[plug] Common ground (was: M$ needs to educate lawmakers)

[Leon Brooks]

alan howard wrote:

> On Monday 19 February 2001 15:51, Leon Brooks wrote:
>> Did anyone else notice that the only thing Napster and Linux really have
>> in common are that they are undermining markets which Microsoft sees as
>> theirs?

> not realy. i didnt know microsoft was heavily into file sharing. sony music 
> seems to be the big pusher against napster, which is ironic when you consider 
> 25 years ago sony was sued by colombia pictures ( unsucsesfully ) for 
> including the record function on their beta-max vcrs

No, Microsoft are working very hard to dominate the music distribution 
industry (amongst many other things), note for example that WMP gets 
installed by practically every new Microsoft product or upgrade, and 
Microsoft is touting a secure-end-to-end music path through Windows - 
right down to the very sound-card, in theory.

Napster are not only a useful bogeyman for Microsoft to verbally 
associate with any enemy (particularly one like Linux which is not 
amenable to traditional corporate backstabbing, acquisition or financial 
assaults) but also a challenge to Microsoft's music distribution market.

Linux is, of course, a direct and effective threat to Windows 2000 and 
potentially Windows XP - and is often used as a platform for Apache 
(competitor for IIS), PHP (competitor for ASp VB-scripting), SendMail 
and PostFix (competitors for Exchange), BIND and Squid (competitors for 
MS-Proxy), PostgreSQL and MySQL (competitors for MS-SQL) and so on. Or 
even scarier from their POV, for things like Zope for which Microsoft 
has no direct competitor.

-- 
People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New
Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the
New Year and Christmas. -- Duncan Bailey