Interview with MS' economist

[Warren Togami]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roderick A Gammon" <AEG-Inc at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 9:19 PM
Subject: [luau] Interview with MS' economist


> This is an interview with the economist that testified _for_ Microsoft.
> http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-6271161-0.html
>
> He is Dean of Sloan business school, but appears otherwise clueless.  When
> asked about why Linux doesn't approach desktop penetration he notes:
>
> "And it's clearly not going to. I don't understand the technology, so I
> can't figure out why it's that hard. Linux may be harder, but I keep
saying
> to myself there are certain basic things you want. Couldn't you take Linux
> and put an interface on it that made it, in effect, into a Windows
emulator?
> Why couldn't you do that? You're doing certain functions, there are
certain
> Linux commands. Why can't you write something that takes what you do
> graphically to do it in Windows, translates it into Linux commands, and
> executes it? I don't have a clue. I don't know this technology, but
> obviously no one's done it, so it can't be quite that straightforward..."
>
> Is it me or have the WINE faqs, since time immemorial, indicated that the
> reason it is so hard has to do with fabricated issues and not tech ones?
> Namely legal issues?
>
> Sheesh.
> -rod g
> ____________________________________________
>
> President, AEG, Inc.     | PhD. Candidate
> Tools for multi-lingual  | Chinese Computational Linguistics
> information processing.  | University of HI @ Manoa
> http://www.aeg-inc.net   | http://www.aeg-inc.net/cuttingEdge

Not entirely legal issues.  It is just that their API's have too many secret
undocumented hooks that tremendously benefit Microsoft software over 3rd
party software.  When they decide they want to destroy a competitor, they
make their platform incompatible with that competitor's software with more
secret changes.

You could always get specification documents on Windows API's and Microsoft
Word file formats from MSDN, but they are always incomplete and misleading.
They are carefully crafted to not give key information necessary to create
Windows emulators and compatible software, and in some cases are pure lies
about the underlying system.  WINE developers have to figure out all of this
with pure reverse engineering... a difficult and time consuming task.  You
not only have to implement the documented API, but the secret API, and also
emulate Windows BUGS that many software rely on to function.