Slashdot passed on requested questions for Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s global general manager of platform strategy, and here is the resulted interview.
Microsoft’s Martin Taylor Responds
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I guess you didn’t read the interview… in fact it’s very interesting. Especially things like these Linux Zealots not being aware that for instance XPSP2 includes a pop-up blocker.
He also embraces open source in parts of the interview. but I guess you were more interested in spreading FUD?
Actually it is very political. His answers skirt around the question at times. But as a impromptu phone interview, i would say it was pretty decent. He didn’t go through the corporate filter before sending the answers back. But he did have some early knowledge of the questions (he read 1096 of them the night before).
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems he offered intelligent answers to what seemed disrespectful and spiteful questions. The interviewer, no doubt, was attempting to discredit MS. Unfortunately, it had the reverse effect on me. Oh well. Hopefully I won’t be reported for abuse because I’m not a total zealot.
PS – I prefer Linux.
No, it’s definitely not just you. I find it pretty much the same way, except that I’m not using Linux.
However, I would’ve loved some questions about the deal they did which put Be Inc out of business and their view on BSD. Especially since BSDs offerwise seems to be the better choice.
but slashdot readers.. what would one expect…
Microsoft sure has a lot of ‘Gnutella’ projects, heh heh!
“And that’s why there’s not thousands of pre-alpha quality crap on sourceforge.”
Plenty of closed source crap on the shelves at Best Buy too. What’s your point?
Why doesn’t Gates show up on Slashdot himself instead of sending a flunkie…
So what?
This interview showed to me that some people that work for Microsoft are really great. He did very well at this interview, although many people might not agree, including some Microsoft folks. 🙂
Whenever we talk, we win. We get to know others better and it allows for some “munitions”.
As it was a phone interview, it was more sincere than we could have expected.
Great one.
“groupthink slashdorks” – cool
“”groupthink slashdorks” – cool”
Yeah, go over there and tell them that instead of bitching abou Slashdot here which is usually what MS fans do.
Especially things like these Linux Zealots not being aware that for instance XPSP2 includes a pop-up blocker.
Silk ribbon on a sows ear.
…whereas the FOSS community is made up of a lot of folks who put in their free time, and are motivated to put their heart and soul into an OS/program(s) to give the users out there what the users really want.
What about the people on the Gaim team who don’t seem to give a shit about what their users want?
PLease, like he didn’t go home 100 bucks richer.
From one monopoly (URRS) to another (Microsoft), huh? When are you going to learn? :-)))))
Google may have an elite class of implementers, but they also have the fastest, most frequently updated site on the web IMO. Whatever the’re doing, it’s working great over my dial-up connection.
Must be some sort of disease at Microsoft.
You have to differentiate between the rational open source crowd and the fruitcakes in the FSF/Stallman camp like this Anon E. Moss clown
Come on, anything to bash Stallman, huh?
—
The interview was pretty good, he put a good bit of spin in it, but it was much better then I expected. At least the guy didn’t act the fool like the execs have been. If all interviews that came out of MS were by this guy, I know i would have a more favorable impression of Microsoft. Though, it would have been interesting to ask the guy about the the commie comment Gates made, he really couldn’t have answered it, but it would have been interesting to see him try
Must be some sort of disease at Microsoft.
You do know its a transcription of a phone conversation?
XP still boots faster than Linux
Apples & oranges. ‘XP’, as in Microsoft Windows XP any version i’m aware of, is an OS whereas Linux is merely a kernel. A kernel with various versions, used in various OSes.
Therefore: Who or what is the source of your statement? After taking that answer into account, i ask the following: What is your definition of XP (e.g. version, any changes made in that OS including configuration changes). What is your definition of Linux (e.g. version, actual OS, version of actual OS, any changes made in that OS including configuration changes). What is your definition of ‘booted’. When did you notice this difference. What was the exact difference in time. Benchmarks, please?
In short, it says little to nothing and its offtopic as well. About nobody here seems to have the slightest clue about conducting a benchmark and are just screaming global statements based on heresay, feelings and other non-objective and more or less useless sources — unfortunately.
You do know its a transcription of a phone conversation?
And what’s that got to do with it?
Every interview a Microsoft employee gives is littered with “Errrr…”, “Well….”, “It’s like….”, “You know….”. I think they should get past nursery and learn to talk properly some time soon.
The interviewer, no doubt, was attempting to discredit MS.
Oh, come on… You prefer softball questions, no doubt?
An interviewer is supposed to challenge the interviewed. Simple as that.
The questions were well-chosen for the most part and the answers, though not all answered to my satisfaction, were truthful and incisive, mostly.
XP still boots faster than Linux
Heh…I actually have created a “parallelized” bootup sequence for my Arch Linux install (I saw it outlined on ibm.com once). It boots up in about half the time my completely stripped and optimized XP boots in. I have most of the services off in WinXP and it’s as optimized as I can get it.
Microsoft is not a company to be under-estimated.
They know that they have some cards stacked against them, eg)
* Companies don’t really want office 2005, its not that much shinier than office 2000, or 97 for that matter.
But on the whole they are doing just fine. The more they give a reasoned approach and seem rational to their customers, the more they effectively discredit or stall (not stop) the adoption of open source in regular companies.
In the meantime they can continue to work on very solid products like server 2003 which is really an amazing piece of work.
