Ballmer on Windows Server 2003, Linux 1282
no_demons writes "Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer, has given an interview to CNet about Windows Server 2003 and Linux. He claims that 'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'. Discuss." Also in the news: two critical security vulnerabilities (MS03-014, MS03-015), and this piece about Windows 2003 mentioning that Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:4, Interesting)
In typical parlance this means make money go further, however in this context it means 'spend money, spend more money, keep spending money', until the budget snaps like an rubberband when its elasticity has been exceded.
Well, our budget has already snapped, like the rubberband. Funny how budgets these days aren't elastic and don't stretch. Perhaps setting up a demo MySQL or Postgres Linux server might be in order to convince the powers that be that we can get along just fine without.
BTW, I love how Steve blathers on about having a corporation behind their product. Like support from that has not pricetag. We're doing without MSDN because we can't afford that. Google is my friend. Lastly, a customer can go to Microsoft and request a feature? Really? Even one as small as us? Yeah, right. Time for a little off the end?
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a senior Cisco sales guy offer me a custom IOS load with some features unavailable to the unwashed masses. I turned that one down because it would be impossible to update.
Although I think no vendor will do feature changes or enhancements unless you're huge or its part of your support contract.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about paid for technical support directly from the developers? Check pgsql.com [pgsql.com]. Very few places really need Oracle.
Read up on JBoss to see how this kind of business model is doing.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Insightful)
All of which FS/OSS offers at competitve prices, which is much better deal than you can get from MS. Btw, you get no assurance with MS software -- all software licenses explicitly deny any assurance. So that's just fuzzy buzzword thinking on the part of stupid executives who don't really know wtf they're talking about.
As for support, that is purchased at competitive rates which are much better than anything you can get from MS. Furthermore, you'll get better support, precisely because there is competition. On a personal note, I get better support for free from Gentoo Forums than I get from Gateway for $300.
The benefits of using FS/OSS also scale very well, in that the more computers you use an FS/OSS product on, the more money you save, compared to using MS NT/2k/XP/2.003k. Oh yea, and there's also the fact that you don't have to worry about hundred-million dollar extortion-attempts from the BSA. These benefits -- though providing the most savings for large companies -- are extremely crucial for smaller companies.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Interesting)
A few examples:
On another note regarding Oracle, it is basically slow crap. The executable alone is 18MB, so it naturally has poor performance; specialized database-systems will outperform it. Btw, data assurance from Oracle doesn't come for free. It costs quite a bit. And for that extra money you spend on it, it'd be better just spending that money doing an audit of FS/OSS code to insure that it won't lose data, and creating backup systems. Using journaling file systems like ReiserFS and XFS is also useful.
Enterprise != Personal systems.
Completely correct. The benefits of using FS/OSS at the enterprise level are even greater. Refer to the many research papers and discussions of companies saving millions by using GNU/Linux over Windows-2000/XP/2003. The MITRE study comes to mind: http://www.egovos.org/pdf/dodfoss.pdf This is a study funded by the government to get an objective evaluation; not some crackpot study funded by MS to make them look better.
Your $300 sale from Gateway doesn't mean shit. A $3M sale, does. They don't give a shit about you. Deal with it. Firstly, this is irrelevant to the rest of the discussion. This was simply a personal digression of mine. The point was that you can get excellent technical support for free within a community of intelligent members. If my $300 doesn't mean shit to Gateway, then they and every other OEM should stop their false advertising of "tech-support" -- because all they're doing is reading from a cookbook which we could have found online. Btw, I don't how many customers Gateway has. Let's say they have 1-million home-user customers, and each customer pays $100 for tech-support (these are obviously conservative numbers). That amounts to $100 million in tech support paid to Gateway by home-users. They damn well better care about the quality of tech support they're giving to home-users.
Lets see some open source clusters
Where have you been the last five years? Some of the world's most powerful supercomputers are Beowulf clusters, using GNU/Linux. See an O'Reilly article [oreillynet.com] for an overview. In particular, GNU/Linux Beowulf clusters are being used for:
Yep, this FS/OSS stuff is really useless. It's only made the movie industry more money then from any other movie (see Titanic), assisted in the sequencing of the human genome, and assisted in the prediction of weather patterns, potentially saving lives.
What about SAN support?
Granted, I can not find any FS/OSS implementations at the moment, but there is commercial support available for GNU/Linux:
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, Microsoft is a mature company that is not likely to experience the astronomical growth that they have had in the past. There's nothing wrong with that, Microsoft makes a big fat pile of money.
Unfortunately, Microsoft employees aren't really focused on Microsoft's business, but rather they are focused on the MSFT stock price. You see, a great deal of their personal wealth is wrapped up Microsoft stock, and they want to see that stock go up. To Microsoft management and employees the idea that Microsoft is not a growth company is the highest form of blasphemy. You see, their Price/Earnings ratio still has them pegged as a growth company. If the market decides that Microsoft has stopped growing, then their stock price will drop so that their P/E ratio is much closer to 10.
Microsoft could kill Linux tomorrow simply by dropping their prices. Microsoft has profit margin to give. However, this would almost certainly trigger a market realization that Microsoft is done growing. To most Microsofties this would be the kiss of death for their own personal finances, and it would put a serious crimp in Microsoft's business plan. After all, Microsoft makes a great deal of money investing in their own stock, and they also use MSFT stock as a primary motivator for their employees.
Re:Steve shares nose surgeon with Michael Jackson? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlikely (Score:4, Interesting)
I could see a version of Windows shipping without the GUI enabled, allowing administration only by remote desktop. But for the entire OS to ship with no GUI libraries would be very unlikely.
On the other hand, they've already done it (sort of), look at the
Mirrors:
com.com link [martin-studio.com]
zdnet.co.uk link [martin-studio.com]
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a server platform.. Work it out.
