05.26.08
Posted in FLOSS, Industry News at 00:22 by lnxwalt
Suddenly, a flurry of OOXML-ODF related news « CyberTech Rambler
Fourth. We may in fact, never see a full implementation of ISO OOXML. Microsoft already said that it will support ODF 1.1, not ISO ODF (version 1.0). That is a correct technical decision, since ODF 1.1 is the norm today. Superimpose this tread of thinking on to OOXML and what do you get? Microsoft not implementing ISO OOXML, but a later, “enhanced” version which they dictate the development of. To critics who says this will not happen, let me remind you that ISO OOXML support is still an raincheck. We know that the earliest posible date is in two years time, i.e. 2010. Do you really believe that Microsoft Office format will stay stagnant at ISO OOXML for the two years??? I put my money on Microsoft Office in 2010 saving in the “updated” OOXML format, with the ability to save to ISO OOXML. When that comes true, every other office suite will still be in the same situation as they are today: forever playing catch up.
Lastly, to those who says OOXML is needed urgently, therefore we should sacrifice quality for speed, you just had egg on your face. The urgency is so strong that we can wait till 2010. Yeah!
CyberTech Rambler always has some interesting insights on the OOXML / Ecma 376 / ISO 29500 situation. I recommend reading his blog along with mine, Rob Weir’s, Andy Updegrove’s, and Pamela Jones’s. Others to read include Arnaud Le Hors and Bob Sutor.
For pro-OOXML propaganda, I recommend Brian Jones, Doug Mahugh, and Jason Matusow. Just recognize that they are constrained by their employer and so cannot speak their true minds. For example, Jason often states that he’s always against technology mandates, but if the mandate was that software used had to faithfully interpret and preserve compatibility with files used by an agency’s existing (Microsoft) software, I sincerely doubt that he’d oppose that. Rick Jelliffe’s posts on XML.com are another excellent read, once you understand that he is still sore about being branded as a wiki-editing prostitute by some overzealous OOXML opponents.
When ODF was being created at OASIS, Microsoft chose to let things go without their input. The knew that it was meant as a vendor-neutral open format that could be easily implemented by office applications suites. So why did they wait? Because their secret weapon has always been their file formats. Truthfully, nearly all of the important functionality in an office suite was already present in 1997. Very little has been added since then, other than bundling some other applications with the suite. The reason that MS Office has been used so widely is because only their product fully-understood their file formats. If you use Word and I use WordPerfect, there will always be little variations in the way the products render documents using Word’s file format. They saw ODF as just another attempt to dethrone them. If the product that runs on 90% of computers does not support the format, it will just die, they must have reasoned. But it did not turn out that way.
It turned out that the timing was right for ODF. Governments and end-users were tiring of having a single vendor for their software. They wanted vendor neutrality in their file formats and in their network protocols. They also wanted open standards, so they did not have to fear the wrath of patent-holders’ legal departments for accessing their own data. The wanted choice, not of file formats, but of vendors and products that use those formats. This is what ODF offers. OpenDocument Format (ODF, ISO 26300) is designed primarily for use by multiple vendors (althoug some claim that OpenOffice.org specific markup still exists within the format). ODF is mostly compatible with existing standards, so there is already a lot of experience with implementing parts of the standard. ODF has multiple implementations, including some that are completely independent. Once ODF went through the ISO-ification process, Microsoft suddenly realized that there are some areas (such as Europe) where laws may require governments to prefer ISO standards.
As a result, Microsoft sent their then-proprietary XML formats (dubbed Office Open XML [OOXML, sometimes called OpenXML]) through Ecma for standardization, with a target of getting the ISO seal of approval. In a contentious process that was far too short for the kind of detailed examination and changing that was needed, ISO recently approved OOXML as a standard, pending the disposition of a recent challenge. They have opened up considerably, although there are still some challenges for outside implementers of the formats.
The goal of the MS 2007 formats, as well as OOXML to some degree, is to prevent you and your business from having a choice of applications to use in creating, modifying, and reading your data. If you are locked-in by file format incompatibilities, you will not normally be willing to endure the pain of conversion to a competing product, even if that product fits your needs better. This also enables MSFT to charge higher prices, which leads to higher profits, which enables them to continue to subsidize their money-losing MSN / Live and XBox / Zune businesses. Their eventual goal, in my estimation, is to have an intravenous line into your wallet. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that they want to have you so dependent on Microsoft that you buy Microsoft-branded underwear because no one else makes undergarments compatible with the software that operates your chair.
