[clue-talk] The reason MS is winning against Linux?

[Nate Duehr]

Sean LeBlanc wrote:

> I'd say this article reads like PR FUD. It's good to consider all your
> options, but this article seems pretty lean on actual data and how they came
> up with those numbers. And notice who they talked to - the chairman of the
> board? I bet you could really snow someone in that position when it comes to
> technology.

Sorry, I'm going to head off into the OT ditch here for a moment, 
because I think you bypassed a major point there.

"Leadership", especially Board members of major Corporate entities who 
can't follow what's going on in technology in the Information Age, is 
actually a major problem with any company that has it -- the 
shareholders should be pounding their fists on the tables of every 
shareholder meeting for the heads of the Board if they can't keep up 
with modern technology.

Boards that can't lead from above get lead from below, but much more 
slowly.  How many companies had Linux handling core business computing 
needs long before even the middle managers knew what it was?  A lot.

Unfortunately most shareholders these days don't act like shareholders. 
  They buy their stocks via mutual funds and pay zero attention to the 
purpose of shareholders... to act to protect their investment when the 
company leadership is inept.  As Warren Buffet says, "Shareholders need 
to remember that they own the company."

Add in a little greed, and the problem can snowball -- read: Enron.  The 
shareholders didn't want to know what the Board and execs were hiding. 
They wanted only unreasonable, unsustainable profits from some silly 
snake oil process that Enron claimed to know better than anyone else, 
that had nothing to do with real market value.

Plenty of other good examples out there, that when you spend a lot of 
time analyzing them, you realize could have been headed off at the pass 
if the shareholders had simply stood up as a group and said, "Hey... we 
know you're doing this wrong and we're leaving with our money if you 
don't explain why or find Board members who can keep up."

Google, of course, appears (at least as an outsider and 
non-shareholder!) to be an extreme opposite example.  Their upper 
eschelons "get it" so well, we're all baffled at what they're going to 
do next, but they keep figuring it out... and they appear to have a very 
  well laid-out plan they're willing to take as much time as they need, 
to get there.  They started with Linux farms and damn smart people, and 
look what they've done... I wouldn't exactly show up at a shareholder 
meeting at Google with any concerns that the people sitting on the other 
side of the table didn't understand Technology!

Nate
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