Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

The Facts on MS Interoperability

Edge of the Valley — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 22:54:27 GMT

Contrary to what Bruce Chizen, Adobe CEO, has said about our lack of intention to maintain a cross-platform

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

fluke — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:27:13 GMT

Sam Ramji: Are we a talking about ICO or TCO? I will not disagree with you that the industry has done a wonderful job of bringing down ICO for the typical home PC. TCO is a different matter. I doubt we will ever agreed with "real dollar" amounts for the home user due to security compromises or the cost in user's time for hardware replacement issues. Does someone spending an entire weekend to reinstall all their software because an OEM refused to replace a bad motherboard unless the user first tried using the OEM's "restore" CD to re-image the hard drive?

My opinion is the following issues have become bigger issues for home PC users over the last 20 years and the customers themselves believe either resulted in lost of money or time:

- security compromise

- privacy compromise

- on-hold time to get OEM support

- quality of OEM troubleshooting policies

Regardless, it is important to remember that cost and value are independent. For example, the intranet services that where enabled by default on XP SP0 and XP SP1 had a real dollar amount associated with writing. Their exposer to the entire internet by default provided a lack of value.

The level of community involvement that Microsoft agrees to allow take place is hindered by EULAs and DMCA issues. Some of the issues such as providing a better environment to troubleshoot hardware issues or secure banking could be done by further exploring the potential of running an OS from a read-only media such as done with KNOPPIX or BartPE. The material needed to put together a KNOPPIX CD is under licensing terms that encourage community involvement and BartPE is not. Even if you don't have time for a science experiments, there is still value in getting the results from someone else being allowed to do the experiment.

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

Sam Ramji — Fri, 11 May 2007 08:11:22 GMT

Fluke - I have a suggestion for you. Go and do the math on the current cost of a typical home PC, including standard preloaded software from Microsoft and other vendors. Compare the cost with the last 20 years in real dollars. Come back and post the results.

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

fluke — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:16:59 GMT

The biggest problem with Gapingvoid seems to be the focus on mioptic business and misses the big picture.

The closed source vendors have been improving in the area of treating businesses unfairly through vendor lock-in. Businesses are in a better position than ever before to hurt the bottom line of close application vendors that choose to try to use lock-in to accomplish artifical gouging. To leverage a lock-in against a business at this point simply ensures that future purchasing choices reduce the exposer to further lock-in based attacks.

What is missed by Gapingvoid and the MS Port 25 "solution" is the lock-in attacks the industry (not just Microsoft, but MS definately contributes to the problem) places on the home user.

It seems to be specific to the closed software industry the concept that the home user should be charged more per feature. Unlike public utilities where the home user's charge is regulated, close source software industry seems to pass better discounts to the businesses instead. Also, in the electronics industry, the deciding factor on cost seems to be the ability to mass produce rather than the complexity or number of features. A home grade tape deck may actually have greater complexity and features such as automatic reverse but as the mass produced product it is sold at a cheaper amount than the professional tape deck which is made from longer last parts but provides less features. If MS worked like the electronics industry then Vista Ultimate than Vista Business where the difference in cost would be the "quality" in terms of ease/quality of support (faster patch release cycle, less hold time for phone support, etc). Instead, while Vista Ultimate can be mass produced as easily as Vista Premium, the home user still gets the depricated grade of support and in some cases pays more for Home Premium than the business pays under it's site license for Corprate edition.

So how has Port 25 changed the situation for the Home user being attacked by vendor lock-in? What amazing things from the MS/Novell deal have we gotten? Oh! There was an "interop" plug-in for Firefox. Does it run on SUSE x86? SUSE x86_64? OpenSUSE x86? Open SUSE x86_64? Should we expect MS WPF/E (formerly Silverlight) to be available for any flavor of SUSE? Or will it be available to only a subset of the OSes that Adobe Flash player is provided for?

