Mr Gates,
first, thanks for Vista. I am singularly unimpressed and should have known better. Which brings me to my much larger point.
Please stop trying to squash the Open Source Software movement with your economic clout. You produce software like the government produces corruption; there is a lot of it, it all looks and smells pretty much the same, and yet we all seem reconciled that it is just the cost of doing business and pay for it.
Mightgrowsoft has two main threats to its attempts to remove all competition via guile (as opposed to superior production values and customer service). Those threats are the webOS crowd ‘led’ by google, and the open source crowd ‘led’ by Linux. They are actively working to acquire or destroy both. Mightgrowsoft tendered a ~45 billion dollar unsolicited bid to buy Yahoo! in an effort to stop their increasing irrelevance in what is becoming the real software venue, the web. That is obviously a reaction to their biggest historic fear, which is people living within their browser. Ask anyone what they want to do with their computer these days. 95% of their responses don’t really require an operating system in the traditional sense that we have learned to live with.
What would they do with Yahoo!? Not quite sure, but my instinct tells me they would gut it and MSN.com/Live.com and Yahoo! would start looking a lot alike. I actually think this will become an anti-trust issue, and this transaction will not go forward, but stay tuned.
The bigger threat to us all is Mightgrowsoft’s consistent and well documented efforts to thwart the growth of open source operating systems and softwares. I won’t go into this sordid history now, but you can get a sense of it from this quote (full article here):
“For years, Bill Gates and other top executives at Microsoft railed against the economic philosophy of open-source software with Orwellian fervor, denouncing its communal licensing as a “cancer” that stifled technological innovation.” Now THAT is funny.
Having railed against Open Source, especially the Linux movement for a decade, engaging in every kind of corporate warfare and underhanded nonsense you can imagine, they have switched gears. Now they love open source. If you listen to them long enough, you will hear them explain how they invented open source. Out of Bill Gates own mouth came these words (full article here.
“…The reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that’s identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there.” The article I am quoting that from goes on to say “Historians will note that this is absolutely not what Microsoft came in and said, if it can be deemed to have come in and said anything at all of significance, back in the early days.”
Now here is where it gets really funny and these two threads merge. Yahoo! would bring a couple of things into the Mightgrowsoft fold… 300 million email accounts, for instance (adding to the 280 million hotmail accounts, essentially dwarfing the current gmail number), and a revitalized if still overshadowed search service. And of course, the user base… but lets focus on items 1 and 2.
I like Yahoo!. I have always used it as one of my many portals. And their new predictive search is better than google in my and Mark’s opinion. But everything BEHIND that interface is open source. Php based web pages running on Apache web servers talking to MySQL databses, etc.
SO, Mightgrowsoft, to merge MSN and Live and Yahoo! would either have to spend a bunch of money and time completely tearing that all apart and rebuilding as ASP (do they pay their own licensing fees for software, I wonder?), or accept an open source trojan horse into their midst. Even worse when you look at the main services, as those all run FreeBSD (Linux). The licensing costs alone to replace all of those with windows server systems would be huge. The project would be horrifically complicated, and the services would inevitably suffer. Far better, if you really think about it, to dump everything Microsoft has been trying to do online into Yahoos methodology than the reverse.
Mightgrowsoft’s new zeal for open source is nothing but more of their traditional tactics in disguise. By advocating multiple stacks on the same platform, and integrating those open source efforts into active directory, essentially weaving them into windows itself, you destroy everything that is good about open source. Treating the Open Source movement like third party software vendors is a neat mental trick, but it is a lot like telling the women who entered a void in the US work force in the wartime 40’s that they may have thought they were a revolutionizing force, but that in reality they were just men who didn’t realize it yet.
Difference is not bad. Innovation is not bad. Weaving Open Source into windows is the stupidest thing from Microsoft since Windows ME, which pretty much means it might be the second worst thought in the history of computing and software.
What does this have to do with Real Estate? A lot, but I will wait to see if their Yahoo! acquisition effort succeeds before returning that the issue.
Just my two cents, which, by the way, is two cents more than I need to ‘buy’ a real operating system.
Since this is vaguely a product review, I will give Mightgrowsoft a D- for their open source methodology. We don’t need to be focused on porting open source solutions into windows, but rather the reverse.