Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Slashdot runs an excellent discussion on the topic of “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“.  If you want to learn more about what people on the Web had changed their minds in 2007, try this Google search - plenty more there.

What did I change my mind about in 2007?  Short answer: Google.  Continue reading for the long version.

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Remember the other time I was agreeing with Matt Mullenweg’s prediction of Microsoft opening sources of Windows by 2017?  Remeber I wrote a list of bullets with my reasons?  Remember the first one being:

Neither Microsoft in general, no Bill Gates are stupid.  They are very much profit oriented. Whatever makes them more money, they’ll go for it.

Well, here is another piece of news that confirms that.

Quote #1:

Novell was paid a whopping $355.6 million by Microsoft in return for software licensing

Quote #2:

Microsoft purchasing 70,000 licences for Novell’s SuSE Linux enterprise server, which accounts for much of what Microsoft was paying for. Microsoft, in turn, then sells these on to its customers.

Quote #3:

“This is to bridge the divide between open source and proprietary source software,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the time, in what amounted to an abrupt about-face on his part given his previous criticism of Linux. “It gives customers greater flexibility in ways they have certainly been demanding.”

Here is a quote from Scott Rosenberg’s insightful post, titled “Clash of titanic business-press cliches“  (emphasis is mine):

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.
Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.    I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

Every day I read more and more blogs and less and less mainstream news. Why? Because mainstream news suck! Most of the mainstream news agencies carry the heavy burden of the printed press and a century of mass media from before the Internet.

Picture is a thousand words they say. Here is a graphical example for you. Cool Tech Zone - “A Division of iTech Media.” Blah blah blah. One of the recent news items is titled “Microsoft Buys Out Opera“. Catching, isn’t it? It is.

In 5 paragraphs of text to follow, they tell that Microsoft is closing a deal purchasing Opera Software. Google is mentioned and so on and so forth. Makes one read a lot, wonder, think, wonder, think, and read some more…

6th paragraph reads:

Update: Opera recently confirmed that Microsoft has not approached the browser maker and there is no active acquistion deal between the two companies currently.

In plain English? OK. “All you’ve just read above is bullcrap. Lies. We just made it up.” Yeah. They just wasted a whole bunch of your time. And they are not sorry. “Opera recently confirmed…” Confirmed? Confirmed what? They didn’t confirm anything. In fact, they contradicted. It should have read something like “Opera recently contradicted this whole article.”

I’m telling you - blogs rule…

P.S.: Slashdot post