"A senior Red Hat engineer has lashed back at Microsoft's attempt to downplay concerns that upcoming secure boot features will make it impossible to install Linux on Windows 8 certified systems"
The Register September 26 2011
Without any doubt, Microsoft are the second most evil company in the world (after Monsanto)
Things that would be fatally damning for most other companies are constantly made public about MS and they continue on unchecked.
On the exceedingly rare occasion that they get prosecuted for something they simply throw a few "free" Windows + Office" licenses at the education institutions in the complaining jurisdiction and their troubles magically disappear.
The U.S. Government won't touch them because the U.S. has only 2 industries of any worth left, Tech and pop culture media.
These are the only things that the U.S. still has the ability to sell to the world, and it is no coincidence that these two industries are given complete freedom to screw everyone over in order to maintain their dominant positions in their respective markets.
Should the likes of MS, Oracle and Apple fall along with the MPAA and RIAA members then the USA would be truly irrelevant to 95% of the planet.
I'm sure their politicians are aware of this and thus they allow them to get away with anti-consumer practices across the board in order to retain their relevance in world markets.
All is not lost however because it is a negative strategy and ultimately negative strategies are destined to fail.
Despite their best efforts to use hostile litigation and anti-competitive lock-in strategies to keep at the top of the heap, eventually others will come along who offer better products with less pent up antagonism directed at them.
People increasingly come to resent being harassed, dictated to and having their choices removed for the benefit of corporate profiteers in another country.
People no longer *like* Microsoft, or their products. They associate them with boring jobs, and having to wait for ages while the crappy slow corp PC they have on their desk reboots after a crash . Even longer for patch Tuesday, not that they know what patch Tuesday is.
Microsoft and Windows are not cool. There is no "wow, I must get the new Windows phone" factor at play and the few remaining OS fanboys that are out there are not enough to sustain a corporation that is the size of the Beast of Redmond. On top of that, most of the OS fanboys have the ability (and willingness) to pirate their copies of Windows Ultimate Whizbang Professional Edition anyway.
If Microsoft do manage to achieve what they are trying to do with this latest lock-in gambit then they will just cause even greater dissent within their existing customer base and increase the rate of user defections to other forms of computing, such as tablets and such.
The thing that killed the netbook was MS and Intel trying to dictate to the OEMs what they could and couldn't build when it came to the Atom based laptops, known as "Netbooks".
In their arrogance they just assumed that everybody had no choice but to purchase PC's, and by creating a set of artificial limitations they could thereby force people to purchase PC's with a more expensive processor and OS just so they could get what they actually wanted, which was usually just a bit bigger screen.
Of course this strategy failed spectacularly and simply left a gaping hole in the market in which Apple promptly shoved the ipad to great success.
If MS succeed in their aims they will just push more people to purchase things other than PC's.
In fact, it is intel who should feel most scared by this. If MS succeed in tying x86 hardware to Windows alone then it will be the ARM vendors who will rush in to take up the slack.
I'm yet to be convinced that MS will be successful in their efforts to port their full Windows + Office stack to ARM so ARM makers would have no reason at all to yield to MS threats and lock their hardware to Windows.
Even if MS do succeed in getting Windows on to ARM, I doubt very much that most of the ARM vendors would be silly enough to listen to such threats anyway as it would mean cutting off what is currently 100% of their market in order to sell in a new market (Windows) which is completely unproven up to this point.
MS will fail. Every time they try one of the tricks that worked for them in the 90's they will find that those tricks no longer work in the more mature market of today.
They remind me of Bart Simpson on that episode where Lisa was using him as a psyche test subject with the electrified cupcake.
Hmmm, cupcake, OUCH!!!
grrrr
Hmmm, cupcake, OUCH!!!
grrrr
Hmmm, cupcake, OUCH!!!
grrrr
1 comment:
Firstly, 'Windows' has been on ARM for a while now in the guise of 'Windows CE'. Agreed, another horrible attempt by MS to enter the mobile market. I had an ARM based WinCE handheld many many years ago and it sucked.
As for the secure boot feature, I think there's more too it than just MS trying to lock computers to windows. Firstly, it's a security thing, which should keep MS's biggest customers happy (ie: government departments). But secondly, and most importantly, it can probably be turned off, because I doubt any hardware manufacturer these days would be stupid enough to agree to it otherwise.
If it can't though, then you're right, and I will exercise my right to choose a different hardware manufacturer for my computing needs.
Lastly, you forgot Apple in your list of the most evil corporations on the planet. They're at the top of my list.
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