Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows

[Bill Vermillion]

Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets that will last an eternity, 
but on Mon, Nov 22 18:50 , Brian K. White wrote:" 

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Bill Campbell" <bill at celestial.com>
> Subject: Re: Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows

> >On Mon, Nov 22, 2004, John Esak wrote:

> >>>Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows
> >>>John Fontana, Network World

> >>Wow!  That sounds pretty good...   :-)

> >Microsoft has a long history of buying companies that produce
> >products that compete with their Windows base, RealWorld and
> >similar accounting software, inexpensive SMTP servers when the
> >Microsoft Internet mail servers were about $5,000, and others.
> >Rarely do these *nix products last long after the acquisition.

> >Microsoft embraced and extended Kerberos specifically to make it
> >difficult to run their Windows clients on non-Windows servers.  I
> >don't see them being interested in promoting a product that makes
> >it easier to do this.

> Verily.

> I was just dealing with one example today, One client has (had)
> Great Plains, which MS bought and discontinued all non-Windows
> versions a long time ago. He hasn't been able to get support
> for his Novell version in years and that's one reason he now
> has a SCO box and a filePro app from us since 2 or 3 years ago.

> Examples abound. They don't buy things to support them, the
> buy them so they can kill them, or worse, change them into
> something you don't want anymore.

And when they can't buy them they put them out of business.

Go computers had a nice semi-labtop that recognized handwriting,
and State Farm was going to buy 150,000 of them for field agents.

But MS got involved telling people they were writing a hand-writing
recognition software called Pen-computing, and then started
talking about all the great things they were going to do.

Go lost all backing and went ouf of business.   Then MS dropped
the project.  One executive was quoted as saying "It only took
us $7 million to put a $50 million company out of business".

Microsoft so often seems at times to act so like the subjects of
Mario Puzo's book The Godfather - and the subsequent film of the
same name.

If you want to read the whole grizzly story on Go it was documented
in the book "Start Up".

The stories about MS were documented in several of the anti-MS 
hard-backs about the time the US Government started to go
after MS in court.

Some of the dealings at some of the software companies even
make lawyers look respectable in comparison.


Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com