The important thing for you to know is this: Microsoft’s Office 2007 does not support ISO standardized OOXML, and will not until at least 2010. Your .docx / .xlsx / .pptx documents are now in a doomed format that may shortly be unreadable by most software. Likewise for the corresponding macro-containing formats. If you care about continued access to your data, do not save in MS 2007 formats. Use the older .doc / .xls / .ppt formats, or even better, use ODF formats (.odt / .ods / .odp). If necessary, install the Sun plug-in (NOT the CleverAge plug-in) to enable support for ODF in your Microsoft Office software. (Unfortunately, there is not a Mac version of Sun’s plug-in yet.)
For your SLOB (small, locally-owned business), OMB (owner-managed business), or FOB (family-owned business), you might be better off holding onto what you have for a while and whenever you have to upgrade or replace a computer, going with Sun’s commercially-licensed StarOffice product (or the related open source licensed OpenOffice.org product). If you really prefer MS Office 2007, wait until SP2 is released next year, so you will have some level of ODF support built-in (and also PDF saving, the most requested feature in my workplace). Or you may want to check out IBM Lotus Symphony, which has a similar interface (like MS Office 2007, I can never find the functions I want).
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03.28.08
Posted in General Management, Industry News at 04:43 by lnxwalt
AT&T CEO says hard to find skilled U.S. workers – Yahoo! News
This is pretty rich. I’m sure you, like I, have dealt with telephone support before. Normally, company policies are so strict that they have to follow a script, even if you’ve already eliminated the causes on their list.
I was in a hotel, calling the support line for their ISP. I knew what the problem was–they were doing some construction and one of the building’s access points was no longer working–but they had me step through the whole process. The thing was, I was doing support myself, so naturally, I had already done all that they listed. Finally, after going through the whole process multiple times, the rep agreed to have someone physically check the access point after he had logged into the local system and found that he could not “see” the access point.
“We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with
the skills that are required to do these jobs,” AT&T Chief
Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San
Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located.
So, Mr. CEO, do you really want to tell me that you cannot find people who can follow a script? If so, I suggest you run right down to the Golden Arches and hire the whole counter crew. Those employees, like yours, are given a script that must be followed, sometimes even down to specific wording. They can read and they can operate often-antiquated computer terminals. They speak English or any of a variety of other languages. They already work for low wages and few benefits, with widely varying schedules that depend primarily on the needs of the company.
Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as
AT&T’s repatriation of service positions and education grants,
he added.
You see, this is part of the problem with large corporations. That man behind the desk did not get his job because he already knew how to do the job. They had to train him, even if he already had education and experience, because every business and every industry is a little different and no skills are fully transferable from one to another. And even though he knows this to be true, he will swear to the day he dies that he got his position because of merit, that he was effective from day one. In other words, neither the corporation nor the people running the corporation practice reciprocity.
Corporations will take all you can do for them, while giving you the absolute minimum they can get away with, until they find someone who will accept less. At that point, they will unceremoniously dump you like yesterday’s garbage.
This is what is wrong with the American economy. Domination by self-centered corporations and by officers and investors in those corporations means that every town and city and their workforces are merely tools to be used up and then discarded to help big companies fill their essentially unlimited appetites for money, power, fame, and reputation. Through pervasive advertising, they continue to drive consumers to buy the big name product from the big name store, when the best interests of individuals and their communities is served from purchases of locally-produced goods and services through locally-owned outlets.
When I buy tools at Big Blue, the world’s largest retail chain, I am depriving my community of the money that flies out of California and over to the chain’s headquarters city in Arkansas. If those tools are made outside of my area, then funds which could have gone to support locally-owned tool producers now goes somewhere else to support their companies and residents.
And when I support politicians that allowed SBC to buy AT&T (keeping the AT&T name) and Southern Bell, I am by extension supporting self-absorbed CEOs that cannot see a skilled worker even if they bumped into one.
Do not misunderstand me. Our schools are in desperate need of improvement, and our colleges as well. But the jobs people actually get do not even use the skills of a normal high school graduate. A superabundance of managers decrees every detail of what to do and how to do it, so that a worker of average intelligence is stymied in his attempts to do a better job.
