“Sun is railing at Microsoft, but maybe it should be hiring coders rather than lawyers. Sun boss Scott McNealy is an entertaining act, with a nice line in puns. For example, Microsoft’s .net becomes “.not”, Intel’s Itanium is the “Itanic”, and IBM’s Regatta server is “Regretta”. As comedians, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are not in the same league.” Yet another editorial on the web about Sun’s lawsuit against Microsoft, this time on CW360. We wrote about this too.
Sun Sues Microsoft from Inside a Glass House
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
That seems to be a secure link. It prompts me for a user id and password.
Try again. I do not have any account with them, but I can get into the article.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I think most people agree that MS was in the wrong for its relationship with OEMs (especially controlling the bootloader). I have thought for a long time that the way to remedy this is simply to force MS to stop manhandling the OEMs in such a way that it would allow them to ship whatever OS they want. On the other hand, since MS strong-arming OEMs was a major way in which Windows got so popular, should we allow Windows to go untouched. Afterall, how are competitors supposed to compete with something that has about 90% of the desktop market, and got there by illegal (or at the very least shady) business practices?
No matter what the Linux pundets think, even if OEMs were free to ship whatever OS they wanted, Linux still doesn’t stand a chance (at least not yet) with the mainstream consumer. This means that somebody has got to create something usable to the average Joe, and that isn’t going to be very plausable with Windows dominating the desktop as it currently does.
This wouldn’t really be an issue if MS had played fair to get to where it is now, but considering the circumstances …
I agree with you that MS should not just be forced into different business practices, but that it should also be punished for its previous illegal practices. But I beleive I did read somewhere that the Judge appointed to this case (Colleen Kollar-Kotelly) did state that she has no intention to punish MS for what they did but to simply promote competition. I dissagree, they commited a crime, they where found guilty of the crime, now they should server a sentence for their crime.
Sony seems like it could have been a really good candidate to buy BeOS, given their strong rivalry with Microsoft, their excellent competence in marketing and connecting with consumers and their tradition in creating some de-facto standards (or at least always trying very, very hard to do so). It seems to me that Sony could be something very Apple-like (in the best sense of the term) or even better, if they wanted to. They seem to have all of the necessary qualities in place. I have even heard Sony management once refer to their own PC product line as the ‘Apple’ of the Wintel world, and I agree. Their boxes and notebooks are choice (decent tech, excellent design).
The best formula to challenge Microsoft IMHO would be BeOS for the desktop and Linux on servers. I don’t see Linux ever getting as good as BeOS as a desktop OS.
IBM’s failure with OS/2 was the result of a different era when many other factors were in play, before everyone started jumping all over Microsoft and before the internet was in common usage. Things are different now. I think contenders like MacOS X (and hopefully BeOS) might have another serious chance to grab some more market-share if they play their cards right.
“I think contenders like MacOS X (and hopefully BeOS) might have another serious chance to grab some more market-share if they play their cards right.”
I honestly don’t see much hope for OSX, as long as it remains only on Mac hardware.
I personally would love to have a Mac, but don’t have the $1,000+ to shell out for one. I know it’s probably possible to get one cheaper, but I’d at least want to have something that is on par (hardware-wise) with my PC.
As it is now, I upgrade my PC about once every year and a half in $200-$300 increments. I simply don’t have the cash to go all out on a new machine.
I think Gil Bates (probably not his real name, above)is right on the money. If Sony was to put a Sonyfied BeOS on a custom intel box or notebook, loaded up with Sony programs and made specially for A/V mixing, editing, and playing, at a decent price, it would probably sell well and be a exciting product. Maybe even become a de-facto standard the way Macs are in graphics. It would also put some new momentum behind BeOS…
I also think OS X would sell like crazy if they made a version that would work on an Intel type machine.
