Archive for February, 2008

Don’t let me be misunderstood

February 28, 2008 at 1:51 pm · Filed under Microsoft, Windows

The song title above sprang into my head this morning when a friend related events at a Microsoft launch in South Africa yesterday. Rodders kindly allowed me to blog his words on a private mailing list:

Don’t know how many of you attended the big Microsoft launch of their 2008 Server, SQL server and Visual Studio yesterday, but I found it really funny to note that every time a new speaker came up to the podium, they were intro’d by the opening bars of The Parlotones’ recent big hit, “Giant Mistake”!!

It gets even better when one considers that the chorus includes the lines:

“What the hell were we thinking, were we thinking at all? – what the hell did we believe we’d achieve?”

Never thought Microsoft was the type to ensure it had the most apt theme music ever for its new products!!!!

I don’t know about you but I’m speechless, and for me that’s pretty remarkable.

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OSS offers freedom from vendors … d’oh

February 18, 2008 at 4:55 pm · Filed under open source

Startling news has emerged from the International Data Corporation (aka IDC). A new report by analyst Matt Lawton has discovered that across the board, open source software projects represent significant initiatives within respondents’ organisations, and there is momentum carrying these forward into the next year. But, shocklingly, this year’s study also revealed a huge hole in the open source software ecosystem, according to Lawton:

“Study respondents are largely relying on themselves to integrate, implement, and train users on their open source projects. Third-party service providers must educate themselves about open source technologies and start offering project-specific services to ensure the continued adoption of open source software in the end-user community.”

Well… d’oh. So businesses are doing it for themselves and that’s a bad thing? Apparently. I haven’t been privileged enough to see the report but C-Net’s Matt Asay has and he writes:

“Enterprises are unshackling themselves from proprietary, expensive licenses and reinvesting that money in the gift that keeps on giving: people. That’s how I read the data.”

Quite so. You can read his full analysis here. But one stat that jumped out at me was:

“90 percent of respondents are planning to increase or keep the same (very healthy) level of investment in open source.”

There are some smart people out there.

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Linux on the desktop is inevitable

February 8, 2008 at 4:45 pm · Filed under Linux, Microsoft, OLPC, PCs, Windows, desktop OS, open source

I’ve long believed that Microsoft’s monopoly of desktop computing is doomed. Sadly, it won’t go away tomorrow or the day after but sometime in the future the majority will live in a desktop computing world not dominated by the rapacious lot in Redmond. And you can bet that Microsoft won’t go away without a fight but the writing is on the wall.

It all boils down to one simple fact: Microsoft has had the power to make and break hardware manufacturers for far too long and they’re tired of it. Even Intel has now admitted this. And while it’s only a small step from there to hardware manufacturers realising that they can get out from under the Microsoft yoke and actually make a decent margin on the operating system while also offering lower prices to the channel, the reality is they’re still too locked in to Microsoft’s sliding scale rebate system.

Despite the success of the Linux-based ASUS Eee PC, other vendors are still only dabbling in Linux and have been for some time. For example, HP here in South Africa conducted a little experiment a while back: it released a single laptop model with a choice of three operating systems: Free DOS, Linspire (one of the more expensive versions of Linux) and Windows, at three different price points: R4199, R4499 and R4999.

The down side was the HP N1000 was a crappy low-end model, hardly comparable to my T-series ThinkPad. But the beauty of that offer was that I could I have bought a notebook without having to pay Microsoft for crappy software I would never use – which is exactly what I had to do.

I wrote about the HP experiment and others here back in July 2006. Sadly, my conclusion then still applies today: “PC manufacturers say they cannot fund the marketing efforts so if Linux is going to grow, the investment will have to come from the likes of Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, Xandros and possibly even IBM as an agnostic Linux supporter. Is it going to happen? Only time will tell.”

I have a dream (apologies to Martin Luther King, Jr)  that one day we won’t be forced to pay the Microsoft tax.

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