The Assault on Software Giant Microsoft II

May 12, 2005 Leave a comment

The second part of this article has been posted. Not as much info as the first piece, but still interesting. The article outlines six “battles” that Microsoft must face: Sort out security, Get into the living room, Get them young, Go mobile, Serious software and Open source. They have been focusing on security for some time now, but still have a long way to go in this department. Will Longhorn be as secure as they claim? Too early to tell of course, but getting it truly secure without changing the paradigm of how Windows works, and therefore confusing the “average” user, is certainly going to be a challenge. They are doing well in the living room and the new Xbox2 should help that quite a bit. So far their Mobile attempts have been lackluster at best, especially in the cell phone segment. The one ironic statement in the article came from Bill Gates. When discussing Open Source, he said: “Such software, Bill Gates tells customers, might not be “interoperable”. Is he really trying to say that Open Source, which is almost always based on open standards, is somehow less “interoperable” then Windows and the other Microsoft products? Comments like these have to make some Microsoft employees cringe.
–jeremy

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Would Microsoft buy Red Hat?

May 11, 2005 Leave a comment

To answer Doc's questions – No, I don't think Microsoft would buy Red Hat. There are just too many obstacles. The potential anti-trust issues involved would be one (Microsoft already has a near OS monopoly and then buys the leader in the Linux market? The deal might not even be approved). Next are the culture issues. How much talent would Red Hat lose if this happened? My guess is a lot, as Red Hat has a ton of people who breathe Open Source. Also, how many of Red Hat's clients went with Linux to get away from Microsoft. Lastly, the damage this would do to the ego's of some high Microsoft execs surely couldn't be tolerated. I can think of a couple more reasons, but in the end, while anything is possible I think this one is HIGHLY unlikely. As I mentioned earlier though, Microsoft has been a bit more open to the competition, and this is a trend I think will continue. Will it go as far as some sort of MSFT/RHAT partnership some day? Only time will tell.
–jeremy

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Sys-Con Taking Some Heat – Update

May 11, 2005 2 Comments

As a follow-up to this story, it looks like Maureen O'Gara will no longer be writing for sys-con. In addition, old material is being removed from the sites. Good to see that sys-con came to their senses and kudos to the LinuxWorld editors who chose to take a stand on this.
–jeremy

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The Assault on Software Giant Microsoft

May 10, 2005 Leave a comment

An interesting BBC article about Microsoft's increasing competition. Competition that is coming from an ever increasing number of directions. So is Microsoft going to implode? No, it's more like death from 1000 cuts. Let's not forget though, Microsoft has enough money for quite a few bandaides. And they still have a ton of talent, even if they aren't innovating at the moment. What I think is going to happen is a slow erosion of some of Microsoft's cash cow products, such as Office and Windows. Don't get me wrong, when Longhorn finally comes out it will ship a ton of units. But the damage the delays and feature cuts have have done to thier image – that they won't get back. The article makes a good point; companies are no longer afraid to compete with Microsoft. Not only that, some companies are competing and actually staying in business. Imagine that. So where does that leave MSFT? They'll surely try to get into other markets, but most of those won't allow them the margins and revenues that shareholders have come to expect. Like their business practices or not, Microsoft puts up very good numbers very consistently. What market is large enough? Entertainment and Media, which is a direction that Microsoft is already headed in. I would not be surprised at all if in ten years they generate as much revenue from those industries as they do from software, if not more. Only time will tell. What do you think?
–jeremy

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Sys-Con Taking Some Heat

May 9, 2005 Leave a comment

…and deservedly so. Seems they may even lose a couple of writers, which says a lot since writers for that mag aren't paid. Why? It's over Maureen O'Gara, who has recently posted an article about Pamela Jones of Groklaw containing home address, phone numbers and a variety of other info. The article also contains some disparaging remarks. Evidentially, for this kind of material, sys-con will pay. Once again it's sad to see that things are written seemingly just to make a story. I'm glad to see that Pamela seems unphased by this. A little while ago I was asked to contribute to LinuxWorld Magazine. I turned the offer down due to time restraints, but had in the back of my mind that I'd submit an article at some point. I'm with the two other authors on this one though, and certainly never will if my article would appear next to content like that.
–jeremy

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Michael Dell, $100M and Red Hat

May 9, 2005 Leave a comment

Looks like Michael Dell has pumped $100 Million into Red Hat. The investment was made by MSD Capital LP in the form of $99.5 million worth of debentures that were converted into 3.89 million shares of RHAT. Those shares are valued at roughly $43 million (it's not necessarily an immediate loss as the debentures could have been purchased using a strategy called “convertible arbitrage”). This could be taken a couple of different ways really. I don't think there is an acquisition in the works here as him investing personal money in a company and then having Dell Inc. acquire it would surly draw SEC attention (at a minimum). That SEC attention makes me wonder if Dell Inc. has any plans to change their Linux strategy or relationship with Red Hat. It may just be Michael Dell making an investment, hedging his other investments, etc. It may even just have been something he did in response to a recommendation from his investment company. Either way, I think it shows some confidence – not only in RHAT, but in the viability of the Linux market. That is a good thing. We'll have to watch this one closely.
–jeremy

