Okay, last one on this subject for a while-- I don't want the blog to turn into a pro-anti-or-whatever-microsoft discussion. BTW, Murph emailed me a pointer to this article from The Register on the default setups of OSes, and how they affect security. Very interesting, particularly the MS-vs-Solaris comparison.

On to the subject, Murph made more comments to my previous reply:

But they don't bundle the things that they're talking about leveraging (SQL server and exchange) and that's why its a bad article. Is novell going to be any different for packaging the AMP from LAMP into Netware?? Only because its not MS.

OTOH talk about the added value of combing (say) Outlook and Exchange and how that in turn stuffed Groupwise I'll be cheering you on...

Or, to come down a step, about the way they roll UI changes round between office and the desktop.

Two points I want to make here.

1) Murph says "Is novell going to be any different for packaging the AMP from LAMP into Netware?? Only because its not MS." Exactly!Microsoft holds a monopoly. Holding a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal; using it in predatory fashion is. Monopolists have to abide to more stringent set of rules than non-monopolists, as far as I'm concerned. If Novell was holding 90% of their market, then we'd be discussing their moves too.

2) Regarding "OTOH talk about the added value of combing (say) Outlook and Exchange and how that in turn stuffed Groupwise I'll be cheering you on...". I think Murph's point was how Microsoft's bundling in the Outlook+Exchange combination made others consider bloatware a good strategy. That is indeed another of the bad sides of massive bundling (even loose bundling, ie., not built-in but easy to integrate).

I just want to make another clarification: I have argued before (in a discussion similar to this one with Murph, actually :-)) that I am not anti-microsoft, or pro-microsoft either. Maybe I haven't made it explicit enough, but my mention in the previous entry of how they could, if they chose to, compete on the merits on their software, was along those lines. They have one of the best software engineering organizations in the world. Their products sometimes are not to par (well, okay, their first releases rarely are), but nobody else has to deploy millions of copies on their first release either. As far as I'm concerned, if they accepted that they are a monopoly, and behaved accordingly, they would be ok in my book. Bundling nonsensically just for the sake of grabbing market share wouldn't matter much: people would choose other products if they thought that was best. The best approach would win.

Agreed, that's a bit idealistic. But these are just ideas anyway. No one gets hurt by saying them out loud. :-)

Enough of Microsoft for a while though. There are a ton of other cool things happening--and who knows, if they get to have enough impact, this whole discussion might be rendered moot anyway! (That's the idealist again talking! :-))

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on April 28 2003 at 4:42 PM