On Thursday 23 October 2003 04:33 pm, Paul M. Bucalo wrote: > Balmer may be conveniently throwing in *all* of Red Hat's critical > vulnerabilities in its *distribution release*, which amounts to many, > many applications, not just the O/S. If he compares O/S to O/S, > instead of O/S to total distribution, Red Hat (or any other Linux > distro) doesn't look as bad as he suggests. Windows is Windows. I've > never seen anything freely given in the O/S that ever could have been > called an app. Applet, but not app. As usual, mind games are being > played that affect the multitude that don't look with clear eyes.
Actually, no one should be surprised by the remarks and I would be highly surprised to find anyone that takes anything said at these types of press conferences seriously. What did anyone here expect Ballmer to say? That Windows 2003, after hundreds of millions spent on development and at a price of several hundred per pop, is worse than a free product, by the way, please buy our stuff? I mean, they guy is doing his job, nothing to get crazy about, he is basically paid to convince people that Windows is better and if he can do that by saying misleading things that are technically true, who here can say that they are surprised that he does so? The mere fact that he is constantly forced to acknowledge open-source at these things is testament to the fact that Linux and other open source competition is a serious threat. Hey, back in the day, IBM and other mainframe companies said the same type of things about PC's, they were only good for games, they weren't powerful enough for serious business, they were being built by a bunch of hippies out of a garage, etc. ad nauseum. The biggest kick that I get from all this is the cosmic irony. There just has to be some old fossil IBM guys sitting around a table somewhere watching Ballmer and saying, "Stevie boy, it just ain't gonna fly, we tried the same lines way back in the day, while you and Bill were laughing all the way to the bank. You gotta notice that we ain't pushing the big steel anymore. You're next, how's it feel to be on the other side?" -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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