Business Knows No Friends, & Microsoft is in Business

Part of the problem with those who wish to portray Microsoft as this great benevolent entity is the fact that it is forgotten that no company, at its core, is in business to make friends. The motive is profit. Greed is what drives Microsoft, and if there are benefits along the way, that is inconsequential to them.

Once you get the idea that every motive relates to profit, you start to get that XP is being discouraged because continuing to use it doesn’t make the greatest profit for Microsoft. If Microsoft could turn out a new operating system every three weeks, with enough new features to impress, and without enough bugs so as to make it distasteful, it would. Then it would simply wait to unleash the next monetization period (you and I know this better as ‘upgrade cycle’) Make no mistake, Microsoft has spent large amounts of money to see exactly what the prime timeframe for pushing out ‘new ‘ software is.

The same can be said of any effort to do anything ‘open source’. If Microsoft was truly ‘turning over a new leaf’ there would have been no need for them to define new licensing models; one of the accepted models, that everyone else uses, would have been just fine.

This is also the crux of the argument put forth by Dana Blankenhorn, this day, on ZDNet -

At OSBC Microsoft’s latest spokesman to the open source world, Robert Youngjohns, asked that the company be judged not by its words regarding open source, but its actions.

Trying hard to be nice and flexible our own Matt Asay, who is a director of OSBC, asked about attempts by Microsoft to “lock-in” customers, something anathema to the ideals of open source and in conflict with open standards.

I’m afraid that what Matt got in response was gobbledygook.

It is, in fact, Microsoft’s actions, and not its words, that are the problem:

• Microsoft claims patents covering Linux, and signs “cross-license” deals with embedded Linux firms that explicitly acknowledge those claims.
• Microsoft sued TomTom for infringing those claimed patents.
• Microsoft SharePoint is all about locking customers in to proprietary standards.
• The whole Office Open XML (OOXML) mess before the ISO was about making proprietary code a standard everyone would have to follow.

Those are actions, Mr. Youngjohns. Maybe you mean we should ignore the actions that put Microsoft in a bad light with open source and only consider those which put it in a good light?

Or maybe you mean we should ignore any actions you, Mr. Youngjohns, were not a part of. This is a common bureaucratic dodge, one that makes me more angry than I can say.

Microsoft, as a company, is an individual under the law. Microsoft’s actions — all its actions — should be considered when open source advocates, or customers, are looking at the company and its products.

You can’t make a little nice-nice or toss some French code over the side and then credibly pretend you’re a penguin.

This good cop-bad cop routine has gotten very, very old. Anyone in open source who deals with Microsoft knows what they are walking into.

Stop pretending to be our friend.

Wow. What’s more amazing than the fact that I almost completely concur, is the fact that someone must have not slipped the pills in Mr. Blankenhorn’s water for a few days. Imagine another dissenting view at ZDNet about Microsoft; the other being John C. Dvorak. Everyone else seems to have drunk the Microsoft Kool-Aid that brings total joy, and almost complete acceptance of any product turned out from Redmond.

Many have read my almost complete praise for the Windows Live essentials, and these pieces of code are generally very good. There is no mistake there. But the fact that they are great is not something that takes away from the fact that these ‘free’ items were designed with a purpose – to crush any hopes of a similar set of programs coming together that were not tightly controlled by Microsoft.

A quick look at the mail program shows how it easily defeats any attempt by Mozilla, with Thunderbird, to control the market. I’m sure that when Eudora was to have become a de facto partner of Mozilla, with Penelope, many, including me, cheered. But it was soon seen that nothing was happening, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders what Microsoft might have had to do with it. Perhaps, in this one small case, the involvement was only tangential, as Microsoft simply made Live Essentials Mail close enough to Outlook that most who had ever used Outlook in a work environment immediately jumped at it.

The only possible hope of unseating this mail program from Microsoft, for those who use a Microsoft OS, is for Evolution to get a better port. Evolution is tremendous, but the port to Windows sucks. It is a kludge, looking to all as though lots of spit, and no polish was used in the attempt.

So it remains. Microsoft is not our friend, and while (in most part) we love their products, for the greatest part, we hate how they manipulate us. I’m sure they would say it’s nothing personal, just business.

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I really didn’t say everything I said.Yogi Berra

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