More of my sites

WinInfo Daily News
SuperSite for Windows
Windows IT Pro Magazine
Connected Home
Thurrott Dot Com
Windows Weekly at TWIT

About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, July 25, 2003

Microsoft babbling on Linux
The unedited Bill Gates can be unintentionally humorous, but his comments about Linux at yesterday's Financial Analysts Meeting are interesting, as he compares what Microsoft is doing in Longhorn to the ways in which Linux is improving. It's rambling, but he makes some good points. "I think that, you know, Linux IS UNIX. It's a form of UNIX. It's not like anyone invented a new way of doing an operating system. It's like FreeBSD was; that existed even ten years ago. The open source approach is valuable for certain types of development. We've always seen software coming out of universities the prototyped various things and was part of the ecosystem of our industry. ... There was a kind of equilibrium between that and the software that was done on a commercial basis. I don't think that's going away. There is a class of innovation that has to do with management, security, natural user interfaces that goes beyond what UNIX has delivered that we are driving forward. It's like designing a 747 or a moon shot where there's a lot of integrated activity: the design, the activity, the pieces that come together, getting a version of Office that fully exploits those things. And our innovation needs to remind people that what they expect out of an operating system isn't standing still. And so there's an onus on us that if it's still 1972, then UNIX is all people expect, then we'll share more space with that kind of approach then if we're revolutionizing and getting a whole new level of expectation. We were able to do that in things like word processing and spreadsheets. We're in the process of doing it in categories like databases and collaboration. Over the next four or five years, that's why we've taken the road of pouring on the R&D, taking advantage of the hiring environment we've got today, and driving things upwards. In the next four or five years, people will understand some of the IP questions that were raised about those systems, and is there some sort of patent pool that people are paying royalties into? How that all plays out so that customers don't feel like they have this open-ended liability for something that comes without that indemnification. I don't have an exact prediction for that, but that's certainly going to put some notion of rights and friction into that side of the system."

[ Posted at 1:24 PM | Permalink ]