Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Windows 2000 Users: The Clock Is Ticking. June 30 marks the end of mainstream support for both the client and server Windows 2000 releases. A Windows 2000 rollup pack is still due by midyear.”
Time to start evaluating your options for your next operating system. There are lots of good choices out there. Me? I’m thinking Tiger, Ubuntu, Fedora and perhaps a little SuSE ought to do me.
OSNews also points to Linux Insider: How Linux Saved Microsoft. “Rob Enderle has an commentary at LinuxInsider discussing the effect Linux has had on Microsoft. An excerpt: “As I look at how Microsoft is changing to address the Linux threat, one that may actually turn out to be no more real then Netscape’s was, I can’t help but see how Microsoft has dramatically benefited from it — and much more broadly so than they did from the rise of Netscape.”
I think Enderle is right on when he talks about the effect that Open Source is having with Microsoft. “Competition breeds Innovation.” However, I think he falls off the deep end in his last section “False Threat?” where he tries to explain what Open Source is.
… “open source” which, in turn, is based on a false concept. This concept is that people actually want to look at source code. No, it’s that people want the security of knowing that the code is there for a community to maintain, support and enhance, that a monopolistic code owner can’t take away the freedom to run the code they have.
Finally, we know that what is largely holding the open-source community together is a dislike for Microsoft. Little holds the community together! 🙂 But the individuals who choose Open Source each choose it for their own reasons, often freedom of choice, freedom to experiment, freedom to extend, integrate, modify and hack together the solution to their own problem. It’s not about Microsoft, nor Computer Associates, nor IBM, nor any other one target.
… unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we’ll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Perhaps, Rob. See you in 2015 and we can compare notes.
OSNews points to a Fortune magazine story Microsoft’s New Mantra: ‘It Just Works’. “Microsoft’s Jim Allchin says that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: “it just works.” In other words, a lot of the fiddly, annoying tasks that computer users have become accustomed to (or never quite got the hang of) such as searching for files, defragmenting, changing network configurations, and tweaking security settings, will happen automatically.”
It’s an interesting piece, especially reading between the lines on the marketing message Allchin is trying to deliver. Microsoft has at least another year before they deliver the OS they have been talking about for a long, long time. Watch how the message changes.