Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows

[Henry Melancon]

So when is MS going to buy Filepro????


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Vermillion [mailto:fp at wjv.com]
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 6:19 PM
> To: filePro List
> Subject: Re: Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows
> 
> 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
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