Look at this comment from our mate Steve - Looks like Soda Pop plays an important roll in employee satisfaction at M$
Steve Ballmer recently came up with his own explanation of the
difference in approach between Microsoft and a company like Red
Hat by saying: “If we open source Windows… we wouldn’t have
enough profit to pay people, let alone invite in people from the
community. I’m not saying open source is a bad thing, but it
doesn’t pay the bills in this company, so we can’t embrace that
way of doing things. We give out free soda pop to everybody who
works here. We make our stuff free, people gotta give back the
soda pop – it’s just inconsistent with what we do around here.”
actually it sounds reasonable to me. Given the size of Microsoft, I don’t see how you can feed so many employees buy dealing with open source software.
It may well be that Microsoft-sized profits aren’t possible selling open-source bits. Of course, this obscures the fact that Google and others happily build businesses on open source and make Microsoft-esque profits. It’s all in figuring out what to sell. Microsoft’s model of selling software is a 20th-century model that will continue to work for it until enterprises discover that they now live in the 21st Century when software is free (but services are not)…He’s a relic of yesterday’s software model. He made a ton of money for himself and for shareholders and the residual of that model will feed many mouths with free soda for years. But it’s yesterday’s model, for yesterday’s companies.
On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 05:46 +0000, caf4926 wrote:
> Look at this comment from our mate Steve - Looks like Soda Pop plays an
> important roll in employee satisfaction at M$
>
> Steve Ballmer recently came up with his own explanation of the
> difference in approach between Microsoft and a company like Red
> Hat by saying: “If we open source Windows… we wouldn’t have
> enough profit to pay people, let alone invite in people from the
> community. I’m not saying open source is a bad thing, but it
> doesn’t pay the bills in this company, so we can’t embrace that
> way of doing things. We give out free soda pop to everybody who
> works here. We make our stuff free, people gotta give back the
> soda pop – it’s just inconsistent with what we do around here.”
>
>
Very true. Microsoft knows they’d have to completely change
their business model to be able to support a FOSS philosophy.
If Microsoft were to do “open source” without changing… they
would die (who cares about soda at that point).
A FOSS-centered Microsoft would require some severe “out of the
box” style thinking… and a lot of change… and a lot of risk
on their part. Microsoft doesn’t see that being possible…
someday they may regret their decision.
On 09/15/2008 geoffro wrote:
> Yea like he said google can do it…
Because Google doesn’t make money with software. They make money with information. The software you get from Google is “free” as in “the first shot of heroin is free”.
Well, Google’s main software is what they are running on their backends.
Show me the source for that. Also, Like Uwe said, Google’s business is not
selling software. Their main revenue sources are advertisments and
services. The little bit of software that Google is distributing to
customers merely serves their backend and is not a source of revenue in
itself.