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greed (was)

Steve Holden sholden at holdenweb.com
Mon Feb 24 09:34:46 EST 2003 
"Mongryong" <Mongryong at sympatico.ca> wrote ...
> On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 18:05, Brandon Van Every wrote:
> >Ergo the market
> > perception of Linux remains "a hacker's OS" whereas Windows is "a
consumer's
> > OS."  Rightly so.

The situation is changing quite rapidly, however. I know you were a Linux
user. Have you actually installed a major Linux distribution on recent
hardware? It's less painful than installing Windows. Everything gets
recognised. One thing that will almost certainly end up as a Linux
competitive advantage is the higher degree of "out of the box" network
security (though it's still not as good as FreeBSD).

Right now Windows may be the logical choice for the consumer. There are no
signs that Microsoft knows what to do to compete effectively on a technical
level, though, and the further they go out along the anti-competitive branch
they seem to have chosen (no-open-source EULA, certificate control of
installed components, etc.) the more likely it is to break under the weight
of the marketing leviathon.

> M$ has won the desktop market - there's no doubt about that.  To try to
> get into the desktop market now would be a waste of money and time.
> That's why it's pointless to try to make OSes like Linux 'cute' because
> only intelligent people use them.  But as history has taught us, things
> always change.  The times are a changing and the peak of this next
> change is getting close.  Like the type-writer, the desktop computer
> will give way to a new breed of smart devices.  When that change hits
> full circle, it's going to be difficult to imagine that M$'s Windows
> will be the last OS standing.
>

This defeatist talk assumes that a monopoly now will remain a monopoly,
despite historical evidence to the contrary. In 1980 you would doubtless
have written "IBM has won the hardware market - there's no doubt about that.
To try to get into the hardware market now would be a waste of time. ..."

Linuc doesn't need to be cute: it needs to be reliable and usable. It's
getting there...

I agree that the software environment is changing, but frankly I think the
thing that will turn Microsoft into the first IBM of the 21st century is
that fact that they have produced systems that have educated users about
windows. Nowadays a Windows user can sit down at a Linux desktop and the
environment more or less makes sense to them. This was completely untrue ten
years ago.

The thing that will turn the tide will be the desire of large corporations
to stop paying huge amounts of money for unnecessary software of dubious
quality. There are also going to be huge changes in the world's approach to
intellectual property over the next twenty-five years. Microsoft won't
disappear (just as IBM haven't), but they certainly won't be the dominant
force that they are now, because they have made the same mistake IBM made:
they think that market leadership implies control over technical direction.
To a certain degeree this is true, but such control has limits.

For example, look at how IBM thought they could control the market by
introducing the licensed microchannel hardware bus design. The industry
simply bypassed this technology and pushed ISA (the original bus
interconnect, which the industry deemd standard) further than microchannel
could go. ISA ended up with more investment, because the industry wouldn't
go with a closed standard. IBM made exactly the same mistake in networking,
where they stuck with SNA far longer than was justified. Guess what - they
sell IP networking and peer-to-peer now just like everybody else.

IBM simply became less relevant. So will Microsoft. Linux is still
developing, but it has everything it needs except marketing muscle and
volume of applications behind it. The marketing muscle is arriving in force,
and what we have seen so far (Linux support from H-P, IBM's $6bn investment
in Linux) is just the first wave. When there's sufficient economic advantage
to be gained by switching, corporations will leave Microsoft behind in
droves, and Microsoft apparently lack the imagination to compete by
embracing open source. We've already seen them stumble and nearly miss the
boat over Internet technology. Open source is a model they simply can't
afford not to understand: but the evidence is, they don't want to embrace it
because they see their profits coming from proprietary intellectual
property.

Just the ruminations of an old fart with a lifetime's industry experience.

but-that-doesn't-mean-microsoft-is-a-bad-short-term-investment-ly y'rs  -
steve
--
Steve Holden                                  http://www.holdenweb.com/
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