Microsoft releases another XML spec

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Doesn't bitty ever get tired of hearing himself crow?

bitty,it seems to me that just a few short month ago you were constantly crowing about how SCO was going to kill off Linux. MS put their full support behind SCO in both public money and under the table money. The OSS community put SCO away handily and IBM is on the verge of totally squashing SCO once and for all.

As usual, bitty was wrong with that prediction. As a matter of fact, I can think of no prediction bitty actually got right. Can anyone out there think of one?

Now bitty is crowing that MS is going to kill Linux through a series of invalid patents. bitty always crows about how MS is going to squash Linux. bittty has been crowing this for the last few years, all the while the MS server market dropped to about 1/2 the market and is shrinking every year while the Linux server market is now about 25% and doubling every year. Now, in other news bitty is crowing that the bogus patents MS is attempting to collect will kill Linux/OSS. There is only one small item wrong with bitty's logic. Everyone on earth would have to switch en masse to MS latest. From the sales, and number of companies actually using MS eXPee, it is highly doubtful that will happen. Most companies are perfectly happy with Office 97 and win98/NT4. Why would they want to change to something that will be totally incompatible with what they are now using? With tight IT budgets it is a scenario difficult to imagine. What bitty, and MS, don't seem to realize is everyone, except bitty of course, is tired of being on the MS treadmill where the only thing that changes is the formats, the bundling to prevent interoperability, even with MS 'legacy' products and the constantly rising prices. bitty thinks companies will cheerfully spend billions every couple years converting all their documents to keep up with the ever elusive, and changing, 'MS standard'. bitty obviously reads only ZDNet and MS press releases. A close look at 40% of MS server customers quickly reveals the only upgrade path for them to remain compatible with what they already have is Linux/OSS. Otherwise they will have to rewrite every document they have since MS strategy is to lock-in it's customers with proprietary formats. MS plan is to dominate the world through lock-in and patents, much the same as a team of horses under one whip. In the end, all the patents MS is now collecting based on open XML standards will be declared void because they are not new, innovative or unobvious. MS efforts amount to an exercise in futility that clearly demonstrate how desperate MS is and how fearful MS is that Linux will eventually make them irrelevant. The Linux folks don't have to worry about a bottom line or shareholders the way MS does. If MS spent 1/2 the money on R&D that they spend trying to FUD Linux they may actually be able to produce something decent. Though not likely. The MS culture, lust for control and greed is what will be their demise. Just as with SCO, all we need to do is give MS enough rope. They will hang themselves. Most of their ex-customers say that it is MS that pushed them away but, now that they use Linux/OSS they would never go back to MS. After having a taste of freedom by throwing off the shackles of MS bondage nobody will willingly enter servitude again.

Of the roughly 50% of the server market that is MS, about 40% is NT 4.0. MS strategy is to abandon those customers expecting they will go with MS latest lock-in and the never ending upgrade and file conversion treadmill that will bring. With the FUD from SCO clearly shown to be totally bogus companies are going full-bore with their Linux plans. MS, again, failed to make a dent in the expanding Linux world.

MS bought a 'study' from Gartner to prove how expensive it is to switch to Star Office (a study, as we all know is totally bogus and hurt Gartner's credibility). My question is will MS buy a study that show how expensive it will be to convert to MS every couple years? Hmm...tough decision...NO. But you can bet the IT departments of all these companies will. You can also bet they will have a long, hard look at the fact their data will no longer belong to them. They will have to pay MS a toll just to access their data.

bitty likes to crow about how the market is a 'world market' now. Well, with about 2/3 of the earth's population committed to Linux/OSS for the future what American company is going to make a business decision that will lock them out of that segment of potential business? Well, the dumber ones will. But then, companies with poor leadership rarely survive.

bitty's predictions are based on the one variable that cannot be predicted. That everyone rush out and buy MS latest 'me-too' mediocre products that excel in one area only---bringing every new virus, trojan or worm into your enterprise. A very unlikely scenario.

The good that will come from this is the EU will discover how MS is attempting to use patents to stifle innovation and development. With that, on the heels of MS latest losses in Europe, MS corporate offices in Japan being raided, and now another lawsuit for bundling in Korea, MS plans for world domination by patents is already circling the bowl.

bitty also crows that the GPL has never been tested in court. Of course bitty neglects to mention the reason for this is because nobody has ever taken the task of challenging the GPL. Every company found to be in violation of the GPL so far has just rolled over and paid their dues. Well, bitty, that has now ended. A small, rag-tag, penniless band of developers in Germany successfuly got an injunction to stop a proprietary company from distributing their product because it violated the GPL license and infringed on copyrights. So much for your theory it takes millions of dollas to challenge a crooked company. Oops, one less thing for bitty to crow about.

At the rate MS is losing both customers and legal battles it won't be long before the only thing bitty will have to crow is how much better the world would be if only MS had won. Of course we will all continue to ridicule him then too. Most of us do not suffer fools gladly. We will not make an exception for you, bitty.

Posted by: Spam-ZD   Posted on: 04/16/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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