Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Nov 22, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>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.

I've heard that Microport had developed a way to run Xenix
binaries under their version of Unix in the mid '80s, but when
Hicrosoft found about it, they sent a letter to Microport
promising to ``sue them out of business'' if they tried to sell
the product with Xenix capabilties.  Microport could probably
have won in court, but didn't have enough money to pay their land
sharks so dropped the product.

>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.

Remember that Bill Gates father is a lawyer, and the M$ legal department is
larger than most software companies.  Remember too that it was Microsoft
lawyers who finally took out the Borg after the Enterprise infected the
Borg ship with the Windows virus and Solitaire.

Bill
--
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