I've watched a programme named "Biography" on SUNTV, it talks about Bill Gates and his software empire he has established in the past two decades. After finishing watching this programme, a question slips into my mind:
What Makes Microsoft So Successful?, the advancement of its technology or the sophistication of its marketing strategy.
Bill Gates has created an enormous company which some love so much at one hand, but some hate so badly on the other hand. And some says that Microsoft has never really invented any technology or products, its MS-DOS operating system is bought from someone else, its Windows graphical interface is learned and copied from Apple's Macintosh, and its newly released development platform .Net framework is some sort of immitation of Sun Microsystem's JAVA platform(you know, CLR vs JVM, and C# vs JAVA). and all those facts just convince me that Bill Gates is just a business person who understand technology well, but understand marketing strategy and business tricks even better.
I personally think that if Microsoft wanna earn some better reputation from the open source community, he must come up with something much more innovative and original, rather than shallow copying someone else's technology or products.