of May is drawing near, I thought it useful to clarify some of the actual concerns surrounding the standardization of OOXML. Perhaps this piece will help dispelling some myths.
[...]
I wanted to point that out because I increasingly get the feeling that some want us to forget this process and to switch to some other topic (XPS for instance?). I know that there are more interesting topics to work on; after all, ODF 1.2 is not that far out in distance, and I expect all the love and kisses to be sent by our friends in Redmond. But I am still sticking to it not clinging, but sticking, not because of a perverse and pathetic hope I would appear to have against OOXML, but because I believe that the bells and whistles have been taken out a bit too fast.
Remember that the OOXML saga is far from over. The several protests, one of which is depicted below, were not organised in vain.
Many people simply could not understand what compelled those folks to take it to the streets. Such sentiments only served Microsoft’s agenda of staged introduction, fueled by the illusion of no choice. As a reminder of how Microsoft harms consumers with OOXML, consider this old and short article which speaks of ignorance or apathy as a barrier to understanding the abuse. You can draw the parallels to compare past and present.
Those who say that Microsoft has only competed in an open market and has not directly harmed the consumer, are very wrong. The consumer is being injured constantly by the behavior of Microsoft and its chairman, Bill Gates.
[...]
I was personally and professionally injured. Microsoft and Bill gates had confused and bullied the marketplace. People who were deploying Microsoft products were doing so without looking at superior competing products. I decided to find another job.
There may be another take-home message to pull from this. Novell harms GNU/Linux users (as a whole). Novell and Microsoft are misleading on software patents in order to sign more deals (using fear as a driver). They essentially replace free Linux with their own non-free Linux, which is seen as Microsoft’s property.
To many people, the feeding of this message by the press can soon make it a reality, at least in people’s minds. It become a case of intuition, or a de facto rule. As another reminder of the dangers of blind acceptance or apathy, consider this. Think about OpenSUSE and Mono developers while you read this.
But as Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple software evangelist, said to me in an interview, “ignorance is not only bliss, it’s empowering.” Which I take as another way of saying that experience can be a good teacher, or maybe that lessons learned by dodging the bricks flying over the transom are lessons you are unlikely to forget.
[...]
For a case in point, I quote Stuart Alsop. He said, “we want a single platform, because the benefits are so tremendous.” Personally, I think he should speak for himself. But where did Alsop utter these words? Right here in Washington, a year ago, in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In this hearing, he also remarked to the senators: “If Microsoft is a monopoly and we decide that we do not want an unregulated monopoly controlling these important interfaces, what can we do about it within the constraints of our system and our culture of mostly unrestrained competition in entrepreneurship?”
Remember RAND? That’s not openness. The interfaces must become a commodity, or not be embraced at all. Why can’t Novell see this? Why are people still assisting those two companies, sometimes voluntarily? █
“Let’s face it – the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey.”
Hardcore and dedicated users of SuSE Linux were either receptive or cautiously optimistic when Novell snatched SuSE. This whole thing happened with IBM’s assistance and endorsement, but both IBM and Novell are proprietary software companies. As we mentioned the other day, a substantiated rumour came up about Red Hat's past consideration or attempts to buy SuSE and it’s interesting to find out now about Sun’s involvement too (before it entered the open source arena).
Chew on that last one for a bit. Way back in 2002/2003, Sun might have been in the Linux business, while Novell might have kept fiddling with NetWare (but more likely would have gone actively into the open-source applications realm, following on its acquisition of Ximian). We would have been living in a very different open-source industry if things had gone Sun’s way back then.
The goal is for distros to come with Sun’s open source Java Enterprise Edition project Glassfish, the NetBeans development framework, and the Java Standard Edition project OpenJDK.
Sun is reaching out to Debian, after parts of Glassfish began showing up in the distro – Sun would, obviously, like to see all of Glassfish ship with Debian.
Sun is also working to build on early work with Ubuntu. As of now, OpenJDK is available in the Hardy Heron release of Ubuntu.
It’s truly confirmed now that, as the following article exclaims, “Java [to be] 100 per cent open source by end of this year.”
Sun is to open source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions.
Will Novell jump on board? Miguel is boasting Google’s investment in Mono projects, which is pretty much a move against Java (the GPL’s new friend), if not Google as well. What is Novell thinking? It is a lot more committed to Microsoft than it is to Sun, let alone Red Hat and Ubuntu. Diplomacy plays a considerable role here, but if Novell increasingly sidles with Microsoft, then it will — by association — become a greater enemy of the GPL. For shame, Novell. █
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