[svlug] MICROSOFT VS LINUX

[Charles Peterman]

I've enjoyed the read so much, especially since I just quit a gig at
a place that where NT was the defacto standard.  

But Ze'ev's comments, while funny, point back to our blind spot.  Its not
Microsoft, its the model that M$ follows, that indeed every commercial
developer has tried to follow.  They don't have the worst developers in
9000 parsecs.  What they have is a competitive model which requires, let
me emphasize that, _requires_ that competition be barred at the lowest
possible level.  Hence the heinous API's, the UI built into the engine,
etc.  Belittling M$ engineers at this stage is pointless and utterly fails
to acknowledge their contribution.   

Think about it. What Linux is to software, M$ was to hardware 5 to 10
years ago.  Where DEC, SUN, SGI, and Apple were all trying to integrate
vertically, branding all of their own hardware, proprietary API's and
protocols, M$ was a veritable whore of babylon.  M$ allowed everyone to
play their game, providing a base level for driver support for a plethora
of hardware.  You produce hardware, well guess what, you can produce lots
of it and sell it to a huge installed base if you just play by this small
set of rules and agree to these terms.  Compared to the deals that DEC,
SUN, SGI, Apple, and IBM were offering those below them in the vertical
market, M$ deal was heroin.  

Hell, half the reason that something like Linux is possible is because M$
forced a lot of hardware manufacturers to play ball with each other.  The
standardization of hardware components is what supports the volume of
contributors to the Linux effort.

Where M$ looses is that they are now trying to play the same game as the
big boys, vertical integration and going after the high end market.  If
you read "The Innovators Dilemma" you will see that this is the logical
course for a company based on increasing monetary return to pursue when it
has filled its lower margin niche.  It is this mindset that Linux attacks,
not the software, not the UI, not Bill Gates, not the engineers, but the
mindset of the corporate culture.  The intermediaries are not the long
term goal. 

-Charles

To quote from annotated memo:


In other words, to understand how to compete against OSS, we must target a
process rather than a company.

{ This is a very important insight, one I wish Microsoft had missed. The
real battle isn't NT vs. Linux, or Microsoft vs. Red Hat/Caldera/S.u.S.E.
-- it's closed-source development versus open-source. The cathedral versus
the bazaar.
This applies in reverse as well, which is why bashing Microsoft qua
Microsoft misses the point -- they're a symptom, not the disease itself. I
wish more Linux hackers understood this.




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