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0 pointsigravious15y ago0 comments

Aaargh! :)

Why am I being down-voted? Others on this page have stated that Microsoft shall not be as profitable going forward for reason X or Y or Z. I have stated why I think this is the case. I can't of course _prove_ it which is why I said that I have a bias up front. But if you look to the mobile phone landscape you have a situation where Android and Symbian are free software. It took a long time to happen and it took two technology giant neither of whose core business was operating systems and office tools per se. Don't you think that this is significant? Let's repeat this, nobody had any success competing with Microsoft at its core competencies until open source competition came along and even then the market that Microsoft "owns" is still firmly within their grasp. Somebody else on this very page expressed their opinion that the technology disruptor would be thin clients/cloud computing and didn't get down-voted for it. But I do. Please do not down-vote me if you disagree with my opinion, express yourself and tell me why you think I merit down-voting. Thanks.

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loewenskind15y ago· 2 in thread

>Why am I being down-voted?

Probably because your post would have a hard time being further from reality. If this were back in the open source heyday it might not seem so out of place but at the end of 2010?

For some people open source was some sort of religion but the form it actually took was nothing more than loss leader. You can't break into the OS market because MS is too embedded? Then give your stuff away and make it up on the back end. This is what you're seeing, not some "power of open source" nonsense. Google doesn't care about open source, they care about getting an OS they can leverage on as many phones as possible so they can't be locked out on advertising. Unix vendors used to give their OS away because it was the hardware they made their money on.

Today the tides are changing. Now you can use micro-payments via the various application stores out there so developers no longer need to try and make some free source app in the hope of landing a job through it. Now they can take their shot at the market place and hopefully become self sufficient. Personally I'd rather become financially independent than land a "great job" working for someone else. I don't see how open source can offer me this.

igraviousOP15y ago

Thanks for taking the time to reply. You may believe that my post is far from reality but surely that doesn't mean you should down-vote me for it. Debate me by all means, don't silence me. I tried to be honest and keep an even town. I was on topic. Just because you believe that my opinion is wrong doesn't mean that you have to down-vote me for it.

You make it seem like open source has had its day. It appears to me from looking at the software landscape that open source is becoming more and more pervasive all the time. If you are a software developer I would imagine that it is nigh on impossible to do your work by only using proprietary tools. This was always the case. Everyone agrees that the mobile market is the growth sector and the operating systems that are starting to dominate the sector are open source ones and the tools used to create the apps that go to the application stores you talk about are open source tools such as Eclipse and large parts of Xcode and the Symbian QT dev tools.

I did say I was biased. Granted. But it is not blind faith. That's unfair and unkind on your part to equate what I feel as pretty rational beliefs with religious thinking. Look at the valuation* of Redhat (the champion free software company) vs Microsoft (the champion proprietary company over the last two years for instance ... What does that stock movement tell you? You can't say that Redhat are making a better fist of the console market or a better cloud play or thin client play because Redhat outcompetes Microsoft on their own turf (server software and support) and this is all due to open source software.

I have no problem if you make your living selling closed source apps and for some verticals (games is an oft-cited instance) it might even make sense but I think in the long run everybody wins through the benefit of network effects and the reduced potential of lock-in when the free and open source software methodology is used. It seems to me that all the big IT companies get this - HP gets it, IBM get it, Oracle now get it through SUN, Yahoo gets it, Google definitely get it ... Microsoft are conspicuous by their absence to the party. And it is my thesis that this is going to begin hurting their bottom line despite the good results posted here.

* http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RHT+Interactive#chart1:sy...

loewenskind15y ago

>Debate me by all means, don't silence me. I tried to be honest and keep an even town. I was on topic. Just because you believe that my opinion is wrong doesn't mean that you have to down-vote me for it.

I think your post was downvoted for being dogmatic (e.g. "Open source is the way, the truth and the light!"), not for being wrong. On a side note, don't fret getting down voted so much. Who cares. Once you get 200 karma you can downvote people but other than that I don't know of anything that more karma buys.

>It appears to me from looking at the software landscape that open source is becoming more and more pervasive all the time.

This is because you're seeing it as some kind of ideology. It isn't. It's a loss leader. You see people doing loss leader all over the place (e.g. milk sold below cost, gaming consoles, television for free but with commercials, etc., etc.), do you think there is a growing trend of people who want to pay you for using their product? Of course not, it's part of a larger strategy. Just like open source.

>That's unfair and unkind on your part to equate what I feel as pretty rational beliefs with religious thinking.

When you see the same thing as everyone else but ascribe it to some "higher power" when there is no evidence of such what should I call it?

>Look at the valuation* of Redhat (the champion free software company) vs Microsoft (the champion proprietary company over the last two years for instance ... What does that stock movement tell you?

And bizarre examples like this further point to irrational thinking on your part. Microsoft dwarfs Redhat in every meaningful way. Are you comparing stock prices between the two [1]? And if you want to talk about the champion of proprietary software I think Apple has a better stake on that claim. They just recently blew past Microsoft in market cap (the metric you should be looking at if you're trying to judge valuation of a company).

>You can't say that Redhat are making a better fist of the console market or a better cloud play or thin client play because Redhat outcompetes Microsoft on their own turf (server software and support) and this is all due to open source software.

Redhat isn't remotely relevant to Microsoft. MS is worried about Google and Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if Ballmer didn't even know Redhat was still around as a company.

>It seems to me that all the big IT companies get this - HP gets it, IBM get it, Oracle now get it through SUN, Yahoo gets it, Google definitely get it ... Microsoft are conspicuous by their absence to the party.

No idea what you're talking about here. Frankly this sentence sounds absolutely delusional. Oracle "gets it" via Sun? Do you read the news? Every single one of those companies you mentioned rely on proprietary software. Sure, they use free software. Some even do some loss leader with it (e.g. Google). So what? Microsoft also gives away software btw. Out of that list it is beyond bizarre that you would give Oracle a pass but single out Microsoft. I feel like I'm having a conversation on slashdot in the late '90s.

[1] http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/10/22/red-hat-vs-microsoft-the...

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