Methods used by Microsoft include: Using FUD, proxies and paid disparager's of Linux, vague statements regarding patents and making attempts to split the FOSS community through agreements with distributions.

The FUD campaign conducted by Microsoft over many years has been multi-pronged but to those within the FOSS community mostly ineffective. The campaign, designed to discourage people from moving to Linux has not gone well for Microsoft given Linux's rate of growth.

If Microsoft have patents over Linux Technology as they attempt to imply, then why are they conducting their FUD campaign? They could, with greater ease go to court, disclose their patents and obtain compensation for their alleged intellectual property and end the ambiguity or they could provide a list of their patents that purportedly cover Linux technology and allow the community to remove the items in dispute, yet instead they decide to conduct a campaign of FUD against Linux and the FOSS community.

Could it be that they know their patent claims are dubious at best? or perhaps it is due to what would happen should they go to court? Lets think about this for a moment. If Microsoft were to go to court against the FOSS community what would be the most likely repercussions? Microsoft is already disliked in many fields and many nations, are they worried about further damaging their image? are they worried about anti-trust issues in the USA and elsewhere? are they worried about what happened when SCO tried their litigation approach against Linux where the FOSS community banding together against SCO and it's supporters? I think they are very worried.

Microsoft's recent agreement with Novell is, from everything I have seen, yet another attempt by Microsoft to disrupt and fracture the Linux community. Unfortunately for now it looks as though it has worked with respect to SUSE as many people have stated they would be now moving away from SUSE or not selecting it in favor of other distributions. Can anyone really believe that Microsoft would wish to sell Linux to their customers?

Microsoft has a major problem when it comes to innovation. While new products they release have new features quite often these features have been available in competitors products for quite some time or they don't significantly improve the product providing an incentive to upgrade to the newest version. As a result many Microsoft customers are not upgrading to the latest and greatest version of Office or Windows, instead they simply use what they have as it is "good enough" or they elect to install an alternative offering such as Firefox (which has had tabbed browsing at least two years before Microsoft decided to implement that feature and release IE7) or OpenOffoce.org's suite as it is free and for most users does what they require with regards to a word processor and spreadsheet.

With this in the background, it was interesting to me to run across this article this morning, How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In, by Cory Doctorow about how the combination of Vista and MSO will exacerbate lock-in to MSO's file formats (and a whole lot beyond that). It has always been my feeling that one of the greatest threats sitting out there to the free(er) flow of information and the ability to use alternative solutions was MS'es ability to implement digital restriction management (DRM) in the corporate world (most likely via their MSO applications). Unlike the consumer world where so many users put up with DRM as an annoyance (at best), ala iTunes/Apple, in the corporate world there are going to actually be users who want to implement DRM. Given the installed base of MSO users, I see it as being very easy and tempting for companies to go the MSO upgrade route instead of looking for other alternatives as their attorneys advise them to lock down everything and MSO is an easy way to do it (especially when combined with Vista and Trusted Computing as Doctorow explains).

Of course, I suppose this will give me an opening as people start implementing Vista and the new MSO. When I can't open their files to work for them, I'll be able to advocate for them to switch to something like OpenOffice.org. The biggest challenge will be getting the State of North Carolina to follow the lead of Massachusetts (and many parts of the rest of the world) to require files to be made available to the public in open formats. Guess I'll call my representative.

Please note: This article is not covered by the IPW site's CCL. Please contact the original author for permission to republish. Though I'm sure you would get it.

Earlier this week I got to spend some time at a conference on technology for accountants. It has become one of my annual events for getting CPE's and usually I can pick up a few nuggets of useful information. That was significantly challenged this year though. What was really amazing to me though was how so many issues and topics came together at the conference that have been followed here or over on the SCOX Yahoo! board. As I'll show, Microsoft is engaging in what looks to be some pretty aggressive "loss leader" tactics. Wonder what Daniel Wallace would think of that? I also got to see first hand some more Microsoft "innovation".

Re: Question, So I just invested $35K i
by: ColonelZen     12/12/05 10:35 pm
Msg: 1060848 of 1060848

I sometimes lurk and occasionally post (Y! MSFT board) here but sometimes hit "Strong Sell" by accident as where I more frequently hang out, it's the appropriate sentiment. The reality is I don't really have a sentiment towards MS as an investment. It may go up, perhaps 25% in any one year; shrug. I suspect - but don't know - that over the long term it will go down.

To clarify my status, I know nothing about the stock market and investing - this is not advice, just casual babble offered for your amusement. I do know a little bit about the technology, though so here and there that babble may have brief tenuous connections to reality.

Before I jump in, I do want to make it clear that I'm not a programmer or a system admin or an "IT Professional" (whatever that is). I'm an end user, but most would consider me a "power" user. I'm the person that friends and family (and even professional peers) go to when they need help with their PC's. In the course of doing that, I have managed to impress the real PC gurus I've had a chance to work with on occasion. I think I also have a benefit due to having recently setup a new Windows XP computer, done a clean install of SuSE 9.3 Pro, upgraded SuSE 9.2 to 9.3 on a box, and installed OpenSUSE 10 on a laptop. Yeah, yeah, yeah - no big deal for folks that work on that type of stuff all the time, but I like to think more than your average bear. I'm sure in my bootstrap bungling around many of our IPW readers will spot improvements in the processes that I look at. But, humor me and enjoy the article as I take a look at Kaelin's lists of things to be done with a Windows box, contrast that with a Linux box, and maybe even generate a short list of things to do with a Linux box (not sure I'll make it to 10).

"One of the most important things is getting this information into the hands of our customers," says Stephen Toulouse, program manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center.