Subject: Re: Don't Fear The Penguin
From: Cynbe ru Taren (cynbe)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 16:04:45 CDT
| I guess I just don't trust Gates
| not to be as evil as he possibly can...
Answer 1: Gates is a greedhead and an asshole, but I can't honestly say
I think he is more so than the corporate norm. Almost any American CEO
would probably do the same things if running Microsoft. As far as I know,
Gates doesn't hire hitmen to rub out people he dislikes, and he doesn't
donate his billions to radical right organizations or militias. So we
could really have it lots worse.
Answer 2: At this point Gates is really not up against a ragtag bunch
of Linux idealists led by Stallman: He is up against the overwhelming
majority of corporate America led by IBM as corporate point force, the
Dept of Justice as legal point force, and Senator Orrin Hatch as legislative
point man. Gates is objectively badly outgunned with time working against
him. And while he is bright in a shallow quiz-kid sort of way, he's
certainly not brilliant, and he's clearly surrounded by hand-picked yes-men
and unable to delegate decisions he's incompetent to make to more competent
people -- this is all clearly indicated by the progress of the DoJ case to
date, in which his personal testimony was a disaster, his witnesses did more
to hurt than help him, and his negotiators got overruled by him so often that
they wound up having to be cut out of the loop.
In short, in chess terms, he's in the sort of objectively busted position
where everything you do loses in the end, pretty much, and he's being
consistently outplayed by the opposition.
Realistically, I think IBM may be a bigger threat to Linux than Windows at
this point: Once Windows is keel to the sky, IBM may choose to make a play
for control of Linux (it may be playing nice now, but it certainly has a
monopolist heritage) and with its resources, inside connections to the Linux
scene, initial goodwill, and virtually unlimited legal budget, it might be
a real threat.
E.g., try this on for size:
IBM snaps up RedHat, and then starts actually doing what RedHat is already
being accused of doing in terms of defining proprietary Linux "standards"
incompatible with everyone else, while putting billions of dollars of development
money into making its version of Linux more attractive, and equally large
amounts of marketing money into convincing the corporate world that RedHat
Linux is the only Linux that matters. It then starts playing Microsoft style
games (which Microsoft, after all, learned from IBM in the first place) of
doing frequent upgrades which are incompatible with previous releases and
competing versions but supported by all the major third party software
applications software vendors. Increasingly important parts of the RedHat
distribution start being proprietary software, in particular the redhat
package manager, with vague promises about releasing the source as soon at
(as) it is fully quality assured.
I'm not losing sleep over that, but I think it is as likely as Gates coming
up with anything.
Honestly, if Gates' heart was still in the game, he wouldn't be unloading his
Microsoft stock as fast as he can short of spooking the market. He's accomplished
his initial ambition of a Microsoft OS on every desktop and in every home, and
doesn't have any real vision to replace it. Steve Balmer is credited with being
the one with the replacement motto and vision. Gates is undoubtedly spending
steadily more time thinking about the cascade of lawsuits, and not enjoying it.
Microsoft's software development system is objectively in shambles, just about
everything they've tried of late has been a disaster, in particular the core
program of replacing Win9x with the WinNT codebase has been such an unqualified
disaster it has been completely cancelled for the forseeable future. Gates gets
the credit for that disaster, and undoubtedly realizes at some semi-conscious
level that he's facing software development problems he's incompetent to manage,
on top of the legal problems and lack of any clear focus in terms of new worlds
to conquer. His media image is taking a drubbing and he's being successfully
accused of being a monopolist at the same time that Linux, a threat he can't
really comprehend, is blowing him out of the water.
His reaction is to unload stock and talk a lot about retiring and getting
into philanthropy. And start selling off and shutting down the various attempts
he made at diversification, which are working out about as well as Boeing's
attempts to diversify into boats and bicycles worked.
On other fronts, word is that Pual Allen has picked up Mick Jagger's old gf
Jerry Hall...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu Sep 16 1999 - 23:04:42 CDT