Quality of threats rather than quality of software

Microsoft seems to have changed tactics. Once upon a time the company was proud of its software and tried to sell it on the basis of what it could do. But the tactic of "selling the steak" (as the advertising biz puts it) or even "selling the sizzle" (which you do if you don't have steak) seem to be getting pushed to the background.

Microsoft seems to have switched to a protection-racket approach. This shift has been happening for a while now. The company has warned users that the intellectual property rights picture with open source software is fuzzy. Now it has moved past merely issuing warnings to issuing implied threats.

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Microsoft seems to have changed tactics. Once upon a time the company was proud of its software and tried to sell it on the basis of what it could do. But the tactic of "selling the steak" (as the advertising biz puts it) or even "selling the sizzle" (which you do if you don't have steak) seem to be getting pushed to the background.

Microsoft seems to have switched to a protection-racket approach. This shift has been happening for a while now. The company has warned users that the intellectual property rights picture with open source software is fuzzy. Now it has moved past merely issuing warnings to issuing implied threats.

Also:

Do software users need indemnification?
Dave Kearns: Microsoft's Ballmer talks the talk
Mark Gibbs: Linux violates more than 228 patents - big deal

On Nov. 18, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said at the Microsoft-sponsored Asian Government Leaders Forum in Singapore that governments using Linux will get sued. He pointed out that a report last summer said Linux violates more than 228 patents. (Detail: The report he cited actually claims 283 patents.)

Ballmer didn't say that Microsoft was going to sue users, but the threat was clear - if the governments did not stick to Windows software someone would come by to break their legal kneecaps. Maybe Ballmer was thinking The SCO Group would be the enforcer. Microsoft has helped bankroll SCO's wacko multi-billion dollar demand for IBM to rescue SCO from having to rely on sales of its own software. The tea leaves don't look all that good for this effort.

If SCO is successful, it will try to collect hundreds of dollars per Linux system even though, by the company's own admission, SCO code (if there is any) would be a minute percentage of the overall system. I guess Microsoft would consider that a positive development and easier than improving its software to actually compete with Linux. Because Microsoft has buckets of numbers that purport to show that the total cost of ownership for Linux is higher than that for Windows, the only reason anyone in their right (Microsoft) mind would choose Linux is that they thought it was better.

Microsoft is far from immune to patent-infringement lawsuits. According to published reports, Microsoft already is fighting more than 30 patent suits. In the last year or two, it has paid out more than $1 billion to settle a subset of the claims. Maybe there is an anti-Microsoft clone of SCO that will decide to sue Microsoft customers over its use of Microsoft software. In this day and age, it doesn't take much imagination to foresee that type of thing.

Microsoft recently had to extend its indemnification program to most customers to mitigate this risk. People could still get sued and disrupted, as some companies were when SCO was trying to raise the pressure on IBM, but Microsoft has agreed to pay some of the expenses if its customers get sued.

In any case, it's very sad to see Microsoft decide, along with most of the political advertisers whose work I saw over the past year, that defining your opponent as a threat is more effective than actually saying what you have or stand for.