“There are people who believe such things, but in my opinion they are nutters”
well, we don’t want an opinion, we want news. for opinions we visit osnews
I also think os X would do ok if it was ported to intel hardware (although if you think it would give ms a run for its money sales wise your nuts). And I know artists and web designers who prefer intel hardware and windows so all the talk of mac being the standard is wrong (if you compare number of copies of photoshop shold I’m pretty sure windows would win), sure 10 years ago mac worked better, these days though the difference isn’t noticable (if there even is one imo). I do think though that linux could take over a signifigant % of the market place if a distro met the needs of joe user (you’d also see more major ports), the problem isn’t ms’s business practices (which are underhanded and shady but not illegal) its linux itself.
Gil Bates, to think of a BeOS/Sony combination gives me a natural high. I’m staring at a Sony SDM-N50PS 15″ LCD screen. The OS is not BeOS, it’s a Whistler Beta1
(yes I still use the beta at home, won’t move soon, who said MS Windows is expensive?).
Although I have a boxed BeOSPro5, I deleted it on my HD ’cause I wanted to try the Beos5.0.4Developer that the beosonline team just released> I couldn’t get the CD to boot, the booting emulation failed (had to burn with CDRWIN), so another CD goes to the trash, tomorrow I’ll try again.
The thing is BeOS does not exist anymore beyond R5, everyone should try to make an effort to really focus on OBOS, not BeOS. The best formula to challenge Microsoft IMHO would be OBOS for the desktop, not BeOS. If OBOS finally succeeds Ballmer will grow a mullet, a <a href=”http://www.nakedhatred.com/mulletsgalore/html/class/class01/04busin….
I just received email from Michael Bego (Xandros President) thanking me the encouraging feedback, that was very kind of him, and very quick also, they answer emails, even two different people [nice footnote: “Simple. Powerful. Linux.”] Hmmm, and AMD in the black list of ‘e-mail nutters’, that has to change.
I was going desperate once again for not having Xandros news, and although not news that mail was mildly sedative.
To the flamers that call them vaporware: hold your horses pals! You just wait…
And finally, something related to the topic. They should apply their own formula to themselves and hire some coders at <a href=”http://www.cw360.com“>cw360.com because this is not normal for a first page, is this?:
http://www.cw360.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1016765154&REQSESS=UgP…
Yooo!!! Nice redirection, indeed.
I’ve never seen a glass Court like the one where this odd affair against MS is taking place. When we are finished with Microsoft, we are all going into a pink house, you bet.
Heh heh, well, Marques, I am currently running the Windows XP Release Candidate 2 (build 2526) 120-day evaluation edition. It has been working great for me so far but it is going to time-bomb in a couple of months so I guess I’d better find some money to upgrade – or get a new free OS somewhere…I *was* thinking about downloading BeOS just this morning…
I believe I’ve discovered the perfect solution to all this: force MS to license (at a reasonable price) the Windows source code. They would not have to worry about creating “thousands of different versions” of Windows. They could still profit by improving Windows and receive royalties. However, then other companies could use the source code to create there own special version of Windows. Imagine, instead of just Microsoft Windows, there could be Sony Windows, Corel Windows, Adobe Windows, etc. Each company could tweak (and/or remove the fluff) at will. Joe User could still use his precious Windows (because he doesn’t know anything else), but us powerusers could enjoy a stable and fast version or a multimedia optimized version. Oh the possibilities…
<sarcastic>
yeah right
</sarcastic>
I think that would be more illegal than anything ms ever did, whats next forcing kfc to share their chicken recipe? Or better yet popeye’s?
Gil Bates, my Whistler’s time-bomb explodes after 180 days, just the pefect time as I reinstall the whole OS about every 180 days (6 months), most non executing stuff on another partition (it’s a Windows Whistler Professional evaluation Copy, Build2296). I’ve checked out other release candidates, and I really don´t see a good reason to change, I have all the XP good things without all the stupid XP icons and Luna theme stuff.
