The Small Wave.

There’s an article on Roughly Drafted about a pilot program at IBM “designed to study the possibility of moving significant numbers of employees to the Mac platform.”

The article is a worthwhile read, and includes comments from users in the program, and what IBM’s next steps will be.

What I’m writing about is not RD’s article, or even the program itself, but rather a comment made by a user in the program:

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What started here, ended here today. It took only two months.

You gotta love this:

According to a Wal-Mart spokesman quoted on AP, “This really wasn’t what our customers were looking for.”

Ya think? Linux is a geek OS. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the price is right, but geeks don’t tend to shop at Wal-Mart. What ever made them think this would play to their customer base in the first place?

Just as they did at the 90, 180, and 270-day mark, Microsoft has cherry-picked and juggled statistics to arrive at the conclusion that Vista is more secure than XP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. Oh please.

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Paul Thurrott sometimes uses various headlines to take pot shots at Apple, so I just thought I’d chime in:

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As I continue to fight off some sort of cold, or flu, or death, or whatever it is, it’s time for another review of recent headlines.

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I wrote about Microsoft’s latest security ploy last month (link at the end of this article). This is a “prequel” to that piece…

For the six years prior to January of this year, these were the perceptions about Microsoft Windows’ security:

1) It is weak.
2) XP SP2 is going to fix it.
3) It is weak.
4) Internet Explorer 7.0 is going to fix it.
5) It is weak.
6) Vista is going to fix it.

Those are simple, but they sum it up well.

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Computerworld has an article that tells us Vista use has grown while Mac OS X has remained flat.

The majority of new PCs sold since the end of January have Vista on them, yet Computerworld seems genuinely excited that Vista’s browser use has increased rather rapidly:

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In a previous post, I wrote that the Linux community should not sit idle while Microsoft implies that Linux violates numerous patents, and could be sued for this.

Based on an article in Information Week, I’m happy to say they will not be idle at all:

““Touch one member of the Linux community and you will have to deal with all of us,” Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin warned Microsoft in a column that appeared May 25 on the BusinessWeek “Viewpoint” slot of its Web site.”

Good for them! And the best part of all:

“Labeled the foundation’s “formal” response to Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith’s statements earlier this month, the column suggested that the foundation was prepared to step in with countervailing patents if Microsoft took action against anyone.”

As mentioned in my post, it’s likely Microsoft has some patent violations of their own. Kudos to the Linux group for letting Microsoft know that patent suits can go both ways.

A ZDNet UK article says that Microsoft will not sue over the alleged patent infringements by free software.

Aw, aren’t they just swell? What a bunch of great guys.

But wait a minute. If they sued they’d have to prove the alleged infringements, and in turn would get sued back since they surely have dirty laundry in the form of patent infringements of their own.

So it appears their plan is to act like a charitable behemoth, yet still drop tidbits to the press about how free software violates 235 of their patents. And they’ll do this without ever having to prove it, or even name the patents involved! This would be classic FUD. If they repeat it enough (and get it in the papers) without opposition then it will soon be assumed to be true.

I think Linux and other free software organizations should cry foul. If Microsoft isn’t suing, then they should shut up about these so-called infringements. Since they probably won’t, every time they drop this notion the Linux community should make it a point to mention that there are no official allegations, no specific patents mentioned, and they have no knowledge of any infringements.

Sure, this is strictly a war of words, but you lose those if your opponent is the only one talking. Bottom line is free software should not be silent on this, and at least offer a “canned” response every time Microsoft goes into their act.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet has a nice article on what the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user. You should read the entire article to understand the five points he raises. Below are my comments on each:

1) On the whole, users aren’t all that dissatisfied with Windows. Forget the fact that this point is damning with faint praise (”on the whole”, “all that”?), it’s generally true to the extent that users never try anything else. Still, if the true thrust of this point is that Windows has not yet been so bad that even average users are screaming for something better, it’s true enough.

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