Ok, I just caught this article on BBC News from a post in Linux Extremist, and I have to say a couple of things.
Unfortunately, neither the original article on BBC nor the post on LE list the 12 tenets that Microsoft’s senior VP Brad Smith announced on Wednesday. But the BBC article does list three of them:
- Allowing computer manufacturers to set defaults as they wish, instead of exclusively to Microsoft applications
- Giving outside software developers the same access to technical information that Windows developers have, so “competitors will know that they can plug into Windows to get services in the same way that built-in Windows features do”
- Promising not to retaliate against computer makers that support non-Microsoft software.
Do these three things sound as banal to you as they do to me? And I’m not saying that because they wouldn’t be huge changes in Microsoft’s behaviour, but because…they are saying “we’ll stop cheating” like if it were such a noble thing to do! I mean…those three things, in particular, are part of why they got swatted on the wrist by the US government (damn Republicans…they had the chance to break them up and went chicken) and slammed hard for by the EU government. So…they are saying “we are going to comply with the law after 4 years of being convicted”.
They shouldn’t be saying these things as if they implied great sacrifice from them for their users…they should have been doing them for, at least, four years!
On the other hand…if they actually do start obeying the law at last, it will be a good thing for their users and for the users of non-MS software (like me). The article in LE calls this (quoting Churchill), the end of the beginning, and I have to agree with them in that. Microsoft won’t become a 2 bit player in a week if they do this, and they also won’t become an easier company to compete with, at least not in the short term. In the long term, I expect that if they actually comply with the law, they’ll become a company with a market proportional to the quality of their software, that is, a midling company in a competitive market, with probably around 40 or 50% market share in OSes and 30-40% in the Office space…but when I say long term I’m talking years, probably decades.
And….
I honestly doubt that they will coply with these three tenets, at least. I don’t know what the other 9 tenets are, it’s late and I’m not in the mood to go hunt them down (but I will do so one day soon and post about them), but I do know that MS has been playing hardball for so long that they will not stop doing it willfully, somebody is going to have to bodycheck them hard to stop them…and I think that somebody is going to be the EU.
On the other hand, wether they behave like a decent company or keep being a predatory monopoly, it doesn’t really matter to the linux crew…if this is the end of the beginning, we need to keep pushing to take advantage of it. If it isn’t the end of the beginning yet, we need to keep pushing hard anyway, so we can do all we can do to make MS reach that point. No, I have nothing against MS as a company…I just don’t like their products nor like their corporate practices…if they fix both those things, I’ll be happy to give them another chance of being on my desktop…until then, linux rocks :)
UPDATE: Ok, eweek published an article about this, and they have the 12 tenets listed…and it’s as laughable as I thought it was going to be. They are either saying “ok, yes, we’ll respect the law” or “ok, yes, we’ll behave like a decent company”…and I honestly don’t believe them one little bit. Read the eweek article and decide if you believe them :)
Technorati Tags: microsoft, predatory monopoly, EU vs Microsoft
Tags: Thoughts
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