Fredrick - stunning post, but you missed the key point. Users don't pay for AD. It is just MSFT's directory. So the question of why pay for AD is kind of silly - like saying why pay for MSFT's media players when REAL's products are so much better. Answer - you don't pay for them, so the question is meaningless.
From the outset of the PC business, there have been companies which made a business of developing products which were lacking in the base platform, both hardware and software. There has always been the risk that one of the big players will add that capability to the base platform and reduce the incentive for people to pay for the add-on. Early in the process, it was not MSFT, but IBM who added those features. Later CPQ became pretty good at adding stuff to their base package.
MSFT usually does not do a first-rate product to add capability that seems to be catching on in the market - IE being an exception. For the most part, they develop a product that is "good enough" to meet the basic need identified by the success of the add-on. Look at compression, backup, and, yes, directory services. Their goal in most cases is to assure that customers who do not choose to buy the add-on still get basic functionality. This has for the most part left room for the original add-on vendor to continue to develop a better product and make a market.
I think the rest of your post is fanciful nonsense. It ignores the fact that the open community, netizens, etc. do not bother to consider the complex needs of large organizations that actually buy 70% of the product that MSFT, Novell and others make. Those organizations need stable products from companies who will be around tomorrow, not free-form development from a bunch of people who may decide tomorrow that they are more interested in artificial intelligence, call someone else please.
You seem to have just discovered the "power" of lots of people developing stuff to open standards. Congratulations but you are about 20 years behind the curve. Do you wear bell-bottoms and love beads?? All of the stuff you are talking about was the power that drove Unix into the mainstream in the mid-80s, that drove the hardware and software innovation which made PCs more than toys, and that created the web in the first place. But it is exactly this "free spirit" thinking which kept Unix from being the OS of choice today. I put a lot of time into attempting to develop common frameworks for Unix in the late 80s. In addition to the names you would think of as Unix proponents, MSFT and CPQ were very interested in that development. It was the combination of the greed of some of the traditional Unix vendors, combined with the fact that many of the best people in the Unix community all wanted to "do their own thing" and could not agree on a mechanism for any significant control, which killed Unix unification. |