There’s been some interesting discussion lately on here and slashdot about the amount of actual open source contributors that can be found in the linux code as opposed to the ideal of “thousands upon thousands” of developers in concert, like some kind of hippy carnival.
Why do people keep asking MS about GNU?
A disclaimer: I don’t consider myself as GNU/Linux zealot, but dislike Microsoft (mainly for price-to-quality comparison) — even that much I bought PS2, not XBox
.
However (yes, I did read RTFA), the guy seems right — he just knows what to say when asked by such special interviewer as the Slashdot guy. I’m very impressed he was able to at least try to be, err, honest. I don’t feel like I’ll approve he company’s way of walk (?), but — as can be seen, just look at me — one good speech/interview can change one’s attitude a bit. Just my feelings.
BTW, the very first post on osnews
. Don’t kill me.
So Microsoft says they care about interoperability. Then it comes down to copyrights, patents, trademarks, EULAs, etc. in the end. Does this mean they’d care about interoperability if the law and their share holders allowed it?
I think I’m beginning to understand. Microsoft is really a good company that wants to give me a free OS, but the costs of supporting it without me registering and paying $250 for it are too high. So they have to charge me and make me activate it and have too much to worry about to provide me good security.
Why does EVERY desktop need a firewall and anti-spyware and anti-adware software? Because it was poorly designed to begin with, but its too expensive to redesign it properly. So we’ll just redesign it to be more secure, meaning more activation.
Its just frustrating trying to work with these people.
he is more along the lines of joel spolsky, he will not say that firefox is evil, or that the gpl is viral. microsoft seems to have realised that the perception was that they are trying to quash the little guy, and a little guy with a strong sense of morals and ethics. they are trying to flip that though, saying that they are actually the rational ones, and pointing to linux as the pack of jerks.
what i really liked about this specific interview was a sense of genuine desire to drop the whole “does not play well with others” attitude microsoft has had for so long. i dont know if anyone really believes it yet (given their track record of being liers), but i honestly hope that they are telling the truth this time. if microsoft has actually decided to start acting in an ethical manner, everyone wins.
however, this was laced with as much marketingspeak as usual, you will note that he refers to windows xp service pack 2 as the greatest thing since sliced bread whenever possible. of course this was partially the interviewers fault, if you are talking to an ms exec why not get someone who pays attention to ms technology? for example, instead of asking about popups (which was a real glaring feature missing from pre sp2 ie), how about asking about how the general featureset is about five years behind on ie? one thing he did manage is to get taylor to admit that the “get the facts” studies were based on specific scenarios, and didnt account for things like the increased cost from bad security and whatnot, which is something i have never heard from a ms pr guy.
anyways, suprisingly good interview, and it is one of the many things that gives me hope for a change in the way ms deals with the outside world.
the very fact that people seem to think that the kernel is the equally devided work of thousands show that they have absolutely no clue about how opensource developement projects work (in the real world), and are completely unqualified to make comments about it.
Gosh, at least he spelled L-ee-n-u-x
.
How could he tell he was even touching Linux since he wasn’t a ‘technical guy’
? I’m also convinced that he *really* was speeching w/o permission of the PR dept.
other then the tired argument over semantics, i agree completely. the difference between xp and linux (or GNU/Linux, just in case anyone here thinks im referring to the kernel loading), is that xp drops you into a gui asap, where you wait for everything to load as opposed (the standard) linux init which loads everything in a logical order, ending with the gui.
i would extend a bit on it though, and say people making that argument dont seem to understand that you only have to reboot linux after a kernel upgrade, and the average joe doesnt need to upgrade on every minor release. by contrast, i reboot my work machine about once a week to keep things from going screwy. windows needs a quick boot because you do it alot (which, by the way, isnt exactly a selling point), on linux its a non-issue.
“Martin Taylor is Microsoft’s global general manager of platform strategy, but he’s best-known as the man the company trots out to refute claims of Linux superiority.”
that would be talking without his own permission 😉
I guess I’ll never understand these people who insist that you have to register Microsoft products in order to get security patches, and who talk about how cumbersome the activation process is.
Personally, I have never had to register either Windows or Office in order to get updates of any kind. The only thing I’ve ever had to do was activate them, which takes all but 3 seconnds. And if you need to reinstall and your NIC is detected, it’s done automatically and requires no user interraction at all. One time I replaced the motherboard and vid card on my machine, but NIC drivers weren’t installed yet – got a prompt to activate and once the Nic drivers were installed, did so – not exactly a painful experience, IMHO. I mean, it’s cool to rip Microsoft a new asshole when it comes to security, but it just doesn’t your case look good when you start making up stuff.
Of course, people will contend (as the interviewer did) that you can take 1 copy of Debian and install it everywhere. To that, I would respond by saying that MS is a for-profit company so unlike Debian, having a single copy of Windows installed on thousands of different computers hurts their bottom line. If you can’t understand why this is a bad thing to a commercial software company, then go back to school and enroll in an economics class.
like you know I rely on stuff that you know we kind of released last week to keep my windows virus free
And it blocks spyware for me as far as I know globally.
No I like to use the ‘Internet’ now and I kind of block Popups with this really neat blocker thing we just released
kind of we sort of thought hey our costumers are the guys who you know buy genuine Windows and like we should protect them not the companies that do the annoying adds and spyware
Right now we wont even charge for stuff that stops your PC turning into like a Zombie spam droid when you plug in the plug thing to the Internet. but later on yeah we bill you I think. For security. Right.