Our dear friend Big Bill has a fearsome reputation for discerning the "next big direction" in computing, and thus keeping his Company afloat.
Unlike all others in the game (except notably IBM), all others made the mistake of living off their killer app, and consequently being consigned to history. (aka Novell, visicalc, Digital Research, to name a few). Where Bill is uncanny is his insistence on moving Msoft, boots 'n all into <whatever it is>. Thus he re-invents Msoft every decade. Remember microsoft? that company that just did Dos and Basic? Thus the occaisional missives from him to all staff to move from DOS to Win3.1 (he sacked the entire DOS6 dev staff) The subsequent all out focus on Word and Excel, the marriage of convenience to Novel when he saw ethernet being 'it', the marriage to IBM while gui desktops were still being accepted... and, recently, his inspired guess that Internet was 'it'. His misguided attempt to kill Internet stone motherless dead and replace it with his (original) version of MSN. The flat out, mad-pace development of IExplorer (just 6 weeks for christ sake!) and, now. The missive from Gates is: stop work on every single project and development, add no more features, and concentrate *solely* on making our products 1) secure, 2) stable. In context to the 1st paragraphs, this missive is the same gigantic leap into something new. He is past the point of just being 'worried' and sees the demise of Msoft on the horizon because of the TWO issues. Recall, he saw correctly, the demise of Windoze without IExplorer. Now, if this OS of his, *is* unstable, and *is* insecure, the bottom line to that is who gives a sh*t when nothing else is available? The arrogance of pumping crap out for a decade was because he could. For a decade now, there was indeed NOTHING else (that worried Bill enuff). The only reason Bill is taking this issue as strong as he can, is he can see people flocking (I use the word advisedly) to Linux and it's derivates. The word from the industry watchers (Gerian, DB Associates, Standard & Poors) is "too little, too late". We live in interesting times. Knowing Msoft history makes me think these pundits are wrong, yet-again. Bill will simply create a new Xindows that IS secure. -------- And now a warning. There are a (very) small number of people on this list, who will confirm for you, that FUDmongery is real and was a paid for veritable disease in the OS/2 vs Msoft warz. The basic rules are, you take your opponent's os apart and find anything sloppy. You then innocently post 'bug reports' into mailgroups. ANY response of any kind to these bugs (real or imagined), prompts a wave of auto-generated hate mail from umpty dozen new mail@somewheres, "How can it be like this", "I thought you said it was 'perfect", "I agree with Fred, your OS is crap",,,,,,,, When genuine weakneses run out, you then look for ones that can't be verified. 'The team' supplies a stream of questions on issues that can't be proved or disproved. Purpose? Confusion, doubt, unsure-ness. What Bill's boys will now (desperately) attempt to do is DIScredit Linux's famed stability and security. They don't actually have a choice if they wish to survive, because they have to show Windoze is MORE secure than *nix. It's that serious, for them. You may laugh, I may laugh, at this obvious untruth, Windoze isn't secure, probably can't be (but knowing Bill, that may not be true forever). The point is, they are going to go flat out with the unwashed masses, convincing them that Linux, it's grandathers, and it's children are cr*p. This won't affect THIS mailer directly because the corporate mind is thinking Redhat, but,,,, Be warned. -- http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
