--Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
Those among Microsoft evangelists who want to boycott Firefox and Opera may actually feel comfortable with Microsoft's scheme to boycott Google through publishers. According to new reports, Microsoft's plan may gain more members for this boycott. Will they be paid by Microsoft for this? Or will the bad publicity for Google be sufficiently worthwhile? As it stands, many people are sympathetic towards Google and disgusted by Microsoft's strategy which leads to this service degradation:
MediaNews Group Inc., the Post’s publisher, will block Google News when it starts charging readers in Pennsylvania and California for online content next year, Chief Executive Officer Dean Singleton said in an interview. Morning News owner A.H. Belo Corp. may introduce online subscription fees and also block Google, Executive Vice President James Moroney said.
First you had to convince the United States Department of Justice that you were not being monopolistic when it comes to the desktop operating system and web browser. You sited Apple, Linux, and Netscape as competitors in this space. Lost but later you settled with the Unitied States while litigating Netscape to death. Your 750 million settlement with AOL/Netscape bought you browser market share. Even though you supposedly out of court by 2003, you were funding SCO in hopes of killing Linux. Now that SCO is bankrupt, you are busy defending your office suite in court with the Word patent suit and Novell is still suing you over Word Perfect. Do you still find it profitable to sue smaller companies that use Linux in their talking-devices based on the Linux kernel like the TomTom?
You lost…
* The kernel behind Google Android phones like the Droid is Linux. * Netscape is now the open source browser Firefox. There have been over 400 million downloads since I made the bet with Nick in June 2009. * Sun Microsystems, one your targets via SCO suits, is still sponsoring Open Office. In a few short months, you will have lost majority market share to the Open Office suite. * The Google/Ubuntu hybrid web-optimized Linux system called ChromeOS will hit your operating system, browser, and office suite market share hard.
Google makes money by making it easy to discover others' content. So does Apple's iTunes. Google can afford to give away lots of free software (and even free hardware) to nudge people into its advertising model.
That's hugely disruptive.
In software, Microsoft doesn't like competing with free Linux. Microsoft spends a lot of money developing Windows. It must seem unfair to have to compete with the rest of the industry, which increasingly coalesces around Linux (or Android, or MySQL, or...).
But that's life in the open-source economy. Your core competence is always going to be someone else's throwaway complement, and ripe for open-source commoditization.
--Larry Goldfarb, Baystar, key investor in SCO
Comments
dyfet
2009-11-26 03:05:44
In Lakotah one is taught to consider the potential footprint of our choices and actions, as they may extend over and effect the next 7 generations. In choosing that particular terminology, I do like to think I have clean feet :).
What about the feet of common Microsoft "employees" and those that receive research grants who might only see what they work on as a paycheck causing no direct harm, but by supporting such a criminal organization even through their bargained labor, do in a small way help enable it to commit crimes? There worse things than being unemployed, and to me far worse things do include enabling, however minor it might at first seem in an individual's work, in destroying future society that all our descendants must then live in.
Roy Schestowitz
2009-11-26 03:09:36
"Do you feel like you're screwing a porcupine and you're one prick against thousands?" the OSCON audience member asked Ramji. Ramji politely replied: "It takes time to change and I knew that I'd be unpopular when I took this job..."
--Microsoft: Not worried about open source patents
dyfet
2009-11-26 03:24:02
Roy Schestowitz
2009-11-26 03:35:51
NotZed
2009-11-26 07:14:55
It's quite interesting to be at the fall of an empire (even if it probably has some time to go). I wonder if other falls of empire have been so obvious at the time.
(it might not be that fun eventually but it will still be interesting)
How is a democratic population ever going to be able to change their lot if it is so undermined by monied interests? Will there need to be a popular uprising? Not whilst there is bread and circuses (food stamps/dole and hollywood) anyway.
Time will tell all.