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Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy
From: |
Sermo Malifer |
Subject: |
Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy |
Date: |
Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:42:22 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.19) Gecko/20081204 SeaMonkey/1.1.14 |
amicus_curious wrote:
"Rjack" <user@example.net> wrote in message
ZdWdnaUnF5_BIuDUnZ2dnUVZ_hydnZ2d@giganews.com">news:ZdWdnaUnF5_BIuDUnZ2dnUVZ_hydnZ2d@giganews.com...
THE GPL IS THE BEST FRIEND MICROSOFT EVER HAD. Open source advocates
are ideologically blinded to these facts.
That is an interesting spin to the issue!
The reality is that the GPL has no practical effect on anything of any
importance in terms of market development. One could, perhaps, take GPL
code and attempt to create a new software product by extending the GPL
source in some useful way, but, if you think about it more deeply, that
is ever so unlikely to be successful.
Or you could create software that runs on a GPL OS but that is not
derived from its source code.
For example, say you could safely, without getting ground up in the
gears of the SFLC or FSF, hijack the source code for Open Office or Gimp
or even Linux itself.
IOW, if you could steal somebody else's work and pass it off as your own.
If you try to sell it as a product by itself,
with nothing added, you are going to fail, since the product is already
available at essentially zero cost and you have nothing to differentiate
yourself.
IOW, you can't get away with stealing somebody else's work and passing
it off as your own.
If you add some useful improvement, you are still faced with
a market that is mature and will only spur the incumbent suppliers to
duplicate your improvement for their own products.
IOW, the world continues to work as it has in all markets since the time
civilization began, long before computers existed.
The customers will
classically wait for the incumbent to adopt the new feature.
If that were true we'd all still be running Word Perfect on CP/M!
Can you
seriously believe that another office suite or graphics package or OS
platform can make any headway against things like MS Office, Adobe
Photoshop, or Windows itself?
Yes, I can believe that being a computer user is not synonymous with
being a Microsoft customer.
The marketing and business issues
involved in such an endeavor totally swamp the technology issues.
How do you explain Apple's success in selling systems based on BSD Unix?
Perhaps you ought to lend your business and marketing expertise to
IBM, Sun, Orcle, etc, to show them what a mistake they're making in
supporting open source software?
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, (continued)
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, JEDIDIAH, 2009/01/30
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Chris Ahlstrom, 2009/01/29
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, chrisv, 2009/01/29
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, David Kastrup, 2009/01/28
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, chrisv, 2009/01/27
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, David Kastrup, 2009/01/28
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, amicus_curious, 2009/01/27
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Rahul Dhesi, 2009/01/27
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, chrisv, 2009/01/27
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Doug Mentohl, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy,
Sermo Malifer <=
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, amicus_curious, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, David Kastrup, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, amicus_curious, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Hadron, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Peter Köhlmann, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Robert Heller, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, ZnU, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Snit, 2009/01/26
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, amicus_curious, 2009/01/24
- Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy, Rjack, 2009/01/24