Verily I say unto thee, that Chris Ahlstrom spake thusly:
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Erik Funkenbusch belched out this bit o'
> wisdom:
>> On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:39:42 +0000, Doug Mentohl wrote:
>>
>>> Rumors are flying again that Cisco is considering buying VMware
>>> from EMC and we at Cisco Subnet say, ok, we'll bite and report on
>>> it. Reuters published a story today which lays out a fairly
>>> compelling argument for the deal ..
>>>
>>> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/38449?t51hb&hpg1=mp
>>
>> Well, there goes VMWare. I've been a big supporter of VMWare over
>> the years, but Cisco ruins good products.
>
> Well, they're probably still better at it than Hewlett-Packard!
Fuddie's just gutted that his paymaster didn't get there first.
With both Citrix and VMWare locked up in the Vole's Assimilation Box,
they'd have had a 2/3 monopoly on virtualisation, and we all know how
much the Vole needs monopolies to prop up its Slopware.
Undoubtedly the Vole would then have used one of its patent-troll shell
companies, like Acacia, to litigate against Red Hat for something
related to their virtualisation stack, and form a protection racket
"deal" that gave Microsoft a huge slab of /that/ pie too, thus giving
them a near-total monopoly in virtualisation.
See how it works?
"There goes VMware", indeed ... out of the Vole's clutches.
Hehe, poor Fuddie.
As for what Cisco does or doesn't do with their products ... bleah, who
cares? It can't be any worse than what Microsoft does. I mean just look
at OneCare (assimilated GeCAD RAV), for example.
The Vole is rapidly running out of escape routes.
It failed to assimilate Yahoo, which they needed for their search
patents (to "f**king kill Google", of course), as much as the market
share and branding, despite sicking their pet gorilla Icahn on them, and
"Live" is such a sad joke that they actually have to /bribe/ people to
use it, so search and ad revenue is a non-starter.
Their OS roadmap seems to have hit a roadblock, with their Next Big
Thing® looking suspiciously like nothing more than a service pack for
Vista (and even more suspiciously like an aesthetic rip-off of KDE4),
and that's especially bad news, considering Vista is the most reviled
version of their OS so far, with people actually /petitioning/ and even
/suing/ for the right to keep using XP. Vista broke the binding spell
that hypnotised Windows users to just mindlessly upgrade to the next
version, so it's just as well they have their secret MOUs with OEMs to
"recommend" Windows 7, or they'd be looking at Office as their only real
source of income.
Talking of which ... MS Office, with it's traditionally proprietary
lock-in formats, is no longer supported by that lock-in mechanism,
indeed the Vole isn't even committed to supporting their own new "open"
format (which they reluctantly created under pressure, but then poisoned
with patents and binary blobs, and had to bribe and smear ISO delegates
to shoehorn through ratification), and with OOo 3.0 achieving 3+ million
downloads in just one week, and 10 million in the first month, it looks
like the Vole's only /other/ cash cow is drying up too.
Their Brown Turd® iPod killa just isn't even funny, and looks set to be
buried in the dessert somewhere next to all those Atari "E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial" game cartridges.
Their baby-killing eXb0rks, which scratches discs, and bricks itself due
to poor ventilation, is also a financial lemon, losing the company some
4 billion USD (plus a 1 billion loss for replacing bricked consoles).
Their games division looks set to collapse, with entire development
teams and external contractors being axed (ref: ACES, Ensemble, and
Bungie), so the Vole won't get much help there either.
Now it looks like their future ambitions for virtualisation will be
somewhat handicapped by a lack of monopoly too.
What's left?
Well there's the "Microsoft Natural Keyboard" ... with magic keys
inscribed with disappearing ink.
No wonder the Vole pumps so much money into "marketing" (i.e. bribery
and shills). It's about the only thing they're actually good at. Pity it
doesn't actually generate an income, because there's precious little
left in the Vole's portfolio that does, and what little that's left is
losing momentum.
As others have predicted, I believe the Vole's death-throes will cause
these gangsters to show their true colours, and like cornered rats will
become the next SCO (or S<0 as they're now known), desperately clinging
on to their precious "IP" (like little lumps of stale cheese), and
lashing out at the rest of the industry, in a pitiful attempt to survive.
Will it work? I think it will, initially. In fact I'm counting on it,
because as the Vole gets nastier and ever more desperate, they'll
ultimately turn on their own "partners" (as they have in the past), and
those "partners" will go looking for help ... from people like IBM -
with their vast "IP" portfolio, and the most formidable legal team in
the IT industry (or possibly /any/ industry). Then watch how pitiful
Microsoft really is, as they get crushed like an insect.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
| is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William
| Pitt the Younger
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
03:15:48 up 100 days, 10:58, 4 users, load average: 0.06, 0.06, 0.07
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