"In a session at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference today, analysts Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver identified many reasons that Windows (and thus Microsoft) are in trouble. Microsoft's operating system development times are too long and they deliver limited innovation; their OSs provide an inconsistent experience between platforms, with significant compatibility issues; and other vendors are out-innovating Microsoft. That gives enterprises unpredictable releases with limited value, management costs that are too high, and new releases that break too many applications and take too long to test and adopt. With end users bringing their own software solutions into the office... Well, it's just a heck of a sad story for Microsoft."
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Member since:2005-07-01
Not really. Advatage to whichever general purpose OS has the best publicity when Microsoft gets in trouble. At the moment, that's Linux, and it doesn't look set to change any time soon.
I can see maybe Solaris or even OS X, if it opens up to the PC world, having the backing to usurp Linux. But that's about it. And I don't really think either of those will happen.
Member since:2007-01-22
Member since:2007-05-13
Member since:2005-08-07
QFT!
Personally (and despite my username) I really don't care who wins the OS Wars--or if anyone ever actually 'wins' at all, so long as the market evolves to multiple OSes in competition with each other with regards to performance and features while requiring mandatory compatibility for standards. I mean if my Image editor can import and export multiple file formats, then why can't my OS support multiple apps? Why must each app pretend it is the only one of its class that exists?
Will the future be Linux? *BSD? Haiku? SkyOS (assuming they ever let it out of beta)? Who knows and who cares, so long as we can all share files and open them for work on whatever desktop or device we're using at that time!
--bornagainpenguin
Member since:2007-05-12
Agreed!
I mean, apps like (say) pf (which I'm using on FreeBSD). *Quality stuff*, it really is...
Then you have the KDE team and Python, both of whom have stepped back to take a look at "where to from here", and they've made the call (a good call, imo) to break backwards-compatibility for a cleaner design.
Gradually, as OSS gets a hold of people school-by-school, company-by-company, people are starting to wake up to the fact that MS is slowly becoming more and more irrelevant. Their software is expensive, poor-quality and insecure.
People find that for very many applications, MS just isn't needed any more.
Member since:2006-06-26
Member since:
2006-02-15
------> Advantage GNU/Linux;
Or *BSD, or Haiku, or pretty much any other alternative OS? Oh well, I don't care which OS gains the advantage anyway as I think the most important thing is that _end-users_ gain some advantage.