What drives Bill Gates 1806

. I don't see these things as "blatant lies" by any means. Technical marketing is based on the concept of "Feature, Function, Benefit, and Proof" (FFBP) and all of the world's business schools teach the need for a vendor to develop products that are optimized for a target market that can be defined by some Standard Of Comparison (SOC). What Microsoft has done is to formulate and document such SOCs that are used in various industries to show that their FFBP is indeed superior to that of its compebreastors, be they unix or linux or even mainframe opportunities. Be buttured that IBM and its partners are doing the very same thing.

These efforts are considered to be necessary consumer education and large, successful companies spend a lot of money telling the consumers the good news about their products. They rely on their compebreastors to make sure that any bad news gets out.

Every prospective customer has their own value system and may or may not agree with Microsoft (or IBM) as to the weight that can be buttigned to various elements of the SOC. Most customers of any size can afford to create their own SOC using their own IT staff and tailoring it to their own business needs. Bill Gates' promotion of Windows using best foot forward techniques is no different than the cola folk harping on linux' presumed strong points.

You might think about the idea that Bill Gates is out to convince the world and the cola activities seem designed to convince the linux advocates themselves.

To me, linux and OSS projects in general have been aimed at smothering the opportunities for commercial companies to continue to make money from software that has become commonly used and standardized among customers and vendors. Linux was a unix work-alike and provides APIs and operating methods identical to those provided by the conventional Unix versions. I think that the "real" Unix versions must have some FFBP advantages over linux, since they continue to exist and are sold by the same vendors who also sell linux solutions.

Apache was a work-alike subsbreastute for Netscape's web server. PSP is an alternative to Microsoft ASP. Mono is a functional clone of .NET. MySQL is a (I think) woefully inadequate alternative to Oracle and other SQL based database managers. The history of OSS has been the creation of software products that mimic commercial successes. My buttessment shows that linux and OSS has damaged the revenue streams of Unix suppliers and other upscale application suppliers, such as Adobe and Oracle much more that it has damaged Microsoft.

I do not agree that anyone at a policy level at Microsoft has ever stated such a thing. I strongly doubt that anyone there really believes it. I think you are citing some words from the white paper prepared by some product team at MS and leaked under the heading of "Halloween Papers". You should not make the mistake of thinking that MS is a single-minded monolith. No company is actually like that and not even Bill Gates has ever been like that. He takes a stand and pushes hard, but he has changed course often in the past and that is the reason that Microsoft has adapted over the years to changes in the market. People in Redmond go to the office in the morning 100% convinced that they are the #1 software company, far and away, and that they will win wherever and whenever they compete.

It is easy to fall into the trap of underestimating your opponent, particularly if all you do is disrespect him with mantras saying that they are fearful and afraid of OSS or they are stumbling fools or anything resembling that atbreastude.

I think your numbers are incorrect by a lot, but give some respect to the notion that Microsoft has been in this business for about 25 years now and does know something about it. The OSS proponents, however enthusiastic, are still mostly unranked amateurs at the biz and may very well be overlooking some fundamental elements that will hurt their future chances.

Of course if you "give it a couple of years" Longhorn will be on the street and Mr. Bill might have the upper hand. Also, don't project your own abilities on the home market and think that you are a typical consumer. There is no such thing, to begin with, and the vast majority of users have been conditioned over time to expect the Windows style of functions and methods. Microsoft doesn't provide automatic end of things that a malevolent dude can use as a kind of virus just because they are stupid. They are doing that sort of thing to cope with the type of customer who uses home computers and looks to the end use rather than the computer science behind the scenes. If Longhorn runs everything in a managed environment and the user gets both protection and extreme simplification of use, linux is going to have to go some to have any appeal at all.