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Individually Smart, Collective Stupid
Individually Smart, Collective Stupid
Posted Mar 25, 2008 3:56 UTC (Tue) by ldo (subscriber, #40946)In reply to: Good work alienating Linux fans by mikov
Parent article: A tour of the Microsoft open source lab
Doesn't it seems a bit immature to condemn all of them just because they work for Microsoft ?
No it doesn't. While there are many individually smart people working at Microsoft, collectively a lot of their intelligence just seems to cancel out.
A case in point is this long discussion by Mark Russinovich about the performance of file copying in Vista. Mark is a smart guy--he used to be with the old sysinternals.com company that Microsoft bought. Now here he is, working gamely away at trying to fix one small part of the problem, without having any influence on the whole picture. As a result, people are still complaining about file-copying performance in Vista.
Getting back to Microsoft's stance on Free Software, ultimately it's mainly what Steve Ballmer thinks that counts. Doesn't matter what lower-level Microsofties may think, if Ballmer is hostile, then their company as a whole remains hostile. End of story.
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Individually Smart, Collective Stupid
Posted Mar 26, 2008 0:20 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
No it doesn't. While there are many individually smart people working at Microsoft, collectively a lot of their intelligence just seems to cancel out.
I am sure the same thing can be said for any sufficiently large company.
Regardless of your opinion about their intellect, the presumption that individual employees are evil or hostile, is not only illogical but harmful, especially if they happen to be using Linux and proclaiming their love for it .
I personally think that it is naive to consider whole companies "evil". It simply does not make sense. A company is a business entity which has to make money (especially if it is a public company). Microsoft does it by developing proprietary software.
RedHat happens to be "friendly" because they use Open Source and Free Software. Of course they must be friendly - they rely on it for their business! However it is just that - a business decision. If it was more profitable to develop proprietary software they would do it in a blink.
Individually Smart, Collective Stupid
Posted Mar 26, 2008 7:39 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
I personally think that it is naive to consider whole companies "evil".I am not sure of that: a company is an organization, and organizations can be less evil or more evil, just like people. Imagine if we said: "Hey, the Mafia is neither good nor evil: they are just an organization, just like the Catholic church or Doctors Without Borders". Sorry, but some organizations are more inclined to commit crime than others.
There is something called corporate culture, and it includes a tendency or willingness to do evil or be fair. Standard Oil was bent on keeping a monopoly, just like Bell or now Microsoft. That doesn't mean that good things can't happen despite that environment (think Unix), but it can be harder.
A company is a business entity which has to make money (especially if it is a public company).That is true, but a bit lopsided. Making a profit is only one of the objectives of a company, and not always the most important; there is also maintaining its stock price, keeping a good public image, respecting the law, making its employees happy, keeping ahead of the competition... And that is besides its particular objectives such as delivering product or developing free software.
Focusing only on one objective for a company is not likely to capture the whole picture. Case in point: what is more important for Microsoft, keeping its monopoly or making a profit? And now its logical consequence: is Microsoft likely to lose money in a deal, just to keep its monopoly in a market?