Tag Archives | Microsoft

There’s some interesting follow-up to Dan Gillmor’s post I mentioned yesterday, where Dan is pointing to Jon Udell’s recent column on the new Mozilla FireFox browser in comparison to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Dan took it as a complaint on the monopoly power of IE supressing development of great tools on other (better?) platforms; Jon replied that that wasn’t his intent. Both the comments on Dan’s site and Jon’s original article are worth a read.

Firefox May be Better, But Internet Explorer is Entrenched. Jon Udell says Firefox fills the IE void by being a better browser than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has stagnated since Microsoft destroyed serious competition in the browser business. I use it, too,but unfortunately it doesn’t fill the void at all.
[Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

Microsoft: Better security means delayed product releases. By allocating more resources to security, Microsoft concedes that future product ship dates will slip further. On the bright side, this means most of us won’t have to play the upgrade game so soon. [Ars Technica]

Jim Grey is a brilliant computer scientist, but he’s not a businessman. On a software conference panel, he suggested that Open Source would destroy the American software industry. Nonsense. It might destroy Microsoft, unless they change their direction, but not the industry. The industry needs to stop selling proprietary products and start selling support for those products. Support is what people *think* they are buying, anyway. PHBs buy BigBlue because “there’s one neck to strangle.” (Newsflash: there is no neck.) Consumers buy Microsoft because they think they can get support from their friends. As their friends master Ximian and Safari and Mozilla and Evolution and Rekall and more, the tides will shift.

Most software companies don’t make money selling software. They make money by helping companies solve business problems through the use of computer technology and software. It is that knowledge – how to solve business problems – that is the value-add, not the ones and zeroes on disk. People will pay for solutions to their problems, for training on how to do it, for support on how to fix it when it isn’t working right. We don’t pay an electrician an annual licensing fee to have electricity flow through the office. We pay a supplier for the energy we consume, and an electrician for maintenance and repairs.

Microsoft exec: Open source model endangers software economy. SANTA CLARA, Calif. — A Microsoft official Monday questioned how the software industry could survive if users are getting software for free through open source. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Europe Supports Antitrust Ruling Against Microsoft. The European Commission is expected to order Microsoft to make fundamental changes to the way it sells software in Europe. By Paul Meller. [New York Times: Business]

c|Net features a story, “Army to Gates: Halt the free software” reporting that Microsoft is giving software away to government officials which “places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold.” So, is Microsoft committing bribery?

Maybe we should all send them disks of Mandrake and OpenOffice.org instead.

Heads-up to programmers trying to automate SourceSafe: [kbAlertz – Visual SourceSafe] points to a new Microsoft KnowledgeBase article indicating the Get command is no longer recursive in the latest 6.0d version of SourceSafe: FIX: The Get method behaves differently with VSSVersion and with VSSItem when you use OLE Automation in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d. (837417) – When you create a program that uses Microsoft Visual SourceSafe OLE Automation, the behavior of the Get method with a VSSVersion object and with a VSSItem object in Visual SourceSafe 6.0d is different from the behavior of the Get method with these…