[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Advocacy digest, Vol 1 #11 - 1 msg

[advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org]

>>>The cross examining of Microsoft's "expert" witness Stuart E. Madnick:
>>>When government attorney Kevin Hodges asked him to name an operating
>>>system....Madnick offered up KDE... GNOME...
>>This reminds me of a saying attributed to Ghandi: 
>>                First they ignore you
>>                    Then they laugh at you
>>                      Then they become angry at you
>>                         Then you win
>>It seems that while the rest of Microsoft is at stage three, this fellow is 
>>still more or less at stage 1.
>Stage 4 does require that one survive stage 3.
Sure, Ghandi was one of those who did. I think Linux will be a similar
winner, but it's a hard call in the middle of the fight.

>I can think of several great packages that have died at stage 3:  OS/2, 
This is a very special example, and it's been the subject of more than
a little bit of litigation, too. OS/2 started as something of a joint
venture between IBM and Microsoft, and M$ essentially jumped ship and
moved to their own development after a time, which resulted in what we
now know as Windows NT. IBM (which never knew how to market anything
smaller than a refrigerator), was completely outflanked here. 

>Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, ....
Actually, I think both of these products had good lifetimes before they 
lost the competitive race to Microsoft, against which they more or less
went head-to-head. Neither product survived the transition to Windows
(or windowing systems in general) very well, and was thus vulnerable
to saturation/monopoly marketing by Microsoft in the first year or so 
after Windows 3.1 became pretty dominant. I was using both products
on commercial Unix systems at the time. Lotus 1-2-3 almost ignored
mouse interactions for some time, and got clobbered on Unix by other
packages (like Wingz in the NYC financial community), and didn;t have
really good initial windowing versions. I recall the first attempts
by WP to do a good windowing version, and they took very different
directions on Windows 3.1 and Solaris. The Solaris and DOS versions
were really very similar (interface-wise), while to Win3.1 version
was just AWFUL!! It wasn't like these guys were missing some large
block on knowledge availabel to their peers in Redmond, either. It
was more like they didn't really know how to design good interfaces
with all this graphic horsepower, and they were going to use their
user base to test out some pretty interesting but somewhat impracti-
cal ideas.

Notthat aggressive marketing, bundling, and discount packaging had a 
place in killing these packages, BUT they were also at vulnerable
parts of their lifecycle, and had trouble shifting gears from the
old model to the new. For a time, each had venerable products that
were not quite as good in the new environment as something else.

>MacOS (at least before OS/X,  lets face it, effectively the Mac
>was dead, OS/X was a brilliant coup).
But this is the way of things on the Mac, it goes from one brilliant
coup to another, with lags in between. Apple made two key mistakes
here... they kept the box pretty firmly closed, and they never really
tried to target organizations. Had they opened things up a little, and
had they developed a clearer picture of what kind of group-level com-
puting they were trying to sell into and support, I think they would
have done a great deal better. AS it is, The Mac has found a niche or
two, but it appears that the niches found Apple, not the other way
around.

>All these products (at least IMHO) were gunned down using quite focused
>marketing and feature-tweaking tactics.  I'm certain I could think of
>more if I spent some time meditating on it.  
Well, "Office" is a classic example of repackaging. MS had all of these 
products around, and the whole notion of an integrated suite had good
market acceptance (Symphony, Works, Jazz, etc), but had suffered from 
execution. The rising dominance of Windows provided a really good oppor-
tunity to try this idea again, only with higher overall product quality,
and lock-in product integration (which few people actually use). This
time, the target wouldn't be consumers or even power users, but corporate
environments. Um, I think it worked.

>There are others I could think of: Informix, OpenMail, etc... that were
>great products that suffered from targeted marketing but in reality
>probably died as a result of hopeless marketing and corporate
>cluelessness.
Indeed... well, there has always been lots of incompetence to go around. I
think the history of products like 1-2-3 and WP effectively ends once the
products (or the companies which developed around them) are gobbled up in
an aquisition. Lotus was never really permitted to challenge Excel once it 
became part of IBM, and WP never could regain the user base it had lost
(through a bad release and a little more) once it was bought by Corel.

