The Mojave Experiment: Fake Results?

Last week, Micro$oft gave the results of an interesting experiment. They tricked 120 diehard XP users into testing a "new" version of windows codenamed Mojave then asked for their opinions. Of course, there was no such version, it was just Vista SP1 with a new theme. According to Micro$oft, over 90% of them where impressed with what they saw, even citing the reaction of one of the test subjects as "oh, wow!". Of course, and faster than people could blog about it, Micro$oft created a website for it, as a marketing move, no doubt. But after taking a look at it, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes made an interesting discovery:

At first blush, I think that you’re supposed to believe that you’re being presented with the views of all the participants, but when you actually count the screens, you see that there are only 55 on offer. OK, 55 out of 120/140, not bad... but...
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Once you eliminate the montages and people who appear in more than one clip, you end up with 35 participants who actually appear on screen [...] Given a pool of over 100 participants, I would have expected to have seen more faces, and definitely no duplicates. The way it looks to me is that Microsoft had a hard time filling the 55 available spaces with good commentary about Vista.

Funny, eh? Make your own conclusions, but my guess is that Micro$oft's PR people are, as usual, lying to us.

Embrace, Assimilate, Destroy

In the past months, Micro$oft as shifted from being extremely hostile to Open Source, to being very friendly to it. At first it came as a surprise, but now I can see the (possible) strategy they are following: embrace, assimilate, destroy. Call me anti-Micro$oft, but I refuse to believe in a company that has, for years, expressed their literal hate towards Open Source. This here is the latest move in that "embrace" part of the plan:

Open Specification Promise: Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.
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Apache Software Foundation: Microsoft is becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). This sponsorship will enable the ASF to pay administrators and other support staff so that ASF developers can focus on writing great software.

The open specification thingie is something that they have been playing with for a while now, but it still doesn't clarifies how future versions of Micro$oft code will be handled. It does cover some of the loopholes it had, so it IS a move in the right direction. The sponsorship to the ASF is less interesting, because it is just one of the many monetary contributions Micro$oft has made to the Open Source movement. One important thing about the contributions to the ASF, however, is the fact that they are doing their best to make Apache (the popular web server, and the flagship product of the ASF) work better in Windows than it does on, surprise, GNU/Linux. And here is where it all starts making sense. The point of all this "flattery" to the Open Source community might as well be only for the sake of establishing Windows as the best platform to work on, to make GNU/Linux lose all the ground it has gained so far. And when they are done with that, the killer blow:

PHP on IIS + SQL: Microsoft is contributing a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications. The patch enables support for SQL Server through the new “native driver for PHP” built by the SQL Server team. ADOdb is licensed under the LGPL and BSD. This is our first code contribution to PHP community projects but will not be the last.

In other words, their ultimate goal is to make people stop using LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) in favor of WISP stacks (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, PHP). And given their advantage over Open Source in terms of user base and raw amounts of money, I can see it happening in the near future.

Micro$oft And It's Quest To Destroy Google And Apple

Kara Swisher has a very good analisis of a memo Steve Ballmer, CEO of Micro$oft, sent to his employees. It's funny how he actually BELIEVES that they'll be able to develop a better phone than Apple. Specially when Apple has positioned itself with the iPhone (it's no secret that Apple's customers have the highest brand loyalty ratings in the industry) and Micro$oft has such an history of NOT doing a good job at defeating Apple at his game (Zune, anyone?). The other point he touches is Google, where he makes a good point (the only good point, IMO): Google's search result page is boring. Still, Micro$oft is not known for it's ability to innovate so, I doubt they'll be showing us anything new for a while... unless they "steal" from someone else, as usual.