This is what I call Microsoft, a Big Fat Copycat. The wealthiest software firm in the states is planning to make more money by their next BIG innovation of windows(tm), what they call Longhorn. Longhorn is supposed to be the world's most sophisticated software (a super windows), which IF everything goes well, will be released after 2005. If that happens, I guess the monopoly will go into a very different phase, meaning that a lot of silicon valley firms such as Oracle, AOL Time Warner, Sun, Sony wouldn't like since Longhorn will handle a lot of those functions which is currently handled by those firms.
Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and business brain is talking to a lot of the employees directly these days and biz-planning their newest product after he switched jobs three years ago with Steve Ballmer (current CEO of Micro$oft) and became the Chief Software Architect. He claims that he has never missed work or called in sick in 27 years!! He's now working harder than ever, what does he want? Money? He has a lot of it.. Fame? Are you crazy?! Bigger company? You must be kidding me!! So what does he really want? Apparently, work is fun for him.. He loves what he does and believes in what he does. Or maybe he likes to be challenged by open source and free software fans and show us he's unbeatable?
Obviously, other big firm won't be sitting watching Longhorn being developed at Microsoft.. It's a big project, but the team believes in its feasibility, will they do that or grab the ready code from somewhere? Lets wait and see.. Some of you guys may already know that the original software for Microsoft's well known OS, has been *bought* by Bill Gates in 1981 from a rival Seattle programmer. This software was purchased for $50,000 and later named MS/DOS. Another well known example you may remember, was the court case in 1990, where Apple Computer sued them claiming Microsoft has violated their UI patent for windows look and feel. Is Longhorn gonna go through the same story? It will have MSN messenger, IIS and MSSQL to beat Yahoo! and AOL messengers, and web server and database suit of Sun and Oracle.. That's why I call them Big Fat Copycat.
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