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
If it's a server than LOTS of stuff. IIS, SQLServer, MSMQ, etc works just fine without a gui attached to the app. We're not talking desktop here.
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)
Uhh, in
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Funny)
They did already. It's called Microsoft LAN Manager [prodigy.net].
innovation. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:innovation. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:innovation. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:innovation. (Score:4, Insightful)
He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
So just because the basic design is old, it's not "innovative?" I think this guy needs to spend more time with his programmers!
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes they are. It is true that the research wasn't their own, but if you look at the comparison between the research system and the original MacOS, well, there really isn't a comparison. On the other hand, Microsoft still hasn't reached MacOS's usability. It _is_ a cheap knock-off.
Let's do a real comparison. Compare the _original_ MacOS to Xerox's system. I think it's pretty obvious that MacOS was very innovative, even if they didn't originate the ideas.
Now, let's compare Windows 1.0 to MacOS (whatever version it was at then). In this case YES, it was a cheap knock-off.
When you put out a better product than what's out there, that's innovation. Putting out a lesser product than what's out there and choking off the supply channels of your competitor is not.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Name an application, or a feature of the operating system, that is truly innovative?
The only I can think of is Mosix. The other large areas of development (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, the kernel) are simply trying to catch up to existing commercial software (Windows, IE, Solaris/BSD).
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Interesting)
Now if you are talking about free software innovations, well, you've got the entire Internet infrastructure. You've got GUILE, which is really cool. Emacs, which is amazing. Anyway, I could go on if I had the time, but you get the point.
Of course there's a general problem of determining the "newness" or "innovativeness" of an idea, but that's another topic...
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source deserves a lot of credit.
KDE and GNOME have additional forms of network-awareness built into them at low levels that aren't present in Windows, CDE, etc. Mozilla allows pretty fine-grained control over cookies, JavaScript, and images (small but extremely useful features), and it is actually standards-compliant, for once. Emacs is pretty darn innovative for its time (Lisp engine and rediculous extensibility). Ghostscript is the only way I know to print PostScript under Windows to cheap printers. Is there a better EPS plot generator than GnuPlot? LaTeX and DocBook are basically the only options for large-scale structured document authoring that allow true version control, output to who knows how many formats, awesome mathematics support (LaTeX, at least), among lots of other things. OpenOffice.org will level the playing field for office software. OpenBSD is the most secure OS I know of. The most popular HPC clustering software is open source (Beowulf, anyone?). Apache+mod_basically_anything. I'd bet NetBSD literally runs on a toaster, somewhere. Open Source will figure out package management, eventually, Microsoft won't. The best TCP/IP stacks are open source. PERL/Python/Ruby. CVS-over-SSH allows distributed development of proprietary software. gzip/bzip. tcp_wrappers. gcc (languages X platforms).
Some of what I list are significant refinements rather than true innovation, but the fact that many best-in-class applications exist in Open Source form is undeniable. There are hundreds of other innovations/refinements that I can't remember or am unaware of (a lot of them get taken for granted).
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a bad thing to go back to the drawing board every so often and ask if there's a better way to do it. But be willing to accept No as an answer, instead of starting over for the sake of starting over.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Interesting)
" Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition."
So just because the basic design is old, it's not "innovative?" I think this guy needs to spend more time with his programmers!
Hmmm...Windows 2003 is based on Windows XP, which is based on Windows 2000, which is based on Windows NT, which came out in 1993 (?) That's 10 years old, except, wait! The internals of Windows NT are based on VMS! Which makes Windows 2003 a clone of at least a 20 year old OS!
BTW--Linux is not a clone of the original 20 year-old OS. It's a MODERN Unix clone. It's based on POSIX standards which is actually quite a bit newer.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Informative)
NT is NOT "based" on VMS. David Cutler lead the design of both and they are sure to share similarities because of it, but one is not BASED on the other and to say that NT is some "clone" of VMS is flat wrong.
BTW--Linux is not a clone of the original 20 year-old OS. It's a MODERN Unix clone. It's based on POSIX standards which is actually quite a bit newer.
But to choose to stop your own logic with this one. POSIX is based on trying to unite SystemV with BSD! Not only that but POSIX itself was started up around 1985, still almost 20 years ago.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
NT is "based on" VMS in roughly the same way that Linux is "based on" UNIX: each share a philosophy and feel with their ancestor, but they are actually completely different pieces of software.
But to choose to stop your own logic with this one. POSIX is based on trying to unite SystemV with BSD! Not only that but POSIX itself was started up around 1985, still almost 20 years ago.
The difference is that the people who originally designed the UNIX APIs really did a great job and that their design still holds up after 30 years. Microsoft and Apple throw out their stuff every few years and start over. That's not "innovation", it's just "doing a poor job". And, what do you know, each time they throw things out and start over, they get closer to UNIX.
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Funny)
A chess master once told me: "Never neglect the obvious. Usually it's obvious because it's right."
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Funny)
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure UNIX is quite old, but it's not like the latest versions of it are that old -- latest releases aren't 20 years old... rather, they've been developed based on technologies that have been constantly DEVELOPED for that long, which is a GOOD THING.
Much better than the vaporware -> 1.0 "market as beta tester" -> "v.3 is actually usable" paradigm that MSFT has historically followed when releasing their OSes.
WINDOWS is going to be pushing 20 pretty soon, too. So what?
Re:He has a funny idea of "Innovation." (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO it's an indirect acknowledgment that Linux is getting better.
Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
'our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that [open-source] community'
Probably true - I'd imagine many Microsoft customers are so busy installing service packs and counting their licenses that they haven't had the time to look at Open Source Software.
