Wednesday, June 24

A Letter from Bill Gates

BoycottNovell has a posting on a letter on strategy, written by Bill Gates. The spin they put on the story is on how Bill Gates is afraid of linux, but I want to focus on something else: is it interesting?

First, a small paranthesis: Is the letter authentic?

I'd say yes, for the following reasons:
1. I'm not very familiar with BoycottNovell and their sources of information, but from what I've read of the letter (provided in it's entirety in the article) I would say that it's either authentic, or whoever made it is very insightfull and has lots of "vision".

2. If they published a fake letter, they be very open to attacks (which would only serve them in the short run - publicity stunt/shock value/whatever).


The letter talks (among other things) about linux and java being Windows' largest competitors and the need to preventing commodization by linux (you may be too late on that) about taking good ideas for improvement from a variety of sources, about a major overhaul of the file/storage system (the points being made there sounded to me both revolutionary and obvious at the same time), about a need (stated explicitely) to improve system monitoring enough to be better than on linux, difficulty of setting up windows for a speciffic purpose, unifying the application platform technologies to win back Java and J2EE developers, improving Windows boot time and improving asynchronous communication (email, Gmail, CRM, scheduling, etc) - maybe they should take a look at Google Wave.

All in all it's an interesting letter, and if they manage to achieve all that, it will make for interesting times.

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