Curtis, cheers!, source what? hehehehe, yeah right, hahahaha @+j+@
Don´t worry their days are counted, according to John C. Dvorak there is a periodic 15 years computing ‘law’ that predicts Microsoft will succumb as an OS company around the year 2010-11, that is 15 years after their ’95 heyday. The first signs of error&decay were given by the Beast 5 years after heyday, just as the ‘law’ indicates (it happened to IBM with the PC biz, 1980-85/1995). YOU GOT TO BELIEVE IT. The killing moon will come too soon. Fate, up against their will, they’ll give themselves to Him!
And then OBOS.
I’m a fan of John C.’s but I think his law was made in jest. The only example I remember him giving is ibm, and no scientist would base a law on a one time occurance (hell most wouldn’t base a theory). Besides even if the law holds water, who knows if its more of a hardware thing, or a software thing or a combination (ibm was big in both hardware and software, and it was a combination of hardware and software that brought them down).
Quite nice comments about how all of you would like to change the market. But I don’t think that some of your ideas will happen … I think Microsoft will be strong enough to stay on the desktop for the intel plateform. why?
I don’t see any advantages for Apple to port OS X on the intel plateform. First, that’s not their goal and simply because softwares compagnies should not be interrested in. Best softwares on MacOS like: photoshop, illustrator, Maya, Lightwave, amapi, bryce, cubase, Office2001, logic audio and so on … will never be developed on OS X for intel. Why companies should be bothered to deploy theirs softwares on OS X/intel or OBOS/intel (with new lacks of drivers support for both)… if they already developed them on Windows for the same hardware plateform? For my point of view that’s a non sense from a commercial standpoint.
Now If you look at the open source community … it’s possible to do this. Simply because softwares are free. So, they can be deployed on every plateform. It’s happening with OS X .. it will happen with OBOS one day.
Regarding OBOS, I hope that it will become a standard and a homogen desktop for the opensource community, shipped with only one distribution (like FreeBSD) … I don’t know if some of you agree with me but linux is only good on the server side. On the desktop side, it’s too confusing … too many distributions .. and too many different environments (kde, gnome, x window, gnustep …) to do the same thing, the newbies who have an interest in the open source are lost!
I would like to point out that BeOS/OBOS may have a decent chance of penetrating the market because of it’s greatly superior multimedia performance over either Windows XP or MacOS X. BeOS/OBOS truly has something unique and special to offer technologically that other OSes just do not have which could encourage commercial developers to write for it and gain an advantage over their competitors.
If Sony had the vision to commit to supporting BeOS/OBOS on their Intel hardware and porting their standard VAIO multimedia apps over to it (and writing some new ones) I think they could be successful in creating a de-facto standard for the audio/video editing and mixing world, exactly like Amiga boxes used to be years ago.
Sony is just a perfect natural for audio/video convergence with their VAIO PC line, hardware and software-wise, as everyone here probably knows. If they are willing to bother to provide Linux on their Playstation 2’s, they should damn well be willing to put BeOS/OBOS on their Intel boxes and notebooks as an option…my $0.02.
I agree Gil, I’d love to see OBOS on sony systems, of course sense I don’t buy pre-built systems I’d also like them to keep the os seperate to some extent (so non sony users could buy it and use it). As for them porting linux to ps2 (waste of time imo) comparing it to launching a line of OBOS sony intel/amd boxes is a bit lopsided. The amount of capital required for the linux thing should be minimal (is it even an official sony relase or 3rd party? I can’t seem to remember), where as launching an entire line of systems based on an untested (granted its got its roots in be, but be never had a really major world wide distribution, that type of distrobution finds bugs not found other wise) would be rather pricey. Not to mention all the legal footwork needed (no way sony would launch without some guarantees about their getting top priority with “oem” contracts, maybe even a “lifetime” stake, or out right purchase of the obos project). Course if it happens ten years from now or so there could be geeks nay-saying a obos/sony monopoly.