Riiiight - only Windows gets patches... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Informative)
Besides the new way to develop software (i.e. the Bazaar idea), here are couple of products that were first developed as open source projects:
email
web server
web browser
Its True! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd like to see Linus, RMS or any of those other hippies try to outdance Mr. Balmer.. Er.. No, on second thought I wouldn't like to see that.
More innovation from Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is trying to develop a command-line only server.
Isn't this a little backwards?
Innovation in EULA's and user restrictions (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder why... (Score:3, Insightful)
20 years... old or experienced? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, so 5 years down the road when M$ is integrating open source software to maintain value in the consumer market, I wonder where this guy will be...
That aside, generally don't things get better with age? With more time on the open market, would that not imlpy 20 years of innovation and development? If not, why is it still alive and more popular than ever? Would that explain the relatively small number of security holes and bugs of the 20 year old system, compared to the "modern" Window$ core?
Ballmer's right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer's right (Score:3, Insightful)
2000 is quite stable; anyone who says otherwise either never tried it, or doesn't know what they're doing.
They're trying command line only? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good luck with that experiment, Microsoft. But there's much more to a solid OS than a simply a lack of GUI
Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
And the best part is, it's so simple to use! It has only one command: "reboot."
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh look, an outright lie too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Forgetting RedHat [redhat.com], Mr. Balmer?
"Are you looking at search?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh, could that be because any not found address put into an IE browser redirects to an MS search page? Could that drive up traffic? Is that innovation? Like Arthur Anderson innovation?
What's wrong with using a 20 year old system? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system."
If it ain't broke...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's partly true (Score:4, Informative)
What improvements? You mean the Start menu used to Shut down Windows, or the ever annoying Office Clippy whose final removal from Office XP became a feature celebrated with a Flash movie http://www.microsoft.com/Office/clippy/ by its creator, or the beloved Registry.
Microsoft is 60 times bigger than Apple with over $40 billions in the bank, but produces virtually zero innovation. Even more amazingly, a hardware company like Apple actually has a bigger and better software portofolio than MS.
no, it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source software has a much longer history than 20 years. Software, in a sense, started out open source as hardware companies didn't view it as being very valuable.
I think it may be fair to say that there's been more technical innovation from Microsoft.
And what would that "technical innovation" be? Just about every single product category, UI idea, feature, or technology Microsoft is using and touting was invented elsewhere: the GUI, the spreadsheet, WYSIWYG word processing, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, databases, networking, web browsing, etc.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind,
I'm sorry, I don't get it. People have been sharing disks via disk interfaces since the 1960's. Microsoft puts a feature into their system that allows this to be done over one specific disk interface (which, not coincidentally, was actually designed to support this). Where is the innovation here? Sounds like engineering to me, driven by marketing ("hey, guys, we need to compete with the mini computers and mainframes on this disk thing").
as does Active Directory (although AD is certainly inspired by NDS).
Again, where is the innovation? We had Kerberos, YP, and NIS, and before that, we had generations of directory services on mainframes.
While Microsoft certainly followed Apple into the era of the GUI, they've made notable improvements to the GUI.
Like what?
There are others, of course;
Please keep going--you haven't named one yet.
only the most rabid anti-MS zealot could claim that they've *never* done *anything* innovative.
Oh, I'm sure they must have done something "innovative", but whatever it was doesn't seem to be related to their bottom line or have had much of an impact on their products.
Microsoft, first to implement CLI on top of GUI? (Score:5, Funny)
Balmer's ability to do math (Score:5, Funny)
Then in response to the XBox,
Remember, we brought Windows 1 out in 1983...
I love interviews with Balmer.
MS coders learning from UNIX & Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that all these bright ideas go through Microsoft's "profit maximization machine" at some point and we get "embrace and extend" and other fun phonomena. I'll stop before I get back into that tired rant.
At any rate, here are two lessons learned -- by MS -- from *nixes, quoted from the article [zdnet.co.uk] on the command line server. "Windows core technology guru Rob Short" says...
We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Later a quote on Linux:
[Question] Why is there no command line only version?
[Short's answer] We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter.
yegods! (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I the only one that that strikes as a poor idea?
What about the positives aspects of the interview? (Score:5, Insightful)
We created the SMB file server specs, and we didn't have the fastest one around, which was embarrassing. So we took our performance team and said "your mission is to make ours twice as fast as this other one on the market."
I understand this to be the admission that Samba was faster than any SMB server MS had in the past, right? See, this is competition at work. Granted, Microsoft tried to discourage people from competing (in the SMB case, by making small changes to the protocols with each release, I believe. Correct me if I my wrong, please) but the Samba team still came out with a better product.
I expect that by this time next year the Samba team will be saying "yeah, we got a faster SMB server than the one in Windows 2003, but hey, they ASKED for it! Do you remember that S Ballmer interview?"...
Security tools (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that tool is called "a non-firewalled internet connection."
Microsoft's Strength (Score:5, Insightful)
They're willing to take ten YEARS to let something come to fruition; they have no problem 'waiting for fullness.'
This is a HUGE advantage that a lot of OSS people simply don't have; whoever's coding NiftyApp gets bored around version 0.64 and drops it, and meanwhile, some other guys is making GniftyApp 0.4 because he doesn't feel like working with the first guy.
On the other side of the pond, Microsoft will let something fail, and fail, and fail, tweak, twist, fix, and then they have something worth having.
Seattle Steve (Score:5, Funny)
They tried to bring a small number of web and print servers through the backdoor but they were surrounded and most of their infidels had their links cut.
I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide under the walls of Redmond. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly.
You can go and visit those places. Nothing there, nothing at all. There are DRM checkpoints. Evrything is okay.