Who knows more about customer service? Some guy in corporate who never even deals with customers or the people on the front lines dealing with customers every day? I’d say it is the professionals that actually do the work, not someone who talks to a consultant or reads a book and decides that he knows how to serve customers better. Which one do you think wrote this script?
Hi, welcome to <company name>. My name is <employee first name>. May I take your order?
Or how about this one:
Hi, welcome to <company name>. Would you like to try our new <product name>? It's my favorite!
That garbage was certainly not written by anyone who actually works with customers. Yes, those were actual scripts that were used at one company I worked for years ago.
So, Mr. CEO, if you want quality customer service, hire people who actually deal with customers, and then let them hire their co-workers. Get your legions of managers and send them to a desert island without a way back. Or even better, contract the job out to small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) with fewer than one hundred people apiece and give them the freedom to experiment with ways to improve your service (this means you absolutely CANNOT try to squeeze them on pricing).
Maybe that outlook was the reason that AT&T consistently had the worst mobile service in every state where I’ve worked except New Jersey. You cannot find quality people? Maybe you aren’t paying enough or offering enough benefits in order to attract quality people. Maybe a lot of quality people are those who’ve seen their jobs slashed over the past decade at one of the AT&T predecessor companies (such as Pacific Telesis in California and Nevada). Or maybe your hiring process drives away anyone that has a choice about what job to accept. All I can say is that anyone who feels that there are no quality employees in the U.S. is seriously incompetent.
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03.07.08
Posted in Industry News at 06:26 by lnxwalt
Some advice on our tech blog about computer buying.
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Tags: computerbuying
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Posted in Industry News at 02:28 by lnxwalt
The ballot resolution meeting for DIS 29500 (Ecma 376/OOXML) has ended. You can search Technorati or IceRocket for the discussion of the event and the edited text that resulted.
Some issues that could not be resolved at the meeting are still threats to your business in the long term. The legal (“IP”) issue, for example, of OOXML is still hazy, pending a thorough review by legal eagles with OASIS, OpenOffice.org, Sun, IBM, KDE/KOffice, and GNOME/AbiWord/Gnumeric. For that reason, it is best to avoid newer versions of Microsoft file types for now.
The stakes are still high. Apparently, Microsoft’s business plan requires ISO approval (why, I do not know, since they never did before) for their file formats, even though the formats were designed to be an exact fit for their product and no one else’s. Exactly what you want in a so-called open format, right? For many of the corrections proposed by Ecma were: make it optional to do things right because MS Office 2007 is shipping with the flawed version already. Sorry, but some of these are deal-breakers. Seriously.
Smaller businesses tend to be more conservative—you don’t hear of them being adventurous in their IT spending—so I expect that many of them are not even considering some of the alternatives instead of buying MS Office 2007. And yet, MSO2K7 faces a rocky road, in part because of issues related to its file formats. In some European countries, for example, all government documents must be in OpenDocument Format (ODF) a competing set of XML-based office document formats. A number of states in the US are similarly considering this choice. If your software cannot work with ODF files, I suggest that you need to start looking around.
Sun has a plugin which can extend MS Office to enable it to work with ODF files, but you still have warning messages every time you save the file. Can you see the consternation when you deploy the plugin to your users’ machines? And yet, if you are using MS Office, that is your best option right now for preparing for the future.
The future. Yes, that’s the issue. Is the future MS-centric and tightly-controlled, or is it a decentralized architecture with a broad mixture of different systems that speak common standardized formats and protocols? I believe the second is the future, and I am working hard to make it happen even faster. As for your business, get ready for the day when your operating system will no longer matter, and neither will what office suite or browser you use.
The future is not OOXML. The future is open and accessible. I encourage you to open your eyes and look around.
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02.01.08
Posted in Industry News at 15:13 by lnxwalt
This morning, Microsoft publicly confirmed months of speculation by making an offer for Yahoo!. It is no secret that both Microsoft and Yahoo! are lagging in their efforts to compete with the Google in the search and online advertising spaces.
