Linux Not Standing in Wait As Microsoft Sinks Its Own Ship
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jan 2006 17:56 UTC, submitted by Linuxfanboy
Linux "With the traditional Microsoft news media turning their collective ear to the rest of the industry, you have to suspect a changing of the guard. But Linux companies don't seem to guage their efforts by what the industry says about Microsoft. Linux just keeps chugging along. So what does the Industry have to say about Microsoft? They say that though many people will swear by the invincibility of Microsoft's ship, it hasn't maneuvered all the icebergs. Collectively, the competition has started ringing up wins. With alternatives in Linux, FireFox, OpenOffice.org and Apple the Microsoft floating casino has begun to list and sway. Here's how and some of it might surprise you."
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RE: Silly.
by siki_miki on Tue 24th Jan 2006 00:34 UTC in reply to "Silly."
siki_miki
Member since:
2006-01-17

I agree that Microsoft remains very dangerous and powerful enough to endanger even a free competition. (Too bad they weren't split up few years ago).

But Open Source software has seen exponential growth in quality and good adoption growth in recent years, I'm talking primarily about desktop.

Look at GNOME/KDE 2-3 years ago. Terrible desktop experience; slowdowns,crashes, lag, ugly&slow browsers, etc. Today? Polishing everywhere, quickness, shiny design, surpasses windows in few features. They learned from mistakes, improved development process and have ambitious plans for the future. GNU/Linux? Well apart from not having driver for half the hardware few years before, having laughable plug&play, ugly sound support, it wasn't so bad. Today? Incredible kernel development cycle and cutting edge technologies.

Microsoft is as well capable of developing their software fast, but I think can't ultimately outpace the world. Their money income stays mostly constant, while FOSS keeps speeding up all the time (incl. persuading in in new developers). Microsoft will only be in jeopardy when windows application makers recognize linux as commercially viable target platform and gradually start releasing equally good software for it. (I understand that they currently can't earn much selling to "poor people who can't afford windows")

Other possible problem are even more cheap computers. Paying $100 for a budget machine won't go well with buying windows on them. Yeah, you can say that in wealthy countries people buy expensive PC's, while in poor countries they pirate windows. But if microsoft is silly enough to implement a non breakable copy protection (e.g. TCPA based), it will mean exploding adoption of FOSS.

There are of course some technical roadblocks: Mostly API support; Games are written for windows API,
everything else is more easily portable or replaceable.
Drivers: We can only hope ATI/nvidia will make worthy drivers for linux. With MS trying to kill native OGL on windows, who knows how all this will finish.

Server area is completely different ecosystem, as well as smatrphone(+PDA) or console market and that's still undecided (healthy competition there).

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