Microsoft suffers from NIH Syndrome (Score:3, Interesting)
This myopic view of their business model:
1) Prevents Microsoft from embracing (in the traditional sense, not in how we usually think of MS doing with this concept) the point that UNIX operating systems are tried and true technology, given that they HAVE been around for a very long time in computer years.
2) Prevents Microsoft from generating products that sell to users of UNIX families (Microsoft Office X for Mac OS X is the only UNIX family product I am aware of), and, as a result, generating additional revenues.
3) Leaves Microsoft in a sacrificial lamb situation when businesses have to look at the bottom line in a tech solution where a competing *NIX product simply does the same task for less money or less complex or proprietary technologies and with less licensing hassles.
Microsoft has beaten the dead horse of The Operating System as the Hub of All You Do paradigm for too long now. Operating systems are still important but now revolve around two camps: Microsoft Windows technology, and *NIX technologies (BSD, Sun, Mac OS X, Linux and its many distros, et al.). What many businesses now need revolves less on what you run your apps on, but the apps themselves.
I see Microsoft losing more revenue due to their licensing model, which still presumes that it's the 1990's and money is everyone. Businesses are finding it hard to justify yearly OS or application suite upgrades. IT managers are just moving to Windows 2000 Server right now, and aren't going to figure in Windows 2003 Server anytime soon.
Meanwhile, many *NIX operating systems are free or lower cost than a Microsoft solution, and does much of the same, if not more. Further, Microsoft tends to develop their software proprietarily, so that third-parties can rarely adapt an MS product to their own product.
Such attitudes killed many a computer company. Usually people think of Apple when pondering NIH, but even Apple is far from those days, with their BSD hybrid OS, stock industry standard ports and protocols, yadda, yadda, yadda.
To use an overused
Ballmer abandons the monkey dance! (Score:4, Funny)
"I will no longer be performing the monkey dance," said a sweaty, flatulent Steve Ballmer on Friday morning to a confused crowd at a Redmond Dunkin' Donuts. "I have decided to adopt the 'Iraqi Two-Step' as my favorite mode of expressing my inner funkitude." He then proceeded to bounce up and down, slap his chest and slice his head with a small sword.
"It his outer funk that worries me," said Randy Jarvis, a FedEx deliveryman who stopped a moment to watch the early morning spectacle. He held his nose against the olfactorius assault. "Geez, my eyes are watering. Does this count as a chemical weapon? Will I need to be decontaminated?"
Neither Geroge Clinton nor Tarik Aziz could not be reached for comment.
PS: I love how he said, "This is an interesting time." You think he knows that's a curse in many cultures?
Linux in pieces: (Score:5, Insightful)
What he doesn't point out is that if you want to do anything - *ANYTHING* - with the Windows kernel or the Windows luser interface you either have to work for the company or sign your soul to them.
And he's also plain *wrong*. If you want to change the kernel and the user interface, and ooh, lets add, integrate the filesystem into your new UI/kernel integrated innovation, you can. Just do it. You've got the source. Do it, release it, its done. Linus might not like it, and you might not be able to call it Linux, but call it 'Xinul' or something. Freedom - aaah, smell it.
Baz
Printing subsystem on a CLI box? (Score:3, Interesting)
So tangled that this makes no sense. Printing is a really dumb example, Steve. No one needs WYSIWYG on their print server!
Microsoft's endemic security failure. (Score:5, Informative)
For example, Microsoft was notified of the issues, concerning only Microsoft implementation of its JVM, on September 2nd 2002 and after SEVEN MONTHS on April 9th 2003, Microsoft have issued an update to fix the problem.
Such a delay with such a serious vulnerability is so abysmal that it borders on the absurd.
Quality and security are measures which only mean something when compared relatively to another.
There is no absolutely secure, therefore you must expect, that once a vulnerability is made known to the vendor, the vendor should do their utmost to close the Window of Exposure ( http://www.counterpane.com/window.html [counterpane.com] ) as soon as possible.
For example, with the lastest SAMBA vulnerability, once notified, the SAMBA developer owned up to the mistake and the SAMBA project released a patch within 48 hours. Within aother 24hrs, redhat had already backported the patch into their distributions RPMs. Similarly any major security issues in Mozilla and Netscape browser are also fixed and updateable within a couple of days
Meanwhile, there are currently 13 KNOWN unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer ( http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/ [pivx.com] ).
Some DANGEROUSLY EXPLOITABLE had not been fixed in over a year ( http://security.greymagic.com/adv/gm002-ie/ [greymagic.com] ). That Microsoft has not rewritten the scripting system embedded with IE so that it is sandboxed by default is bad enough, but to have such major unpatched vulnerabilities exposed for months is abysmal.
Other inherent vulnerabilities, such as the Shatter attack ( http://security.tombom.co.uk/moreshatter.html [tombom.co.uk] ), Microsoft has known about since 1994!
Even if the API/call flaw is inherently unfixable, that is plenty of time for Microsoft to implement a safer methord/systemcall/API, adapt it's own applications to use the safer methord and depreciate the unsafe API.
It also appears that Microsoft 's own implementation of SMB is vulnerable and Microsoft has known about it for over eight years ( http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=599 60&cid=5681769 [slashdot.org] ), but Microsoft either choose not to, or cannot fix the problem themselves.
Microsoft is clearly not closing the vulnerabilities they are aware that exist in their products and services.
A year after after Bill Gate's Email promoting securtiy over functionality, Microsoft by choice, remains neither secure or trustworthy.
Microsoft's attitude towards the security of it's products, service and customers is abysmal.
From Jason Coombs' A response to Bruce Schneier on MS patch management and Sapphire ( http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/315158 [securityfocus.com] )
20+ years old? (Score:5, Interesting)
20+ years old hrm, Windows 1.0 was released on November 10, 1983 [microsoft.com], making windows just 6.5 months short of being 20 years old.
