In article <bUednVlV6qPsvL3ZUSdV9g@ptd.net>, David H. Lynch Jr. writes
>Chris wrote:
>> How can Linux benefit from Microsoft?
>>
>> A very strange thought!
>> But consider.
>> What does Microsoft have? Money and power.
>>
>> That means they can find out what people want.
>> (It is *extremely* expensive to find out what people want!)
>
> Open Source software is created by people trying to solve their own
>needs. While it is not the result of massively expensive market
>research, it is about an individual finding a way to solve their own
>problem. In essence one of the thesis of Open Source is that given that
>the source to everything is readily available, a percentage of users
>will be motivated to improve it to better meet their needs and the best
>solutions/improvements will work their way back into what all of us use.
>
> If you use OpenSource long enough while you will certainly find a few
>ways in which Windows is friendlier or does a better job, you will also
>discover inumerable ways in which OpenSource tools are better and
>friendlier.
>
> I am a software developer. I take both windows and Linux (and other
>projects). When doing windows development, I run coLinux under windows
>so that I always have a Linux environment available that I can use to
>work on my windows projects. There are many programming tasks that can
>be performed trivially just by dropping to Linux and scripting together
>the tools needed.
>
>
> One of the hardest things about migrating - from anything to anything,
>is it does not matter if the destination is significantly better than
>the source, Outlook Users will not migrate to Thunderbird, Office users
>will not migrate to OpenOffice, until they can easily perform - usually
>exactly the same way that subset of tasks that they do routinely.
>Conversely, once you migrate, you will not return even when the
>underlying problem that caused you to move gets fixed for exactly the
>same reason. Microsoft continues to bleed users to Firefox. Even if IE
>is fixed sufficiently to stem the loss, getting the users that left back
>can not occur until IE supports the FireFox features like tabbed
>browsing they have come to depend on.
>
> Obviously OpenSource developers should borrow good ideas from Microsoft
>- just as Microsoft "borrows" ideas. But OpenSource Developers are
>scratching their own itch, and that is more likely to produce useful
>innovations for all of us.

Good ideas - well expressed. Interesting. Thankyou.
--
Chris