You can find more details about the proposed transaction elsewhere (finance.yahoo.com, bloomberg). One thing that most commenters will not consider is that Yahoo!’s infrastructure is built upon FreeBSD and other FLOSS, using open standards. When Microsoft bought Hotmail, which also used FreeBSD, it took quite a while for them to successfully transition to using Microsoft’s Windows Server platform. Hotmail’s users dealt with outages and flaky behavior. If Microsoft does succeed in buying Yahoo!, expect some quick changes in the appearance of Yahoo sites, followed by a longer period of transition.
I have no idea whether the merger will go through. Nor do I know whether Yahoo! still owns stock in Google (Yahoo! was an early investor in Google), which would tend to cause regulators to block the purchase.
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09.20.07
Posted in General Management, Industry News, Legal Issues at 03:32 by lnxwalt
In what has been called a “stinging rebuke”, the European Court of the First Instance (CFI) ruled against an appeal by Microsoft in a long-running case pitting the world’s largest software company against the European Commission.
The second-highest court in Europe on Monday rejected Microsoft’s attempt to overturn a landmark European Commission antitrust ruling and record fine, bolstering smaller software makers and putting market leaders on notice that they cannot leverage dominance in one technology niche to squelch broader innovation, industry and legal experts said
This from an article in the International Herald Tribune. I noticed that the article did not get all the details correct. For example, it said the court “ordered Microsoft to obey a 2004 commission order to share confidential computer code with competitors.” The only problem is that the court made no such order. This is about the languages that software programs speak to one another: protocols and file formats, and also about illegal bundling of Windows Media Player as a way to squeeze RealPlayer out of the market. It has nothing to do with sharing code.
In my experience, RealPlayer is an inferior product, so given the choice, most users will choose WMP over Real, although they might choose to use Quicktime instead of either one. The problem, which even many technical people do not understand, is in using dominance in one area (such as operating systems) to push you into dominance in another area (such as media players or Web browsers). It violates a longstanding prohibition on misusing an existing monopoly in order to build another one.
“What the court did was uphold EU law, which makes it illegal to leverage a dominant market position to obtain similar dominance in another area,” said Michael Reynolds, a Brussels antitrust lawyer with the firm Allen & Overy who filed the initial complaint against Microsoft in 1998 on behalf of Sun Microsystems. “Microsoft argued that the software industry, because of its dynamic growth, was an exception. But the court dismissed this argument.”
The US has similar laws, but the Department of Justice is lax about enforcement, believing that it is better to let the market sort things out. The problem with that is when you have situations where the market fails to remedy the wrongs. An example of that is when one provider obtains monopoly share of the market. Competitors, if they exist, fight over the crumbs that are left over, never being serious challengers to the monopolist. The monopolist, in this case Microsoft, then gets away with all sorts of abusive and questionable (if not illegal) behavior.
The question for non-technical people is this: what does this mean to the users and purchasers of computer software? It means that, assuming that Microsoft behaves according to the law, consumers will have more choice–choice of operating systems, of media players, office suites and more. Businesses will have more choice of operating systems and other software to use on their servers. Many of the choices that are available are less costly than Microsoft products, so for many people and businesses, this is good for the wallet.
I encourage you to open your eyes and look around. The choices that are available already would surprise you. Look at the Ubuntufamily of GNU+Linux operating systems, the StarOffice, OpenOffice, KOffice, and now Lotus Symphony office suites, and an incredible variety of other ready-for-prime-time software applications that are available now. Many of them were not ready just a few years ago (although I have to say that for someone that was willing to do a little work, the software was already even with commercial competitors).
Recognize that even big companies will eventually get punished for wrongdoing, but they often continue to do wrong anyway. The best thing to do is to spread your dollars around so that no single company controls your (or your business’s) destiny.
Technorati: legal microsoft
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05.19.07
Posted in FLOSS, Industry News, Legal Issues at 03:50 by lnxwalt
In ancient times, one of the weapons that soldiers used was the spear. The good thing about a spear is that it gave the ability to repeatedly hurt your enemy (enemies) before the enemy could get into sword range.
Microsoft is looking in its rearview mirror, terrified at the approaching juggernaut that is FLOSS. As more of the market uses FLOSS in place of proprietary software, Microsoft’s market share and profits are limited. Microsoft has been the leading software company for many years, so seeing competitors that are parrying their every thrust must loosen their sphincters. Now they have pulled out the equivalent of the nuclear bomb and said in effect, “We are willing to use this if you continue to threaten our dominance.”