Of course, the internals are totally different now, but then so are the internals of Linux to the original UNIX code...
Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Thinking about this, he seems to be accurate on one point - there hasn't been much UI innovation in the open-source community. (And after all, everyone knows that's all that matters!) There has been a lot of innovation in other areas, mostly places the user doesn't see but which improve the overall experience. Things like operating system internals, file-distribution protocols (BitTorrent), server architecture (look at Apache, and all the stuff they do!), build tools, programming languages, software packaging/installation, software frameworks, compression algorithms, file formats, system administration tools... And that's just off the top of my head.
There's definitely room for improvement. Look at the noises coming out from Microsoft about their next-generation database filesystem. Coders who are interested in filesystems should be looking at that and thinking "how can this be done better?" Or .Net - instead of marching to Microsoft's drum, "we" should be asking "how can we do this better?" And there's always the UI and graphics infrastructure issue...
One problem is that a lot of OSS projects (UI ones, mostly) have moved away from the Unix philosophy: small, simple, dedicated programs that do a job well and can be connected with simple tools to perform complex tasks. Sure, you can feed data from one program into another with modern GUIs, but it typically requires a lot of user intervention and the programs are usually monolithic blobs of functionality. Find a way to escape from that limitation, and develop a graphical equivalent to pipes and I/O redirection, and you'll have some real innovation.
Oh yeah, and there's one little open-source innovation he seems to be forgetting about. Its this minor, inconsequential technology that no-one cares about or uses, called "the Internet".
Amusing misunderstanding (Score:5, Informative)
We'll be able to patch probably two thirds of the components without shutting the system down. That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
You can patch a file in use on UNIX without shutting down because you can delete an open file and the applications will still be able to map/read/write to that inode, which will magically disappear when the last application closes it.
Example:
Symlinks are cool, and it would have been nice if Microsoft implemented Shortcuts at the file system level, but they aren't what save us from rebooting.
PHB speak translation (Score:5, Funny)
Quote: "I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition."
Translation: "It's a big fat blimp on our threat radar. We're out to fry their asses before they get ours."
Quote: "On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition."
Translation:"We'll make them an offer they can't refuse."
Quote: "I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues."
Translation: "Our FUD tactics worked well in the past and I don't see why they shouldn't work as well in the future."
Quote: "[...] some people are choosing Linux. I don't think that is going to continue to be the case."
Translation: "Yeah, we're pretty scared about customers considering a switch and haven't really figured out how to counter that threat yet, but why admit it?."
Quote: "If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?"
Ballmer's thoughts: "Let's hope the interviewer doesn't ask what happens if we decide to discontinue a product."
Quote: "There are still challenges in parts of Asia. We have seen improvements in Latin America."
Translation: "In Asia, they steal our software like there's no tomorrow. Latin America isn't really much better."
Quote: "By hook or by crook, so to speak, there will be 5-plus million servers, roughly, sold in the next 12 months."
Translation: "If this server consolidation thingy that's been going on lately is just a fad, we'll be doing fine. Otherwise, well..."
Quote: "everybody likes to talk about Google, which is fine. They are doing a good job as a company. But for traffic, Yahoo is doing quite well and we are doing quite well."
Translation: "Google is kicking our collective pasty white rumps so hard you woldn't believe it. Let's just hope they go public so we can buy them out."
Quote: "No, I don't anticipate making a change of that ilk [Licensing 6] in the foreseeable future."
Translation: "Our vendor-lock-in strategy worked, and now we have them by the balls."
Surprisingly, CNET asked interesting questions... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The cost of systems is going down, and Office can cost 1/3 the cost of a physical system.
It seems crazy to me that consumers are willing to pay $800 for a $300 computer with Windows and Office. Eventually consumers will figure this out too. Ballmer basically sticks his head in the sand and claims the two things aren't related. But when the price ratio of going Linux/OSS + PC vs. Windows/Office + PC goes up and the utility of the systems approachs par, this has to be bad news for MS.
2. People selling Linux-based PCs in developing nations and installing pirate copies of Windows...
Obviously, this is an ongoing problem for Microsoft. The real problem will be when the users don't immediately install Windows on the computer, and are happy with Linux. Indeed, this is the acid test for desktop Linux.
I've got two words for you. (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft Bob.
Ballmer shoots himself in foot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well Steve, considering that Windows/Office can generally make up about 50% of the PC's price...you're right. They haven't budged at at all.
Pretty amazing what a monopoly can let you do eh?
Wait, what does MS innovate??? (Score:5, Informative)
MS has a GUI. Apple and Xerox did it first.
MS has multi-tasking. OS/2 had it before MS did, and many OS's did/do it better even after MS finally got around to it.
MS has Word. WordPerfect, among others, did it first.
MS has Excel. Anyone heard of Lotus 1-2-3? Or VisiCalc?
MS has IE. Netscape, Mosaic, et al. all came first.
MS has Outlook, and I know for a fact I got e-mail on various clients long before Outlook was a glint in the e-postman's eye.
MS has "Age of Empire". Microprose already did Civilization.
MS has X-Box. Sony and Nintendo already had products in this area.
MS Money is a Quicken clone.
Visio was already Visio before MS purchased them.
MS NetMeeting was innovated by another company (Databeam) and purchased by MS.
MSN Instant Messenger comes from IRC by way of AIM and ICQ.
For that matter, MSN is basicaly a value-added ISP, essentially AOL with butterflies.
Windows NT was really IBM's OS/2 technology for the most part.
DOS was purchased, and was, in any case, basically CP/M.
