[TriLUG] Ford Drops Windows for their Sync System

[matt at noway2.thruhere.net]

> I predicted that Microsoft would continue to fall short in adhering to
> computing standards. Instead they have tried and failed to drive the
> standard requirements to their advantage and this is working against them.
(snip)
> There is no way that they can keep up their development cost when the
> rest of the world is developing an OS at a neck-break pace. They should
> concentrate on what they do best and that is end user applications. They
> are a premium supplier of productivity applications. I think if they
> concentrated on the applications, they could even get back into serious
> server applications, which they are now left out because of their crappy
> OS. Their two pieces of gold are .NET and User Domain control for desktop
> maintenance and a UNIX variant would not have to change either of them.

This reminds me of how a few years ago they made their software
development tools freely available for download.  It used to be that you
had to pay some major beau coup bucks to get them and I always assumed
that this is part of what drove people towards *NIX which has support for
multitudes of languages.  The same thing could also be said about TCP/IP
support back in the 90s.

Perhaps this was their way of trying to get people to develop applications
for their platform and leverage off of the open source concept.

All the hype about their latest OS sales figures aside, as an OS provider,
I agree that they are in trouble.