09.27.08
In A “World Without Walls” or Fences…
Oh, you know the rest.
I’ll admit, I found the fact that Bill Gates was using his rather famous (in Geek culture, anyhow) mug shot in the first of those ill-fated Seinfeld ads for Microsoft to be uproarious - even if the commercials were so-so. The fact that he’d embrace the image that has so often been used to poke a bit of fun at him, I found that to be pretty humorous and ‘big’ of him and Microsoft.
More humorous, to me, was the revelation that Microsoft’s latest set of advertisements for Windows would be mimicking the popular “I’m a Mac” campaign from Apple and using the slogan “Life Without Walls” after all of those sayings that were so popular some years ago. Of course, these ads are just awful - to the point where I want those Seinfeld ads to continue.
Well, there may be another aspect to this other than Microsoft showing it’s sense of humor, and that is trying to possibly undermine the supposed pending trademark of a competing Operating System company, G.ho.st.
An unusual Israeli-Palestinian joint venture start-up, which makes a cloud-based Web operating system letting users access their desktops from any computer with an Internet connection, is alleging a trademark violation by Microsoft in its new $300 million advertising campaign.
G.ho.st, which stands for “Global Hosted Operating System,” is claiming it has a pending trademark registration for the tagline “no walls.”
For it’s part, Microsoft claims that they are aware of no such trademarks, and dismiss the claim as “without merit”. Of course, we all know that Microsoft has a dubious history with trademark suits involving competitors, ala Lindows/Linspire, so it’ll be interesting to see how far they take this one before either backing down or making a large payment.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
glosoli said,
September 28, 2008 at 5:05 am
Did you run out of things to bash microsoft with? where’s roy? at least he would have added 29 links to the last paragraph to support his claims, although they’re usually just backreferences to his own unsupported claims in other blog entries.
Shane Coyle said,
September 28, 2008 at 9:28 am
I just blog about things that catch my eye, Roy will be back soon, I’m doing my best to fill in here.
Peyote Pekka said,
September 29, 2008 at 11:00 am
How about a nod to the 25th anniversary of the GNU project? — without mentioning the M-word. We’d not have many of the advances we have today, including what we know as “Linux”, without GNU. Nor would either the information economy or the information society exist in anywhere near its advance state without GNU.
The GPLv2 itself is the single most widely used license — ever. GPLv3 is rolling in to take its place.
Most of the GNU tools have become so dominant that the GNU version provide the expected behavior.
Some of the concepts presented by the FSF and GNU seemed laughable at the time, it was of course mostly documenting the way things were done. But now, the need seems self-evident. That’s some foresight with hair on it! (pun intended)
Roy Schestowitz said,
September 30, 2008 at 9:58 am
Peyote,
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll do that soon.