Windows post 95(b) provides Internet Access via TCP/IP, but they were probably the last player to enter that game.
Media Player is basically just RealPlayer.
Someone please enlighten me . . . apart from legal and marketting ploys, what has MS actually innovated? What technology did they come up with themselves? (As opposed to either buying someone else's tech and rebranding it, or cloning someone else's idea.) So far, only ones I see as possibles are MS Project and MS PowerPoint, but I have a feeling that these are purchased technology also. (I seem to recall reading as much, but can't find the reference at the moment.)
Any MS apologists care to give us a list of MS innovations?
Balmer: next Iraqi Information minister... (Score:4, Funny)
Linus Doesn't Shoot... (Score:5, Funny)
Open source is based on the very principles of communism...
But the biggest difference is that Linus isn't going to send you to N. Finland and have Alan Cox shoot you if you whine on /. about your latest/greatest kernel patch...
;)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
What I think, is the open source community needs to work more on marketing, documentation, and support. I believe that's the area that is lacking the most. Probably one of the best ways to education people on linux and open source is to get it in the schools. Kids usually tech their parents how to use computers.
Go calculate [webcalc.net] something
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Cummunism is the result of a cycle beginning with Fuedalism. Then capitalism, socialism and finally communism. At least that is what Marx and Engel wrote in their manifesto. Capitalism is the state of economic affairs where there is two classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) and the people are detached from the government. Socialism combines the two classes but leaves the government seperated from the people. Ideally, communism would have the state dissapear completely because the people would not need any centralized control (they are obviously happy according to Marx).
For the record, Fascism is when the state controls the means of distribution, socialism is where the state controls the means of production.
In this case Microsoft, the convicted monopolist, is closer to the central state than the any of the GPL hordes. [conspiracy] I even think that the GPL will ensure that, once Microsoft does control everything, the transition from central control to responsible individual control will be forced to occur where it failed in the past. [/conspiracy] Still, this is more anarchism or libertarian than communist as history defines it.Microsoft is the epitome of capitalism turning into socialism. As Microsoft completes its domination of the software market, it will control the means of production. Since the people have no purchasing choice, they are controlled. Open Source is, as the parent poster points out, close to ideal communism. Communism as a model is too flawed for practical use because it is the nature of man to be selfish. Hobbes and Machiavelli trumps Marx and Sir Thomas More every time.
Also, motivation [to] do what you want vs. money earned to do what you hate is far more of an incentive for most.Motivation is important, but motivation to survive is supreme. I would rather code for Microsoft and feed my kids than code for free and enjoy it!
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, with all this poiticization of "Open Source", I feel a strong desire to distance myself from this "movement". I much prefer the days when Linux was just Linux and people used it 'cause it was useful, not for some ridiculous philosophical or political reasons.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Soviet "communism" was never that, it was Soviet socialism with a bit of fascism thrown in for good measure.
Communism itself is just an idea that has been turned into a bad word by seemingly endless propaganda. I'm actually surprised that Ballmer hasn't thrown in the new buzzword for bashing things you don't like. (You know, the "t" word.)
Another informed reader (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another informed reader (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words: If Linux couldn't beat the snot out of Windows on everything but ease of use, then Windows would indeed be the best choice. The facts, however, clearly show that in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, Linux can and will outperform Windows on an older machine. It's more stable, it's more secure, it adheres to standards, it's faster, and it's more likely to advance faster than MS could possibly keep pace. All of this for free.
Especially in the server realm, Linux will continue to grow while MS still operates under the delusion that if they say something enough (e.g. "Linux sucks"), people will believe them.
Re:No wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Additionally, arguing stability no longer works: 2000 and 2003 are quite stable, they're both remarkably fast (apache on 2000 is a nice platform), and while I certainly use unix on my servers, there's certainly reasons where windows would be an accep
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Much easier to let Microsoft take care of you and feed you, isn't it. Ignore those other web servers for Windows because Mommy Gates doesn't make them.
Open source was doomed from the beginning. [...] Open source is based on the very principles of communism:
The American revolution was doomed from the beginning. It was based on the very principles of democracy, and look what happened to the Roman republic. It's easy to make a simplistic analysis, but the simple fact of the matter is that open source works.
People ignore the basic fundamentals required (a decent media server),
The basic fundamentals required include a media server? Since when?
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia, Linux kernel patches YOU!
OK, that silliness aside, let me get more serious about your comments on OSS and communism. You said:
Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it.
OK, so far this part is correct in a way. You do have a sort of joint ownership of the software in that anyone can contribute to it in some way.
The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard.
This is where I lose you. What I think you're trying to say is that the reason communism fails is that while communism seeks to guarantee everyone a certain amount of resources and rights, it does not take into account the fact that many people want more than that.
This is not at all apropos in OSS. Everyone working on a particular OSS project is NOT equal. Some inevitably rise to the top, whether by being incredibly prolific, by providing the most useful patches, or some combination of the two. In "pure" communist systems, you don't have this. In fact, it's discouraged. Having more than your neighbor destroys the system.
If I had to use some sort of analogy with political systems, I would have to say that many OSS projects are a kind of constitutional monarchy. You have one or a few that are in charge of the project, but there is some underlying set of rules that prevent the "rulers" from exercising too much power. For example, see how Linus Torvalds is often referred to as the "benevolent dictator". In that example, he wields a little more power than your typical constitutional monarchy, but it can be see from past discussions on the kernel mailing lists that he LISTENS to people.
But here you state something that I do agree with, but I don't see the connection with communism, so I'll treat it as an individual topic:
So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on. People ignore the basic fundamentals required (a decent media server), and instead work on a 3D GUI for X.