But at least the MS/Novell solution includes ensuring Windows runs on Xen, right? So, at least that will help the home user move away from vendor lock-in? Well, actually, it has been stated that Microsoft expects most home users will choose to buy Vista Home Premium where the EULA allows the license to be void if the product is run on Xen. Home user looses again.

Then there is the conflict of interest in Vista "features." In the past we have seen Real Jukebox, Zango and Sony XCP provide media player software which negatively impact consumer privacy. The fact that they negatively impact consumer privacy comes up when a third party audits what the software is doing. Vista's solution is to extend to media companies the option such that third party auditing of the software becomes hindered. Almost a "see no evil" solution to privacy violations. But at least it will only be with applications that Microsoft reviews and signs first. Much like the signed nVidia drivers which negatively impact the stability of the OS. With people like that reviewing to protect my privacy, who needs third parties auditing what the application does, right?

Then we have the "Live" services. A friend let me know how vendor lock-in allowed MicroSoft/Bungie to pull a "bait and switch" with Halo 2 for Xbox Live. As part of paying for a Xbox Live Gold subscription, it was stated that "Revolutionary TrueSkill matchmaking" was included as part of the price. During the free month of XBL Gold, he was "baited" by the number of different multiplayer options Halo 2 provided during matchmaking. Then Bungie releases 2 new maps for $4 which get mixed reviews on the forums. But they don't have to sell the maps merits. MS allows Bungie to cripple the matchmaking options to less than half of what was previously provided unless the customer buys the maps. But wasn't matchmaking something he already payed for with the XBL Gold subscription? Why is MS allowing such a clear case of bait and switch? What rights does the customer have when lock-in allows a vendor with a conflict of interest remove functionality that he already payed for? This type of issue does not come up with FOSS solutions where an artifical removal of features can be re-coded around. If Red Hat where to unfairly remove options the customer payed for then an easy switch to CentOS will get the options back.

It is not the CIO and shareholders that are going to move away from close source solutions at their business. Close software companies attempt to ligitimize themselves to the business and the idea of unfairly leveraging a sofware lock-in is not used as heavily anymore. But in the area of what the CIO, shareholders and others end up selecting in the future for home solutions in commodity computer solutions and embedded products will be a migration to FOSS solutions due mostly to the side-effect of lacking the negatives from vendor lock-in.

I personally don't see adoption based on simply a side-effect as providing long term benefits to FOSS and would prefer to see MS and other close vendors at least attempt to ligitimize their offerings in the home businesses as much as they attempt with business. Currently, I don't see any attempt to retain consumer trust in the home market. Instead, the attitude seems to be closer to that of someone that believe there is a sucker born every day and for every customer dissastified there is still another new customer to be gain to replace him.

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

SamirChopra — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 03:03:36 GMT

Sam,

Matt Assay posted yet again on this post (at http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/04/where_all_the_o.html). I've blogged on it (at http://decodingliberation.blogspot.com) as I think it makes a good point in addition about Web 2.0 companies and their relationship to open source.

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

Sam Ramji — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 16:47:17 GMT

Max - good to see you on Port 25.

One of the key things I learned from you and the other panelists (Dave Webb and Tim Golden) was that it's not how the technology was built that matters, but how it meets your needs for performance and risk. This is independent of the development model.

Another great quote from the CIO panel (I think it was Tim) was "don't try to sell me a replacement for something I already have - like an open source enterprise management console - do something new that solves a problem I haven't addressed yet." No different from what I heard from customers when I was at BEA Systems - "don't try to sell me a rip and replace solution!"

All this just goes back to feed my belief that users are pragmatic, and as technology developers we need to find ways to combine the best attributes of traditional and open source software.

re: Gapingvoid Got It Wrong

raynermn — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:08:12 GMT

Sam: Thanks for providing context to my quote!

As a big fan of open source, and of development based on open communities, my hope is that we don't use the fact that something is produced as open source as an excuse for it remaining hokey. To the contrary, the power of open communities working on open source should fix any non-industrial strength defects faster than closed development could.

Is OpenSource Good for Shareholders and CEOs? : The Last Podcast

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