There were a couple if very interesting articles on the web today. They were about vision, which some called madness, and about embracing, and all that goes along with it.
The first is Microsoft's announcement that
That announcement on TeamSilverlight's Blog spells a shift away from Microsoft's emphasis on SliverLight and toward the EMBRACING of the HTML5 protocol. In one fell swoop Microsoft has upended years of work on SliverLight, an important component of .NET.
First, there was the catastrophic failure of .NET on the London Stock Exchange and then HTML5 showed what was possible on the web with an open standard devoid of SilverLight technology. The entire .NET/SilverLight tool set now has an uncertain future and the comment section is filled with rage and rejection from former Microsoft adherents.
Microsoft's standard approach to innovation has been to capture a technological niche by adopting it ("embracing"), adding proprietary bits that run only on the Windows platform, thus leveraging their dominate market share ("extending"), and then extinguishing the competition by dropping the technology once the majority of the user base has shifted from the original source of the new technology to Microsoft's version. The hapless users were then given a "migration path" to Microsoft "other" proprietary choice for their lives, also more favorable to its bottom line. This tactic worked well for years, aided by Plamondon's trained "Technical Evangelists" acting as 5th columnists inside "enemy camps". Then they tried it on Java using their Microsoft Java Virtual Machine ... and Sun sued them, which led to J#, a dead-end product. Java survived.
but today, it is a different world. Microsoft no longer holds a 95% market share of the world's desktops. Even Ballmer himself, over a year ago, put Microsoft's market share at less than 80%, and VISTA only made the situation worse. Win7 hasn't helped that much because PC sales are down and Win7 is mostly replacing VISTA and XP. Microsoft is losing market share. Even Microsoft's attempt at meida manipulation is meeting with skepticism. Apparently paying for another "report" which "shows" their market percentage dropping 2.4% to 92.8% in 2014 doesn't have the same effectiveness as it use to have. The comments are skeptical. People just don't believe the hype any more.
The second is an opinion by Jim Lynch decrying Canonical's switch to Unity on its 11.04 Ubuntu desktop. Jim calls it "madness". A LOT of the Gnome fans are disturbed and, like KDE 3.5 fans, they promise to seek out other distros if Unity becomes reality. Most seem to think that Linux Mint will save their Gnome. Maybe Linux Mint will become Gubuntu, with the same status as Kubuntu. Stranger things have happened. However, what a few have pointed out in the comments is a point I also agree with -- Unity is just another DE choice, not a loss of freedom.
From my POV, Canonical dodged a bullet by switching Ubuntu to a DE of their own making, and Microsoft may have unwittingly (?) helped. De Icaza was using C#/Mono to re-write Gnome. Mono had originally required C# wrappings around GTK+ API, creating GTK#, in order to have GUI capability inside Gnome. But, de Icaza was replacing GTK# with his version of .NET's GUI components, thus turning Gnome into a Mono/C# Desktop where GTK+ was unnecessary. His dev teams were busy replacing apps written in GTK+ with those written with Mono. His next goal was to replace libc6 (written in C) with a C# version, thus making everything above the kernel dependent on Mono/C#, the second step on the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" paradigm Microsoft has employed so successfully in the past. When that stage was completed the only thing left for Microsoft to do was to determine when to "pull the trigger" and declare the whole ball of wax a violation of the terms of the EMCA 334 & 335 standard. Microsoft is, after all, THE ONLY agent which determines the validity of an expression of those two standards.
Will Mono remain in Ubuntu? Like I have always stated at the bottom of my posts and emails... see below ...
The first is Microsoft's announcement that
When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices. But the world has changed. As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible. We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices. At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows...
First, there was the catastrophic failure of .NET on the London Stock Exchange and then HTML5 showed what was possible on the web with an open standard devoid of SilverLight technology. The entire .NET/SilverLight tool set now has an uncertain future and the comment section is filled with rage and rejection from former Microsoft adherents.
Microsoft's standard approach to innovation has been to capture a technological niche by adopting it ("embracing"), adding proprietary bits that run only on the Windows platform, thus leveraging their dominate market share ("extending"), and then extinguishing the competition by dropping the technology once the majority of the user base has shifted from the original source of the new technology to Microsoft's version. The hapless users were then given a "migration path" to Microsoft "other" proprietary choice for their lives, also more favorable to its bottom line. This tactic worked well for years, aided by Plamondon's trained "Technical Evangelists" acting as 5th columnists inside "enemy camps". Then they tried it on Java using their Microsoft Java Virtual Machine ... and Sun sued them, which led to J#, a dead-end product. Java survived.
but today, it is a different world. Microsoft no longer holds a 95% market share of the world's desktops. Even Ballmer himself, over a year ago, put Microsoft's market share at less than 80%, and VISTA only made the situation worse. Win7 hasn't helped that much because PC sales are down and Win7 is mostly replacing VISTA and XP. Microsoft is losing market share. Even Microsoft's attempt at meida manipulation is meeting with skepticism. Apparently paying for another "report" which "shows" their market percentage dropping 2.4% to 92.8% in 2014 doesn't have the same effectiveness as it use to have. The comments are skeptical. People just don't believe the hype any more.
The second is an opinion by Jim Lynch decrying Canonical's switch to Unity on its 11.04 Ubuntu desktop. Jim calls it "madness". A LOT of the Gnome fans are disturbed and, like KDE 3.5 fans, they promise to seek out other distros if Unity becomes reality. Most seem to think that Linux Mint will save their Gnome. Maybe Linux Mint will become Gubuntu, with the same status as Kubuntu. Stranger things have happened. However, what a few have pointed out in the comments is a point I also agree with -- Unity is just another DE choice, not a loss of freedom.
From my POV, Canonical dodged a bullet by switching Ubuntu to a DE of their own making, and Microsoft may have unwittingly (?) helped. De Icaza was using C#/Mono to re-write Gnome. Mono had originally required C# wrappings around GTK+ API, creating GTK#, in order to have GUI capability inside Gnome. But, de Icaza was replacing GTK# with his version of .NET's GUI components, thus turning Gnome into a Mono/C# Desktop where GTK+ was unnecessary. His dev teams were busy replacing apps written in GTK+ with those written with Mono. His next goal was to replace libc6 (written in C) with a C# version, thus making everything above the kernel dependent on Mono/C#, the second step on the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" paradigm Microsoft has employed so successfully in the past. When that stage was completed the only thing left for Microsoft to do was to determine when to "pull the trigger" and declare the whole ball of wax a violation of the terms of the EMCA 334 & 335 standard. Microsoft is, after all, THE ONLY agent which determines the validity of an expression of those two standards.
Will Mono remain in Ubuntu? Like I have always stated at the bottom of my posts and emails... see below ...
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