This is indeed a problem. Because OSS is open and free-wheeling, people work on what they want to work on, and less "glamorous" features or projects fall by the wayside. Perhaps we need more companies like IBM, willing to pay developers to work on OSS code that gets released back into the community.
False Statement (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry but this is completely backwards and dangerously misleading. Communism (the logical extreme of socialism) is not defined by common goals or teamwork but force, and force alone. At the root of anything and everthing socialism is force: the people are forced to contribute to some goal, product, or service defined by those in power. The motivation, or incentive, is not common interests as the socialist rulers would like you to believe. The motivation is pure force. If you don't contribute, you go to jail.
By contrast, the root of free market economics (capitalism) is voluntary association. The motivation is not force but achievement. The open source movement, therefore, is a product of capitalism, not socialism. Open source software fits perfectly into the capitalist model, precisely because open source software is a voluntary undertaking. It is voluntary association -- not force -- that makes open source work.
Incidentally, this is exactly why I oppose the use of tax dollars to fund open source software: it takes a pristine example of what can be accomplished when people are free to interact voluntarily and transforms it into a product of force.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
You're first point is that there are too many mediocre applications. You point out there are 23 web servers, one of which Apache was for you a clear choice. Your implied question then is why waist time on the other 22. The answer is choice. Not everyone has the same requirements for a web server, or any other piece of software. By creating multiple overlapping programs the Open Source community gives itself flexibility. This flexibility comes with the cost of inefficiency, so your point is well taken. I would like to point out however that redundancy of design occurs in almost every commercial industry. Most auto manufactures produce an SUV. Would it not by your augment be better to have one manufacture (say Ford) focus exclusively on SUV's while another (say Toyota) made exclusively compact cars? Yet to insure competition and consumer choice all the major auto makers make all the major classes of vehicles.
This leads to you second fallacy; one that I am also guilty of in this essay. The Open Source community is not really a single community. Each software project is its own community. Just the auto industry is not one industrial machine, but each manufacture is it own company.
Your next complaint is in many areas projects are incomplete. As an example you point to the lack of QuickTime support in any of the 4 media programs you tried. This is a real problem. Open Source projects suffer from regulations designed for a commercial software market. If I were an Open Source zealot, I would advise you to use your considerable rhetorical and writing skills to make changes in the government structure. As a moderate, I will instead simply concede that Open Source projects are hampered by proprietary information and ask that this be held as mark against proprietary standards and not as a failing of the concept of Open Source development.
On your final point, that Open Source is doomed by the same economic factors that impede communism. I have been throughout this paper comparing the software and auto industries. At this point I would like to contrast them. When a car is built in Detroit, the factory workers spent there time and effort on a product they themselves will not use. Were the plant workers not able to exchange their product for others, there would be no incentive to continue to make cars. On the other hand, when a software developer writes a program, the programmer is able to use that program him or her self. In addition it is possible with software, unlike cars, to quickly and at virtually no cost, reproduce the work product. Software cannot be thought of as just another consumer good (to spite Microsoft's attempt to make that happen) the nature of software allows for a community to invest time, talent, and treasure into it and not be deprived of any think by giving it away. Therefore, incentive to work on a software product remains while there are people who need to use it.
Here is a concrete example of this. You earlier bemoaned the fact that there was not a good media player for GNU/Linux. It would appear then that you have incentive to make one, or to have one made for you. You do not need the incentive of monetary compensation to have this desire, but only the need for functionality. Were you to make one, or lacking that skill, compensate others for making one, your reward would be the product. You could then allow others to use this software without your self loosing the benefits. But, let us assume that you have neither the skill and time to produce such a media player, nor the resources to properly compensate someone else to. We can assume that there are others with your same desire. By forming a community you can pool the resources necessary to create the desired product and, because software is infinitely reproducible all share in the benefits. Open Source will indeed follow the hot software, but so will Commercial sof
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Point by point:
23 web servers
What distro are you using that comes with 23? Or did you just go to Source Forge and search for webservers? I don't know of any distro that ships with 23.
4 media servers, none of which support Quicktime, 3 of which support low-res Real only: unusable.
Apple makes a Quicktime media server that runs on BSD,Linux, Windows, and OSX I believe its free. Logged on to RealNetworks just now. They have a version of their Helix Streaming Server for free and guess what, it runs on Linux as well as a bunch of other platforms.
Very little XML support, which is important because our document retrival system is based upon it.
Funny I develop on Linux using XML all the time. There seem to be several libraries for doing so.
Very buggy when uploading to Windows clients, which is very important
This doesn't even make sense. What are you uploading and how? What are you using on the client side to upload? If its FTP chances are you are using a braindead client that doesn't know the difference between Windows and Unix newline characters.
since Linux is so easy to screw up
Yes if you give clueless people access to commands that can screw up the system. 90% of the time if you don't give someone root they can't do anything to the system that would damage beyond repair. Contrast to windows where by default you are logged in at the 'root' level and can just go delete a bunch of DLLs if you want.
and there's no applications for imaging or like Norton's GoBack.
I believe that 'dd' will do what you want though admitidly I've never tried it on an entire harddrive.
What open source needs to do
Then shut-up and start coding or pay someone to do so. This also refutes the whole communism thing. We aren't forced to work on this stuff (ie communism) we do it because its fun and we release it in hopes that it will be useful to someone else. I don't write stuff for you, I write stuff for me. If you don't have the time/skills to write your own then call up someone who can and offer them money to code what you want them to.
As far as Open Source being doomed: then why has it been happening since the beginning of computing? Closed Source is a Microsoft invention. Companies wouldn't dream of giving out their product (free or for sale) without source.
And finally ask some of the communist companies that are making money off the sale and support of Open source software, you know like IBM. Is IBM doomed because they support linux?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but you have to give back any changes to the community".
