Randall Shimizu([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Thu, May 05, 2005 at 04:23:56PM -0800: > Microsoft has mad so many people unhappy that it's afraid of any > competition. So the only way to defend themselves is extend and > embrace and try to lock people in. That is essentially what .NET > is all about. Bill Gates publicly admitted that Microsoft > protocols were designed to be propietary to thwart > interoperability. This is why Microsoft is on this patenting > binge. Now that it is harder to lock customers with propietary > protocols they can dersail OSS and other competitors with IP > patents. So in other words public IP now becomes private. >
I would like to see a reference to that public admission. Such an admission would be equivalent to saying, "customers can go to hell, we'd rather block their main concern of compatibility so they can share, than possibly compete in any respectable fashion." I don't see many people saying that they feel locked in, though. They may be irritated at times if sharing data with a Mac or Linux user doesn't work as it should. Unfortunately, the real "lock-in" is in the form of a mild delusion. When a person has those kinds of difficulties, they automatically assume the other platform is the broken one. My mom took some photos of my new baby's birth in raw format. When I asked for a copy of them she asked why I wanted them since she "knew" that I couldn't do anything with them anyway. So the assumptions are there even when there is no problem. All this is just to say that I've all but given up on trying to get people to try Linux. If incompatibility problems, untrustworthy practices/principles of MS, and the virus and spyware problems don't motivate them to switch, there's little else that one can do. That's a powerful hold they've got on those customers. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
