QUOTE(Jonny Cache @ Wed 24th January 2007, 10:14pm)
[*] That there's any amount of money you can pay somebody to say nice things about Microsoft.
I know, it certainly seems that way sometimes... But think of the tens of thousands, maybe
hundreds of thousands, of IT people out there whose livelihoods are almost completely dependent on Microsoft's continued success. And that doesn't include what must be untold
millions of people in a wide variety of jobs who have been trained on the software and at this point, barely know how to use much of anything else.
This is an interesting case, in many respects. Microsoft has always been between a rock and a hard place on issues like this - they presumably don't
want to support non-proprietary standards, as they would prefer that everyone simply use MS Word/Excel/etc. and not deviate from their vision of universal conformity to things that they control. But if they're seen as trying to undermine the development of such standards, then people start using the M-word (i.e., "monopolist") against them, and probably for good reason - which just upsets them all the more, really.
The fact is - and I hate to be the one to say it, but it's true - Wikipedia has always been a haven for Microsoft-bashers. But it's one of those situations where if Microsoft sues the Wikimedia Foundation over
anything, then it's just going to validate what people have said all along, namely that they want to "control the internet," squash open standards, and kill off open-source development in general. (The fact that they actually do want to do those things doesn't help, of course!)
It's hard to feel sorry for them, what with the billions of dollars always rolling in... but to the extent that it also hurts the little-guy business partner who's increasingly dependent on Microsoft's success to survive, it's all rather sucky.
