From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Jan 23 1998 - 05:02:08 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker said:
> Anyone care to take bets on how long it will be before Word and
> Excel are free? My money is on sometime before 2002.
I don't expect Microsoft to survive (in current form, at least). To
quote shamelessly and at length from one of http://slashdot.org/ 's
contributors (in turn quoting someone else):
-- snip --
Thought you all might like this:
One Microsoft executive called Netscape's move to make the Navigator
source code widely available "odd." Sam Jadallah, vice president of
Microsoft's Organization Customer Unit, said, "Consumers want to know
what they are getting. They like one version. They want to know a
McDonald's hamburger is a McDonald's hamburger wherever they go."
Jadallah also noted that, "Whenever source code is out and gets
distributed, things can get fragmented. That's what happened with Unix
and Linux."
The beauty of Netscape's move is that Microsoft probably can't
comprehend it.
-- snip --
Microsoft is close to being a monopoly, insofar as they have such a
death-grip on the corporate desktop that all the application
developers have to develop for their products. GPLing Microsoft
code would relinquish this. Have you ever known a monopoly to
reform itself from the inside, willingly?
-- Charlie
(PS: Linux spoken here ;-)
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