The EU beyond Reason.
There isn't anything stopping anybody from writing a viable windows alternative at this point in time. All of Microsofts interconnects and APIs have either been released to the public or reverse engineered by the bsd/linux community.
The problem is that there is no solidly released linux distribution that meets everybody's needs, or will even nessesarily run on your machine.
Take a windows XP disk. Put it in the CD-ROM drive of ANY machine made in the last 5 years, using any hardware and install. Then either download the patches from your release disk version to what is most up to date.
Your computer now has a moderately secure, put it behind a 30 broadband router/firewall and anything bad that happens to it will be due to a dumb user. For the record, in all these years I've been involved in computers I have NEVER seen a virus, half the time I've run a virus scanner and half the time not. I have even managed one department's network at a college and still never saw a virus get flagged by the scanners.
But I digress, the point here is that the now forementioned fresh XP install will be clean and integrated and for the most part easy to understand and follow. If you need to do something the built in help system will describe exactly what steps you need to follow. While the base windows package comes will nearly everything you would want for the standard PC that will be used for email and internet browsing you don't need to go any further. If you need more you can purchase Microsoft's Office for a relatively small fee. While MSWord might have a few deficiencies it still works as one would expect it should. Excel is still unrivaled when it comes to Spreadsheet work. If you use POP or a Corporate email system the version of Outlook that comes with Office is one of the cleanest email/groupware type programs around (compare wil Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, etc)
Now try to find something that competes. There is no linux distribution that even in itself that maintains a commonized interface. Moving into the unix field the only good integrated windowing environment would be OS-X from Apple. Again OS-X is not free. OS-X has all of those same features I talked about earlier when describing Windows XP.
And by all indications it looks like Apple will start growing even faster in the close future. With Microsoft's .NET architecture gaining ground, I would even guess we will see a business model shift for Microsoft shortly.
But the point of all this really comes down to the EU's extremely agressive and utterly absurd Communistic approach to their Anti-trust dealings with Microsoft.
While the EU case started off sketchy at best, it has gone far far off into the crazy now. The people consulting on the case for the EU are paid for none less than Microsoft's own competitors. Their comments are sealed and can't be viewed by anybody, not even Micrsoft. The case is designed from the get go to extract either massive amounts of money for the EU nations or else had over to Microsoft's competitors the entire source code for Windows.
Right now the EU is getting ready to levy a fine of $5 million PER DAY back dated to December of 2005. Right now thats about $1 billion and rising. Microsoft isn't the only American company that the EU is targeting either.
At this point I would rather see Microsoft stop all opperations in the EU instead of paying any fine of any sort to the EU. That means closing all divisions and refuse to sell any software licenses to anybody in the EU.
As an interesting subnote the EU has a GDP of just slightly more than the United States (about $1 trillion more) but if you take the EU's GDP per capita and compared that to the States of the US that number is only better than THREE (3) states. Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states with worse GDP per capita numbers than the EU. Ironically with the coal boom just starting up again I wouldn't be surprised to shortly see the EU's GDP per capita barely above the two lowest states.
The problem is that there is no solidly released linux distribution that meets everybody's needs, or will even nessesarily run on your machine.
Take a windows XP disk. Put it in the CD-ROM drive of ANY machine made in the last 5 years, using any hardware and install. Then either download the patches from your release disk version to what is most up to date.
Your computer now has a moderately secure, put it behind a 30 broadband router/firewall and anything bad that happens to it will be due to a dumb user. For the record, in all these years I've been involved in computers I have NEVER seen a virus, half the time I've run a virus scanner and half the time not. I have even managed one department's network at a college and still never saw a virus get flagged by the scanners.
But I digress, the point here is that the now forementioned fresh XP install will be clean and integrated and for the most part easy to understand and follow. If you need to do something the built in help system will describe exactly what steps you need to follow. While the base windows package comes will nearly everything you would want for the standard PC that will be used for email and internet browsing you don't need to go any further. If you need more you can purchase Microsoft's Office for a relatively small fee. While MSWord might have a few deficiencies it still works as one would expect it should. Excel is still unrivaled when it comes to Spreadsheet work. If you use POP or a Corporate email system the version of Outlook that comes with Office is one of the cleanest email/groupware type programs around (compare wil Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, etc)
Now try to find something that competes. There is no linux distribution that even in itself that maintains a commonized interface. Moving into the unix field the only good integrated windowing environment would be OS-X from Apple. Again OS-X is not free. OS-X has all of those same features I talked about earlier when describing Windows XP.
And by all indications it looks like Apple will start growing even faster in the close future. With Microsoft's .NET architecture gaining ground, I would even guess we will see a business model shift for Microsoft shortly.
But the point of all this really comes down to the EU's extremely agressive and utterly absurd Communistic approach to their Anti-trust dealings with Microsoft.
While the EU case started off sketchy at best, it has gone far far off into the crazy now. The people consulting on the case for the EU are paid for none less than Microsoft's own competitors. Their comments are sealed and can't be viewed by anybody, not even Micrsoft. The case is designed from the get go to extract either massive amounts of money for the EU nations or else had over to Microsoft's competitors the entire source code for Windows.
Right now the EU is getting ready to levy a fine of $5 million PER DAY back dated to December of 2005. Right now thats about $1 billion and rising. Microsoft isn't the only American company that the EU is targeting either.
At this point I would rather see Microsoft stop all opperations in the EU instead of paying any fine of any sort to the EU. That means closing all divisions and refuse to sell any software licenses to anybody in the EU.
As an interesting subnote the EU has a GDP of just slightly more than the United States (about $1 trillion more) but if you take the EU's GDP per capita and compared that to the States of the US that number is only better than THREE (3) states. Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states with worse GDP per capita numbers than the EU. Ironically with the coal boom just starting up again I wouldn't be surprised to shortly see the EU's GDP per capita barely above the two lowest states.
Labels: software