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Microsoft Funded Benchmark – Again

May 8, 2005 2 Comments

I don't know why these benchmarks keep getting publicity. Yes, that claims Windows 2003 is easier to admin that RHEL 3 (which is now a full release old). Yes, it was sponsored by Microsoft. Yes, it's the same company that did the much criticized Samba benchmark. I didn't have time to read the whole thing (it's 62 pages), but almost every page I read contained at least one skewed or outright ridiculous claim. A couple examples:
– The “skilled/prescreened” Linux admins admitted they didn't like writing scripts (these are not real admins then)
– The tape drive selected came with 2003 drivers, but not Linux drivers
– The Linux admins seemed to have no OpenLDAP experience, but it was a required task. The report then goes on the point out that OpenLDAP is confusing and lacks integrated management tools. Indeed it does, which is why Red Hat bought Netscape Directory Server and will be dropping OpenLDAP
You get the idea. The fact that the measured action item here was how long it took a couple of admins to complete a couple of task is almost ludicrous anyway. That is so dependent on individual talent that it doesn't even give you a cursory indication of anything, except how long it took those couple of admins to complete the indicated tasks. Not too useful is it. At this point, I have to think that these funded reports are doing at least as much damage as they are doing good to Microsoft. The education level of consumers is growing at an astounding rate and most are quite sensitive to feeling duped.
–jeremy

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The Problem with Corporate Blogging

May 7, 2005 Leave a comment

Looks like HP is currently taking it on the chin. They got caught removing negative customer comments from their corporate blogs. From the linked blog post:
Earlier this week, an HP customer posted a comment about his experience upgrading a media center PC. His experience was not good and he let us know. We pulled the comment. This was a bad decision and we have reversed it.
While I'm glad they reversed their decision, I don't think that's necessarily enough. Evidentially, they have been caught removing negative comments before. What's to say it won't happen again? Unfortunately for HP this incident made Slashdot, ironically after they had already reinstated the comment.
This brings up my larger problem with so called corporate blogs though. You don't know how much of the positive comments are astroturfed and you don't know how many negative comments have been pulled. There are times when I read them and wonder if the CxO that is alleged to have written the post even did. Obviously, some corporate blogger have gained a huge amount of trust and respect. Jeremy Zawodny and Robert Scoble come to mind, but there are many others. If you notice though, both those blogs are not done in an “official” corporate capacity – neither are even under a domain that their employer owns. I don't think that is a coincidence. Yet both gain their respective companies a huge amount of positive PR and exposure. Both Jeremy and Robert get it and both have been critical of the company they work for (of course they have both also said positive things also). By letting them be honest, it shows that at least their bosses within the company get it too. The fact that corporate blogs are being installed just as another PR outlet is a shame, since it dilutes the blogosphere IMHO.
For my part, I never remove negative comments from this blog or even from LQ itself. Honesty and openness in a community like LQ is paramount. The only things we remove are spam, extremely offensive material and things of that nature – and all that is in the TOS. I'm glad to see some of these cases drawing public attention. The negative PR will likely offset any of the fake positive PR that was drummed up. NOTE: This shouldn't be taken to mean that I think all corporate blogs are bad – they aren't. In fact, some are quite good. It just means that you should take what you ready on them with a healthy dose of skepticism (but that's probably true about most of what you read on the Internet).
–jeremy

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Tiger OSX Compatibility Issues

May 7, 2005 Leave a comment

To me, this article about upgrade problems with Tiger seem a bit played up. Of course there will be some application incompatibility issues. This will be the case with any major operating system upgrade, be it Linux, Windows, Mac OSX or whatever. No enterprise should be upgrading to a .0 release of an OS one week after it came out anyway. If they do, the sys admins either don't know what they are doing, don't like their jobs much or deserve what they get. It should stand to reason that if you are changing OS internals, apps that depend on those internals might act in a unexpected way until the application provider has had a chance to come out with an upgrade that takes the changes into account. To me, that means you should not even be looking at a new OS version until every app you depend on is known to work. After that you still have to verify OS stability and you should really consider waiting until .1 if it hasn't already been released by the time your apps have all reached compliance. Seems like common sense to me – ounce of prevention and all that…
–jeremy

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OpenOffice.org Reviewed by The Associated Press

May 6, 2005 Leave a comment

It's good to see OOo getting some good press. It's even better that the press is coming from an outlet like The Associated Press, which means that it'll get widespread exposure. OOo 2 looks to be a breakthrough release, with the suite now being something you can safely install on your parents machine, even if you haven't switched them to Linux yet. It's programs like OOo and Firefox that will be many peoples first introduction to Open Source software. This makes them extremely important as once a person realizes this gratis Open Source stuff is worth more than they paid, they are likely to try more. Eventually, they just might get it.
–jeremy

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