Robert Scoble writes an open letter to Bill Gates. Dare Obasanjo strikes back. As Dare says, packing Open-source apps in-the-box is not likely to help MS against Open Source. On the other hand, I am not convinced that MS’ software is “commoditized” yet — not for 2-3 years, anyway. (Unlike soap and shampoo, creating software, especially office software, is hard to do right). Increasing value to paying customers, however, could.

Office Suites: What about sane licensing for Office on Terminal Servers? This would take the wind out of Star/Open Office in low end markets like call centers. Webserving: (according to even MS, this is one area where Windows’ TCO is higher than Linux’s) Where is a $49-$99 edition of Windows Server 2003 (Web edition)? Engineering/Academic workstations: (an area where Linux is gaining ground as organizations look to dump legacy Unix workstations) Where is a special edition of NT with enhanced POSIX compatibility, your command line shell of choice, an X server, bundled Interix, the .net fwsdk, shared source, plus the Win32 shell loadable on demand for a special academic price of $69 and maybe a full price of $249?

The problem is, Microsoft is too busy making money by the sackful for it to really listen to its most reluctant customers. Unfortunately, these customers are the ones leading the edge of a migration to Open Source right now, and they are the reason why Open Source, while as crappy in the desktop world today as Microsoft Word was in version 1, will ultimately become successful. And Microsoft, like every BigCo before it, will fail to react until it is far too late and there is already red ink (or less profits) on its books.