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Story: Microsoft exec talks patent politics

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Microsoft can no longer innovate effectively.

This attack of fear, uncertainty and doubt over IP issues is a sad state of affairs for Microsoft. It is an admission that they cannot keep up with pace and innovation of open source development, their creaking legacy codebase is too spaghetti infested for even their massive resources to handle effectively. Six years between versions of Windows, and for what ? The big new security feature, i.e. enter the admin password was present in Unix some 30 years ago, how about respecting that IP ?

Microsoft now have no option but to employ lawyers with bully boy tactics to coerce businesses to buy their products or those of a subservient partner (Novell). The dinosaur is in trouble, the small hairy mammals of the open source world are more nimble and continue to eat into their market space - eg the Dell / Ubuntu announcement. The Linux distros deliver new functionality on a 6 monthly cycle - not 6 YEARS. It is a vibrant software ecosystem that is evolving rapidly.

This admission of sluggishness is a sad admission indeed, given that MS have made much use of open source in their own products in the past (for example the BSD TCP/IP stack). Its morally and technically repugnant.

Forget legalistic games, try to get back to innovation.

IT manager 07

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