>I mention this as I think there is still a realistic chance that M$ will
>successfully crunch Open Source.  Not via technology, but through
>"mandated" proprietary services (ala PassPort, Active Directory,
>etc....) and whacked licensing and pricing policies (paying for use of
>M$ software by computer count,  irregardless of whether M$ products are
>loaded on the machine).
Certainly this is one way M$ is trying to combat open source; some of these
ideas have really upset a number of users, and we've also seen some of these
policies relaxed, "postponed", or withdrawn entirely. It has become clear
that M$ does not see a short-term fix to it's technical mistakes and problems,
and is moving things to a level where they think they have a better chance.

The weakness of Lotus, WP, etc. was that they were a lot smaller than M$ and
could not compete for shelf space, mindshare, or exposure over the long haul,
and were eventually beaten down. A lot of other competitors (like FoxPro)
could simply be bought. The Linux/Free Software community does not have this
weakness; there's no "Linux Corporation" to target. Now, the weakness of being
smaller has turned into a strength, by being distributed. Instead of fighting 
one or two smaller opponents, there are dozens (at least) or hundreds (more
realisticly) of adversaries, each fairly well targeted. Battleship Microsoft,
well tuned to fighting other battlewagons (like IBM), or even picking off a
few destroyers (like WP), is a lot more vulnerable to large groups of dive
bombers, who, even when they miss, seem to survive, and will be better shots
next time....

Legally, Microsoft has a more level playing field. The OSS/Free Software folks
are not going to be able to marshall the legal artillary that MS can, and MS
can continue this fight on a number of levels until they gain some form of
legal "protection". Once the current antitrust farce is played out, The overall
advantage will probably be Microsoft's, since if they weren't tagged on the
big case, the little ones aren't going to be so bad. THe whole area of Intel-
lectual Property seems so tilted toward corporate interests at the moment that
this may actually offer some hope, if and as some of these laws are found to 
be either frivolous, so biased, or unconstitutional, the pendulum may yet swing
back, but not without some action.

>I do not think academic computing alone can support the Open Source
>movement,  corporate entities and academic entities are now much too 
>closely intertwined.  
Perhaps so, but the academic and R&D folk exercise a great deal of freedom
when it comes to selecting platforms, and it's still considered something of
a scandal when platform choices are driven (or rewarded) by commercial inte-
rests. When you look at a lot of R&D stuff, it seems that Linux and systems
like it are becoming more ubiquitous, for a lot of reasons.

>If corporate America moves away from Open Source, it will wither.
I think this is a bit too rash, and it's not clear this is going to 
happen any time soon. However, I agree that it is possible. However, there
are some very encouraging signs that this is ** NOT ** happening. It may
well be that Open Source software will thrive as a bunch of products just
like any others, and corporates will become more comfortable with this rather
different business model.

>>On a bit more serious note, my read of the transcript seems to show that the
>>testimony covers some interesting points; notably that rendering information 
>>at URLs is built into what are nominally several file/disk management applica-
>>tions (in both Windows and KDE, for example, and that the lines between the act
>>we know as "browsing", GUI apps in general, and OS utilities is indeed blur-
>>ring. 
>Yes.  Witness gnome-vfs:  the clearest expression currently is
>Nautilus.....
[lengthy and rather accurate technical exigesis elided]

>So where does the functionality of nautilus/gmc/galeon end and the
>functionality of GNOME (oaf/bonobo/corba/gnome-vfs/gconf, etc...) begin?
>...insert long protracted philosophical argument here...
Well, a lot of this devolves into something like "Who cares? functionality
resides in a pile of libraries, and we can link 'em up like tinkertoys!"

What been ** MISSED ** in this discussion is that the testimony reads as if
we're talking about monothic programs with packaged, discrete functionality,
and NOT piles of libraries. If the testimony took that turn, it might be 
something very interesting to see!

>Mostly I think the "browser bundling" arguement is spurious, and a
>really dumb tactic.  
Actually, this was more the focus of media attention than anything else.
It got a lot of attention at trial, but mostly because it was one of the
best documented cases the Government could find. there were actually several
examples, but this was play up in the press becasue of the leading place NS
had in the market, and how far they fell.

>Did M$ use monopolistic practices to brow beat
>competition?  Have they deliberately created egregious barriers-to-entry
>for new competition?....  Did they prohibit OEMS from offering other products?  
>Did they design products in order limit interoperability? ....
The answer to these questions has been yes, and M$ has been convicted of most
everything. It's a pity that the adminstration changed, and the DOJ, recon-
stuted by GEEDUB'YA, caved. M$ will probably get nothing more than a fairly
mild tap on the knuckles now, almost licence to continue.