Microsoft wastes its money on anything but software

"Windows Server System outperforms Linux on TCO, reliability, security, and indemnification." No, your Linux News editor is not joking, it is really true. I read it on MS' "Get the Facts" page, so it has to be. On the other hand, Windows bla bla also outperforms Linux on indirect costs for marketing, anti-Linux-FUD and the well earning people to make those reports, lawyers, fixing software bugs which shouldn't have been made in first place, and money going to political parties in the US.

Infoworld, March 3, 2006. "Microsoft seeks U.S. court intervention in EU". Microsoft asks several companies "to produce documents pertaining to the European Union's (EU's) antitrust case against the software vendor." 
Already fined for €497 million, and paying even more money to appeal against that verdict, and also threatened by daily fines of up to €2 million, Microsoft still isn't spending its money on better software. Instead, it hires some more lawyers to ask for documentation from other companies, hoping it hasn't to pay the €2 million a day. This raises an interesting question, of what would be more profitable: 
-Complying with the rules of the European Competition Law and spending your time and money on making better software, or 
-Leave your software as it is, and spend your time and money on going to several courts, screaming fire in the media, asking Uncle Sam to influence the EU, shouting about the 'biggest offer MS can make; revealing its source code' (while the EC never ever asked for that), and making a complaint of 87 pages, hiring four professors to show one other professor isn't right.
Sidenote: There is maybe an even more interesting question: A lot of people in the 'old' European countries, are a bit angry, about the amount of tax money that their countries pay as a contribution to the European Union. Great Brittain and France are still fighting about the Brittish 'rebate', and the money going from the EU to French agriculture. Voters don't want their money to go to "Brussels'. On the other hand, that same voters buy MS products, of which an amount of money will probably go straightly to Brussels as a fine, without even thinking about it.

As all computer-minded people ought to know: Security isn't reached by obscurity. Well, the same is true for value, I'm afraid for MS: Value isn't reached by obscurity. What does that mean in the EU Competition Case?
Well, lets take another example: The OpenDocument Format. Anyone who has used Microsoft Office and OpenOffice2 lately, knows, Microsoft Office doesn't add that much value to OpenOffice2. Ok, the database is maybe better, but for making letters, there isn't that much difference. When reading letters however, there is an important difference: Microsoft Office can read all your several-year-old .doc letters without problems, while OpenOffice screws up formatation. So, the only added value MS Office gives you, is being able to read old MS Office files. However, if OpenOffice could read that same old docs as good as MS Office does, people without to elaborate office needs, wouldn't be needing MS Office anymore.
Microsoft fears the same for its network software: If their SMB protocol isn't obscure and made unusable by patents anymore, what value does Windows add to Linux, also capable of using the same protocol through Samba?
So, you might think, if Windows and MS Office doesn't add that much value above their free counterparts, MS will spend their money on adding value to those products, by means of making that software better.
Well, guess again, because you are wrong: MS chose to spend their money on keeping the formats obscure, and on lobbying with the EU to make software patents enforcable - thereby making it more difficult for others to "reverse engineer" the protocols and make software that use those 'reverse engineered' protocols.
Considering <kansrekening>, that is a stupid thing to do. For example, if the chances are a half, you can make software patents in the EU enforcable, the chances are a half, you can't. If you spend $50 million on lobbying to make the enforcable, the expected losses are $25 million, because the chances are a half you lose, and if you lose, you can consider your money lost. On the other hand, if you spend that $50 million on making better software, the chances that money will be lost, will probably be less. In other words, the Return On Investment for making good software, is higher than spending that money to lobby with the EU.

Now, take the "Get the Facts" campaign. If it was a fact that Windows was more secure, more managable and had a lower TCO than Linux, than everybody would probably know, and nobody would use Linux. But that is not the reality, just look at our LXer migration list, and you see many, many companies and governments working with Linux. A lot of them migratet from proprietary Unices, that's treu, but the point is, they chose to migrate to Linux instead of Windows. This shows, to make an understatement, Linux might have a sligthtly benefit over Windows. So, what would you do if you were MS?
"Hey, that's simple!" I hear you say. "I'd just use my million dollars to make all MS products more secure, easier to handle and more reliable!" Indeed, if MS did, in a short time, Windows would be easier to managage, more secure, and so on.
However, Microsoft decided to spend their money in another way: The consumer was misinformed (I already hear you say: "Hey, what about the 'The consumer is always riht' mantra?"), and Microsoft needed to spend another couple of million bugs to inform the consumer in a proper way.
Again, we can use <kansrekening> to show this is stupid: If you think the consumer is misinformed, and you are going to change his mind, there is always the risk the consumer will not believe you. Especially, when you are using non-independent research firms which produce non-scientific reports, there is a big chance your money is wasted. Since the quality of the reports is really low, one report compared Linux on a mainframe with Windows on a cheap Intel, Bill Gates is a shareholder of Gartner and SI is a certified Microsoft partner, chances are rather big the customer will laugh at your whole "Get the facts" campaign. So, lets estimate the campaign costed $100 million, and the chances the consumer will not believe you are ~75%, you will have lost $75 million. You could have spend that money to make the TCO of Windows lower, make Windows more managable etc.

With the same reasoning, we can think about the big Microsoft ad campaigns. There is a chance people don't look to your ads, when your ads are on tele, they go drink some coffee, or they use an adblocker. So, much money is wasted here. Same for the Microsoft money which went, via Baystar to SCO: here, we are >95% sure the money is wasted, since, from a leaked SCO memo, we know the people at SCO knew in advance, the Linux code didn't infringe any of their copyrigts. Even more, if the judge find out about the money which went illegaly from MS to SCO, it is going to cost MS. One of the exceptions in this story are the political expenditures maybe: It seems like the US government is a big friend of Microsoft. On the other hand, Massachusetts still chose OpenDocument, software patents in the EU are in general still not enforcable, Windows can be bought without Media Player in the EU (though nobody buys it, so that's a point for MS) and the European Commission still wants MS to reveal its protocols. In South America and China, things look even worse for MS. So as you see, not all governments are as cheap to buy as the one in the US.

Now, lets compare this waste of money to Free Software. How much money went in to it? Well, comparing to MS, not much. Especially in the beginning days, no money at all went into it. Still, at the moment, Linux is only a tiny bit worse than Windows, in the worst case for Linux.

In short, the problem boils down to this: Microsofts software is rusted. It is not making that much new things for its core business, only protecting the market share it already has. Compare this to the other branches where Microsoft is selling products, like the Xbox360, Microsoft Music players etcetera, and you wonder why Microsoft invents in all kind of things, except for their "core business". I even compare Microsoft with a nuclear explosion: The core (software: Windows and MS Office) is becoming a vacuum, while the outside is becoming bigger, more elaborate and less dense, till nothing is left but smoke, wind and dirty waste. At the moment, much money is thrown into that vacuum, disappearing, or also going up in smoke.