Paul Thurrott Opens Mouth, Unbridled Idiocy Pours Forth

In the Retarded Zealot Hall of Fame there is none loftier than Paul Thurrott. He has achieved a level of absolute inanity that is unpar­al­leled by any MacMac, free­tard or New Media Douchebag. Given that fact, today’s bit of men­tal vomit comes as lit­tle surprise.

Microsoft Licenses ActiveSync to Google Why is the com­pany coop­er­at­ing with a competitor?

There you have the head­line of today’s dia­tribe; and there you have the crux of the idiocy. See, like any good zealot, in Paul’s mind Microsoft must be the end all and be all of, well, every­thing. The mere thought of coop­er­a­tion is trauma induc­ing. Paul begins by spend­ing a few sen­tences mak­ing snide com­ments about “conspiracy-happy Mac fanat­ics” (pot meet ket­tle) before mak­ing this comment:

With Apple gain­ing usage share in the PC mar­ket reg­u­larly over the past sev­eral years, why is Microsoft prop­ping up this ever-stronger com­peti­tor with the cru­cial Office pro­duc­tiv­ity suite?

Oh, I don’t know Paul; maybe because Apple and Microsoft aren’t really com­peti­tors.I know that this is a shock­ing con­cept to both sides of the OS wars, but it’s true. Apple doesn’t com­pete with Microsoft. Fuck, every cur­rently ship­ping Apple Macintosh com­puter not only can run Windows; they even come with a tool to facil­i­tate that. In the per­sonal com­put­ing space; Apple com­petes with Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. Which is, inci­den­tally, why Apple will never will­ingly allow clones again.

And, to address Paul’s ques­tion, why does Microsoft “prop-up” Apple by pro­duc­ing the Office suite. The answer is sim­ple, go to the (online) Apple Store and click the Productivity link under Software. What do we find on the first page? Why, it’s Microsoft Office for the Mac; at a tasty four hun­dred simoleans. That’s money in Steve Balmer’s sweaty hands; and Uncle Fester does like the money.

What Paul and the rest of the zealots, Mac and PC alike refuse to accept is that the OS wars are over, and nobody (or was it every­body) won. It’s 2009 and we now live in a glo­ri­ous post–Glasnost utopia where we can run Office natively in OS X (and have pretty damn good com­pat­i­bil­ity with Win Office files), run Windows on a MacBook and sync our iPhones with Windows XP. Unfortunately Paul and crew are the OS wars ver­sions of a Japanese sol­dier hid­ing in the jun­gles of Guam; vehe­mently deny­ing that the war is over.

Paul con­tin­ues:

This week, Microsoft announced that it had licensed Exchange ActiveSync to yet another com­peti­tor, but this one is more pow­er­ful than most. Google, in turn, announced its Google Sync for Mobile Phone ser­vice, which allows pop­u­lar mobile phones like the Apple iPhone, the Blackberry, the Nokia S60, Windows Mobile phones, and other devices wire­lessly sync with Google-based con­tacts and cal­en­dars. As is so often the case with Google, Google Sync for Mobile Phone is absolutely free. This is, I feel, unbe­liev­ably dan­ger­ous for Microsoft. The soft­ware giant already faces an exo­dus of cus­tomers, espe­cially on the low end, to Google’s free and inex­pen­sive cloud-based solu­tions, solu­tions that com­pete directly with expen­sive and com­plex Exchange-based servers and services.

I want to call out one part of the above before tack­ling the whole “…Google’s free and inex­pen­sive cloud-based solu­tions, solu­tions that com­pete directly with expen­sive and com­plex Exchange-based servers and ser­vices.” No Paul, they really don’t com­pete. Again Paul makes the mis­take of think­ing that he knows what he’s talk­ing about. The truth is, with the very small excep­tion of a few Google Apps for Domains cus­tomers, Google apps aren’t com­pet­ing with Exchange. Not many indi­vid­u­als are run­ning Exchange 2008 Server on their home net­works; and a sim­i­larly tiny num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions are using Google Apps.

The remain­der of the piece is basi­cally a repeat of the above argu­ment. As far as I can tell (I may be wrong here, I’m not all that drunk yet) the logic goes like this: The iPhone is the most pop­u­lar smart phone in the his­tory of stuff. Exchange Server can’t com­pete with Google Apps. Therefore Microsoft should refuse to license Exchange Active Sync to force con­sumers to switch to buy­ing Exchange licenses and WinMobile phones. Yeah, I def­i­nitely need more Gin, because that con­clu­sion seems a bit off to me. I sup­pose that Paul hasn’t con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­ity of Google just ask­ing Apple to licence what­ever they’re using for MobileMe sync­ing. It’s not like the CEO of Google sits on Apple’s Board of Directors or anyth…oh wait.

Of course, like a good lit­tle zealot, Paul misses the point by a con­ti­nent. It’s a good thing for Microsoft to get Exchange Active Sync onto as many devices as it can; and used by as many back-end providers as it can. Because EAS isn’t com­pet­ing with Google Apps or MobileMe. It’s com­pet­ing with BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And that’s who Google and Microsoft took a swipe at today.

But I guess that’s hard to see when you’re still hid­ing in the jungle.