I have read that eventually, it was learned that a sword-bearing soldier could beat a spear-bearing soldier more often than the reverse. That is, the victory comes up-close-and-personal, not from far away. I would caution Microsoft that using patents as weapons instead of building great customer-centric products is not the road to continued success. It is the road to slow death, like the one chosen by the Detroit automakers.
I believe that FLOSS is the future of software. This does not mean that proprietary software will die out. However, I believe that proprietary software is destined to become primarily a niche product. For one thing, the high margins that some software companies (including Microsoft) have received can not continue indefinitely. For another, things like TUR place the user’s interests underneath those of the vendor, which also can not continue indefinitely. Enlightened users will seek software from vendors that are less hostile to their own interests.
The knowledge that this is coming fills many of the proprietary companies with fear.
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion only. It does not reflect the views of WebConnect Consulting or any employers, relatives, or anyone else.
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05.02.07
Posted in Industry News at 04:06 by lnxwalt
As we discussed on La Voz De La Revoluccion, US News & World Report tells us that Apple’s recent gains are partly due to virtualization, saying, “Bottom line: Which one your base machine is won’t matter as much anymore. Software will run well just about everywhere.”
Even before their new version comes out, Apple is having explosive growth with Mac OS X, which is coming at the expense of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista. People are excited by Mac (and Ubuntu Linux / Linux Mint) in a way that a few ersatz “wow” comments pushed by advertising can not match.
Linux and BSD offer many alternatives for emulation and virtualization. They also run on numerous kinds of hardware. In fact, with some of the newer Linux distributions and versions are so good that few people need to buy Windows any more. (A distribution, or distro, is a separate package of the operating system. It is something like XP Home, XP Pro, Server 2003, and so on, except they are generally offered by different organizations instead of a single company the way that Microsoft Windows is distributed.)
This indicates that people will soon buy a computer with its built-in virtualizer and then obtain multiple operating systems to place within virtualized environments. Soon, you will no longer need to consider the OS when you buy equipment to use with your computer, because it will be designed to plug directly into Parallels or VMWare or Linux VServer or UML or Xen or Virtuozzo/OpenVZ or VirtualBox or Qemu or Plex86/Bochs. I believe that some of these will emphasize direct-connections with hardware, while others will figure out how best to plug into the hardware-based solutions.
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04.17.07
Posted in Industry News, News and Announcements, Small Business at 22:31 by lnxwalt
Jonathan Scwartz, CEO/President of Sun Microsystems, has some sage advice about your brand. Your brand is a lot more than you think it is. This is the best advice on the topic that I have ever seen.
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Posted in Industry News, Legal Issues at 01:54 by lnxwalt
In Defense Of Free Markets
Or, Reasons Why Antitrust Laws Must Be Enforced
Sadly, the technology news and information site C|Net has allowed itself to be used as a tool of monopolists. Why is Microsoft under fire for antitrust violations? I am not an attorney, but just reading the news and my old business law texts says that they are under fire because their whole strategy is based upon violating those laws.
Case in point, taken directly from the C|Net article: CompTIA’s Lars Liebeler defends Microsoft on violations relating to server interoperability. In fact, Microsoft took the industry-standard Server Message Block protocol and extended it so that no other vendors’ products would work with theirs—clearly anti-competitive behavior, designed to limit the choices available to purchasers who had Windows servers.
One thing never seems to change: Microsoft is always enduring some antitrust challenge–even when it is working with other industry players to create better products. Take, for example, Microsoft’s recent agreement with Novell to make Windows server software interoperate better with the Linux server products of Novell.
Last month, oblivious to this agreement, the European Commission issued another statement of objections alleging that Microsoft engaged in bad faith to thwart interoperability in the server market. The Commission’s proposed remedy would require Microsoft to make its valuable intellectual property available to its competitors–for free.
Mr. Liebeler ignores the details of the Microsoft-Novell agreement. Note that no matter where one stands on the agreement, it does nothing for those who use Samba apart from Novell / Suse. As it is Samba, not Novell, that is creating the software, Microsoft’ should be working with Samba and other SMB/CIFS server software makers. Novell reuses Samba’s work in their own products and formerly employed a leading developer in the Samba team. Yet, an agreement with Novell can only mean that Novell may get some of the missing documentation that nearly all server software makers have sought for years.
