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From an outsider's point of view, and as one old
enough to remember when Microsoft was the upstart
and not taken terribly seriously, I'd say their
culture has been changing for the better with regards
to opening the system. Sure, we can dig up more
bad boy behaviors; every company has those, but
not every company enjoys a monopoly on operating
systems. So we have to watch carefully and chide
where needed, just as we have to watch Google given
their position as the dominant portal. If either
starts open sourcing their code, that's good behavior.
When they are upfront honest about what they
are doing with the information they dominate,
that's good behavior.
<irony>Someone made an interesting observation to me
with regards to the increased surveilance technologies
and who or how would any entity take the position
that their job is to provide "human security". He
said, wouldn't it be odd if after all of the bad
things said about MS, they turn out to be the one
entity with the power to stand up to the control
freaks in government and take the position that is
their duty and within their power to protect the
average user from predations on their constitutional
rights.</irony>
Any company that fails to keep up with the zeitgeist
of the information ecosystems gets rousted
by a niche player eventually. "Heavy hangs the head
that wears the crown" as the saying goes.
len
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
clbullar@ingr.com (Bullard, Claude L (Len)) writes:
>The Open Source heads will like this one.
>
>http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/02/20/outgoing.exec/index.html
Nah. I'd much prefer a change in corporate culture to a retiree,
however honored, pointing out what lots of outsiders already think.
On the bright (and XML) side, I wonder if the Office 2003 work -
exposing so much of that previously binary proprietary information as
XML - may constitute a change in some ways. That'll be interesting to
watch.
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