Linked by David Adams on Tue 5th Aug 2008 21:20 UTC, submitted by JCooper
Microsoft . . . complained in its annual report that it was facing increasing pressure from open source companies. It claims they are stealing its ideas and benefiting from its intellectual property.
"A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products." Also see analysis at Microsoft Watch.
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Member since:
2006-01-10
Sadly, I agree with MS on this one.
Knock offs are a reality in any industry. I mean for Cheerios, there is Cereal O's. Yet people still buy the brand name. Sadly for MS, their business is software. There is no cost to the open source companies to sell their product.
I mean, even for Cereal O's, they still need to build the factory, buy raw ingredients...
With open source, that's not the case. Yes, it does rob us software engineers of good jobs. Even interop items are sketchy. I mean who developed MS .NET. It's a great infrastructure that took some very smart people. Now, there is an open source clone of it.
I think MS really needs to start undercutting their competition if they want to stay in business.
If Windows was 50 dollars, most people wouldn't even think twice about installing it. I mean if the option was 50 dollars for Windows or 25 dollar for Novell Linux... meh... the cost for windows is nothing. But as someone who recently built a small HTPC... when windows is 1/3 or 1/4 the price of the whole system... something is amiss.
MS doesn't really sell hardware the way Apple does, so it can't just offer users a box. Lord could only imagine the outcry of monopoly if they suddenly started doing that.
It's a tough problem for MS to solve. I think for them to be successful in the future, they're going to have to step on a lot of toes (of previous allies, 3rd party vendors... ).