Besides this, is Microsoft paying IBM a licensing fee for using SMB as the core of the now-renamed CIFS? After all, the SMB protocol is IBM’s “valuable intellectual property” that underlies Microsoft’s revised protocol suite. In essence, Microsoft has taken an open standard and made a few secret, incompatible changes to block their competitors out. This is hardly innovation and surely not worth legal protection as “intellectual property.”
One thing that this behavior surely is, and that is anti-competitive behavior—you know, the kind of thing that the Sherman and Clayton acts were passed to eliminate.
Yet the Commission alleges that Microsoft has established “unreasonable” prices for its protocol licensing of its server technology in Europe. The Commission characterizes Microsoft’s proprietary server software protocols, which is protected by patent, copyright and trade secret law, as containing “virtually no innovation.”
The Commission then remarkably concludes that everyone in the industry, nonetheless, “needs” Microsoft’s protocols, and that Microsoft should provide them “royalty-free.” What the Commission demands in the end is that Microsoft make its intellectual property available to its competitors for free.
Attempting to “outlaw” the Microsoft-Novell deal through changes to the GPL or trying to force Microsoft to disclose its software protocols through regulation and litigation both suffer from the same erroneous foundational assumption–that there is something wrong with the operation and functioning of the free market in general, and that IP protections that underlie the free market.
The free market theory lists certain underlying assumptions, without which it cannot be expected to work. One of those assumptions is that goods and services are functionally identical, that is that the goods or services from one producer can be used as drop-in replacements for similar goods from another producer. As soon as this becomes untrue, producers gain market power, which violates another underlying assumption: namely that neither buyers nor sellers individually have any market power, the ability of an individual buyer or seller to affect the pricing of the particular good or service in the general market. It is helpful if someone arguing from a free market standpoint understands the requirements for free markets to exist.
This position is directly contrary to a central premise of free-market economics: IP protections will encourage investment and result in a wider breadth and depth of innovation.
I am amazed that an attorney and free market advocate knows so little about the topic. “IP protections” are incompatible with free market economics. Their justification is based on the idea of market failures where an inventor or other creator may not be able to reap adequate reward for his or her creative works before copycats move in and make those works low-price commodities. In the server market, whatever minor creative work was exercised has already been compensated many times over, so this so-called need for IP protections does not apply.
Furthermore, since software has a near-zero incremental cost per unit, theory demands that any IP protections be strictly limited in time and scope. I suspect that his advocacy is not borne out of any commitment to the theories and ideas behind free markets, but merely promoting and protecting the interests of the organization’s largest member. That makes this article dangerous, because those who are not acquainted with these ideas might absorb this wholesale, without vomiting up the anti-competitive, anti-consumer portions of the rant. That would be truly negative for all consumers of server software as well as for Microsoft’s competitors (some of which are presumably also members of CompTIA).
Smaller businesses, our target market, can benefit by taking a look at server implementations that utilize Samba and other FLOSS-based implementations of SMB/CIFS. It is important to note that Microsoft’s monopoly-preserving actions could cause some problems between their products and some of the other products listed on the Wiki page.
I note that Mr. Liebeler is the antitrust counsel for CompTIA, and that Microsoft is a leading member of the group. I am not suggesting anything improper about it, but surely the point of view expressed must be informed by the dependence of the organization upon the continued good will of such an important member.
In fact, I would suggest that CompTIA is not independent enough to be critical of Microsoft when it deserves it.
I think we should always be sure to praise them when it is proper to praise them, just as we criticize them when it is proper to criticize them. The Eolas suit against Microsoft, for example, was completely groundless—in my opinion—and should have been thrown out from day one. Eolas, in targeting Microsoft, went after deep pockets, but threatened everyone in the industry that used plugins to enable one application to utilize another to manipulate an object within the first application. The OLE system is an example, and could easily result (if this is never rectified) in large damages against any company building OLE-capable software going back to the time the patent was issued.
Yet, while we should support Microsoft in this fight, we should not turn a blind eye to their misbehavior. In the server field, there are a number of companies that build servers that utilize what is publicly known about SMB/CIFS. Enterprises can purchase server software from numerous vendors that will work with one another, but each one has a certain amount of trouble working with a Microsoft Windows-based server, not because Microsoft was innovative, but because they made incompatible changes in their implementations of the protocol.
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