[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“MS Apps will acquire Word, Excel, PowerPoint and maybe Outlook.
Microsoft has denied persistent rumors that it is porting Office to
Linux, but its professed reluctance could be a bargaining chip.
Part of a proposed remedy was to require such a port. MS Apps might
protest that rewriting Word to use the X Window System API would be
too much trouble, and propose instead to use a virtual machine to
host Word. They could take Wine (stands for “Wine Is Not a
[Windows] Emulator”) and modify it, adding proprietary,
closed-source extensions. I believe their shenanigans with Kerberos
were a dry run. Wine is open-source, so MS Apps might use that
opportunity to challenge the Gnu Public License in court. They will
make their libraries available for a price, although the price may
not be in dollars. Since Wine is far from finished, the temptation
to use those libraries will be too great for some Linux developers.
As someone (I think it was ESR) has observed, developer mindshare
is as important as market share to Microsoft.”
“MS-OS will inherit the wind–I mean Windows. (That was an
allusion to Darwin for you Macophiles). MS-OS will probably get IIS
and the other server software. For reasons I outlined in my
previous article, I believe that Windows 2000 Desktop will be
popular but W2k Server will fall by the wayside. As part of
divestiture, Microsoft may be forced to remove features from
Desktop that work only with Server. Expect Windows to start showing
modules that look a lot like applications minus the GUI–voice over
IP, ICU, and instant messaging and voice recognition if they can
ever figure it out. The Microsoft motto will morph into, “It’s not
an app, it’s a feature!”
“Microsoft will prove to be a planarian (flatworm). Cut it
into two, and the parts will grow into three full-size
flatworms.”