I want to requalify that slightly because the community isn't necessarily why some one licenses their code with the GPL (except RMS, maybe).
"I've written this software. It's free to use, it's free to modify, but if you are going to distribute it make sure I can get your changes too."
This is how some one writing GPL software gets economic benefit from the software by receiving the benefit of programming by those who use his programming.
Note, if you modify GPL software and never distribute it, your changes never have to be revealed. Although there is benefit to revealing those changes in order that you don't have to keep adding them in when some one else makes a change that you want.
Commnity tends to develop from this as a means of preventing anarchy and excessive forking.
Dastardly
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
By contrast, communism is based on the lack of ownership. The BSD license is a borderline example of this since it makes it very easy for someone to revoke your right of ownership with even the slightest modification to the source code.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a good example of fascism since you never own but rather license their software under their strict terms. Your are forbidden from doing anything with their software without their express consent.
There's your politics lesson for the day, now go troll elsewhere.
Re:No wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
This "interview" is nothing but FUD:
Ballmer: Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in. I would argue that our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that community.
Um...okay. So Apache isn't innovative? Distributed/cell computing isn't innovative? TiVo wasn't innovative? Granted, a lot of OpenSource projects are started in response to an idea or single implementation in the private sector (e.g., WordPerfect & Lotus -> OpenOffice, UNIX -> Linux, etc.), but web browsers started as basically open software. Not to mention that the directions taken in OS projects often involve quite a bit of innovation on the parts of the maintainers.
Ballmer: Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition.
So is XP (NT/DOS). So is OS X (NextOS/BSD). None of these XX-year-old systems have been unchanged over their lifetimes. The only really new OS that has been somewhat popularized recently was BeOS (some the POSIX layer was originally based on MINIX, I think), but MS stomped that out of existence. This statement is pure FUD.
Ballmer: Some people say it is an advantage that Linux gets built in all of these little pieces. The fact is that if you want to do some kind of integrated innovation that touches the kernel, that touches the user interface--there is no way. Maybe Linus (Torvalds) can control the innovation in the piece called the kernel, but there are many pieces.
Wha...? Who...? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Anyone can make changes to the kernel or user interface or both. TiVo did it. Embedded devices do it all the time. Hell, they could even do it without even talking to Linus.
Ballmer: The Linux world in some sense is a lot like the Unix world. There is not much communality. There is this distribution; there is that distribution. There is this user interface, there is that. Some people might see some advantages to that. On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition.
I'm sorry. I have no idea what "communality" is, but I've got to assume that you either mean commonality or community or both. I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on both of these as well. The fact is I have a choice between distros (which is good), which basically give me access to much of the same core software. It's not like RedHat vs. Debian vs. Mandrake is going to leave me completely out in the cold with my choice of software. They all run the Linux kernel. They all have Apache. They all have the GNU tools. They all have Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, libpng, OpenSSL, zlib, on and on and on. Hell, they all provide reasonably similar desktop tools (but we are talking about Windows 2003 Server, right?). That doesn't even acknowledge that if there is something missing that I want, I can either (usually) download a binary for my distro, or, no matter what I'm using, I can often download the sources and type
FUD is another term for lies, and this interview is full of them. I'd go on, but it's not a very challenging excerise.
Re:Clone (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They aren't necessarily wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that HTTP.SYS thing sounds quite similar to the TUX in kernel web server switch. Innovation? Not sure. Check out Slicker. UI research. Is the GNOME2 "less is more" philosophy innovative? ReiserFS is really doing some cool things with filing systems.
The problem with "innovation" is that it's so badly defined. Everybody operates under a different definition. So, I don't see much coming out of the computing industry as a whole that I'd class as innovative right now. There are things. Just not many.
I don't think you can make arguments about whether open source is more innovative than proprietary software. I believe innovation is a function of the individual. Sure, there are innovative environments, but for every argument I've seen saying "open source isn't innovative" there are plenty of good counter arguments.
For instance, I would disagree totally with the idea that paid employees are more innovative by definition. The corporate environment is focussed on increasing the value of the company for shareholders - if you have no need to justify profit, you can work on all kinds of things that traditionally probably wouldn't get the green light, and who cares if you fail?
There are also examples of MS innovation, I mean, really innovative stuff like some of the IE bookmarking enhancements that MSR produced a few years ago, that simply never got into the main product. The researchers attitude was, "well we send the product team a report, but we don't know if they read them or not" which stunned me. At least with open source, if somebody doesn't want to implement your innovation, you can fork.
So I haven't seen any convincing arguments that open source isn't innovative. The majority of open source probably isn't, but then the majority of stuff is not innovative, that's part of what makes innovation special and prized.
Re:Best. Quote. Ever. (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't it be funny if he had then said:
Then we're going to go totally nuts, plug in the network cable and run something on it. Oh shit, I wasn't talking out loud just now, was I?
Not really. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Innovation" is coming up with something new and useful. None of these things you have listed qualifty as either; they have been done to death, and Microsoft is just catching up 20 years later. (Java was hardly the first VM. And yes, other VMs have attempted this at the OS level, including Java, and even non-VMs, like Lisp.) "Catching up" and "doing things you haven't seen from us before" seems to be the MS definition of "innovation," but it's not the well-accepted one.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We see the fact that people do not comprehend the reasons for X and its design, and rather look to things like having transparent windows as a more useful "feature" than network transparency. Standards like X and OpenGL are misunderstood; there are mechanisms for extending them with the fancy new features. There is no need to replace them, particularly with poorly-thought-out designs by people who don't truly understand windowing systems.
People who do understand them realize it's a lot easier to extend X than implement a new system. ;-)
It's better to stick with X than be subjected to an inferior attempt at a windowing system.