Microsoft

That's what this news would lead one to suspect. In sum, Mandriva won a deal with the Nigerian government, only to have Microsoft fight tooth and nail after the fact to win it back. Just good competition, right? Maybe. But Mandriva's CEO points to something a bit more (or less, depending on how you look at it).

In an open letter to Steve Ballmer, Mandriva CEO Fran?ois Bancilhon called out Microsoft's tactics:

Then your people entered the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. They fought and fought the deal, but still the customer was happy to get CMPC and Mandriva.… Read more

For a computer, dealing with color is just another math problem. And Microsoft wants to change the way your PC counts.

The company has developed a color space--a way to encode colors as numbers a computer can process--called scRGB. If the company succeeds in getting it to catch on, the technology could help add depth and richness to photos taken with digital cameras and viewed on a computer or TV screen.

Today's cameras and computers usually employ a color space called sRGB, developed in the 1990s by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, that describes colors as a particular combination of … Read more

Once again Microsoft continues to muddy its SOA (service-oriented architecture) strategy with a push into model-driven development (MDD). While on the surface it may appear that this is meaningful, in fact all Microsoft is doing is dumbing down the already mediocre tools and "prescriptions" that currently suggest an obvious misunderstanding of the fundamental (primarily vendor-enforced) components of SOA, which usually include items like business process management, enterprise service bus, registry and governance.

Instead, Microsoft has a set of things that are not in line with any other vendor or standards group: "a bundle of BizTalk Server 2006 … Read more

It's a small thing, but Sony got some good news today related to its troubled PlayStation 3 video game console. In fact, the system helped set a new Guinness World Record.

The record was set by Stanford University's Folding@home project, a distributed computing system utilizing PS3s among other computers, to help scientists study the effects of a process called "protein folding" on a series of serious diseases.

Well, Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last … Read more

There was a day when Microsoft's confidential internal documents had to be leaked in order to show the company's views on open source (dubbed the "Halloween Documents" by Eric Raymond). Not so anymore. We haven't had a leak in a few years, but we've had more information than ever on what Microsoft intends to do about open source.

Unfortunately, the older Microsoft gets, the more complex its relationship with open source becomes, as the following "Halloween Documents" demonstrate:

Before you read this, you should read this. I regretted this post shortly after posting it.

I think Miguel de Icaza is an exceptional developer. He's also a fantastically effective community leader. And, though he's never displayed his best side to me, personally, I understand that he's a quality person that people like to be around.

For these reasons I can't help but wonder why he's squandering his talents on writing largely irrelevant code (Mono, Moonlight) that appeals to himself, Novell, Microsoft, and no one else.

It's not that Microsoft is a bad company. It's that Miguel could be doing so much more for the industry if he stopped cloning the Microsoft experience on Linux and instead drove forward the Linux/open source experience. Sam Varghese writes:

For a long time de Icaza, who is now on the staff of Novell, appears to have been trying to please the people at Redmond. First it was with Mono, his implementation of Microsoft's .NET development environment.… Read more

It's by no means the most interesting thing that I write about, but Microsoft tops the list of topics read by Open Road readers. In fact, it accounts for four of the top 10 posts on this blog since its inception in July.

The only open-source vendors to crack the top 10 are OpenAds and MySQL. For an open-source blog, that's a wee bit depressing.

Here they are:… Read more

It continues to amaze me at how overlooked Microsoft's crown jewel is: SharePoint.

It's not overlooked by the market, which has bought it up to the tune of $1 billion or so in license fees in its first four years. Yet its competitors have largely downplayed it as a threat--even partnering with it--as it pillages their installed bases.

Now Microsoft is taking its SharePoint story one step further by decoupling it from Windows Server.

I wish I could think of some nefarious reasons for this, but it actually seems to be worse for Microsoft, not better. If Microsoft were cutting SharePoint adrift of Windows, allowing the collaboration portal to work with something other than Internet Explorer, SQL Server, Windows, and IIS, then it would be a truly killer move. (That isn't the case. If you go SharePoint, you have to buy into the complete Microsoft ecosystem.)

It's just a separate download that still only works with Windows. Microsoft gave these reasons:… Read more