“Enterprises will see major changes in Microsoft’s competitive strategy as Linux and other open-source software continue to erode Microsoft’s traditional sources of income. Don’t expect Microsoft’s bundling strategies to continue as before, and don’t expect it to support Linux before 2006 at least — if ever.” Read the analysis on TechUpdate.
Microsoft vs. Linux: The Changing Nature of Competition
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
zdnet and osnews are both horribly biased towards linux. microsoft will not lose server marketshare to linux. in fact microsoft’s market share is INCREASING and continues to gain favour amoung admins. tight integration between microsoft servers and clients will lead to even more marketshare for windows. I predict the opposite that microsoft and windows will eradicate linux by 2008
Does that mean that communism is a more efficient business model than capitalism?
is it better to work together or compete fiercely and horde IP?
For a quick comparison can someone show me how many companies were either bought by Microsoft or went bankrupt. And how many companies were bankrupted or bought by open source?
Now maybe I’m wrong, but if two football players were competing against eachother and one killed the other the one left alive would not be as competitive or strong as the two of them working together. If these football players were corporations filled with tens of thousands of people who had families and lives outside their job. Would it not be in our best interest to maintain the jobs for all those people and have both corporations continue to compete? Then why do people insist on having a desktop monopoly, be it Windows or Linux or OSX or anything. Why do we insist on competing until the competition is dead? Why do we keep on beating the dead horse?
Can’t we all just get along?
“But your either with us or against us…”
Fuk! .!..
So, you are saying that we are FOR Linux. Funny, just yesterday people were saying we were for MS. Last week I was called a Mac zealot. Just this morning I was also called a BeOS cheerleader.
Haha, you people, you make me laugh. Make up your mind. Or just ->think<- before you write trash over here.
>>zdnet and osnews are both horribly biased towards linux.<<
this is a bunch of Bull-oni, actually ZDNet has a track record of being quite biased towards M$FT/Windoze, especially David Coursey is a known M$FT sycophant = http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame38.html
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html
and OS news has been quite neutral and have read things here that gave M$FT & Linux an even footing under the spotlight…
i think Eugenia Loli-Queru does a great job with this website, she might think i am biased towards Linux, and she is right again because i am biased towards Linux because it is Free as in USA#1 freedom & OpenSource, and M$FT is more like a tyrent dictator with their strongarm tactics with OEM computer manufacturers…
Does that mean that communism is a more efficient business model than capitalism?
Insofar as Linux is developed out of voluntary private charity (and in some cases distrubuted for free), it is perfectly at home in a capitalistic society.
And how many companies were bankrupted or bought by open source?
Well, Linux is pulling a major squeeze play on proprietary Unix vendors, especially Sun.
Okay, now Eugenia I am getting confused. In The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison everyone says you are biased towards Windows, now in this article you have a reader that says you are biased towards Linux. Funny, aint it?
Microsoft and Gates in particular believes in Christensen’s theories, to the point they distribute his book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0875845851/qid=104802… to their execs. Basically in terms of this theory Linux is a classic disruptive technology. There are 4 stages of compitition:
1) Features
2) Reliability
3) Convience
4) Price
I’d assume that microsoft figures they are winning right now on (1) but that this is short lived. Linux is going to continue adding features faster than customer needs will grow so that its only a question of time. That’s the reason their security and stability initiative is so important, they need to get the reliability up higher than min {linux reliability, customer wants}. Of course because they can’t possibly beat linux on price they are going to have to fight the last stand on convience.
In the server area (where Linux is already feature competitive) that’s the technique they are using. Better system management tools resulting in less disruptive technical staff…. I’d imagine their strategy for the desktop would be similar.
As for adopting Linux late in the game; they know that doesn’t work. The companies that were part of a disruptive techology early have huge advantages over late comers especially those with established business models in the same industry to protect. What they will be forced to do is fly “up market” that is focus more and more of their business on smaller segments of the market willing to pay very large premiums to use some features that Microsoft has that GNU/Linux does not. Culturally this could be difficult as Microsoft has always seen itself as the low cost high volume provider; but the server group is likely the way for the desktop group and that should ease the transition.
BTW Christensen’s book is excellent. Gates is very smart to push it on his people, it perfectly describes how his organization could lose and what to watch for.
As fast as linux is going to stop being like the anti-microsoft. anti-ms = means coping from others but is free. I’m going to take it serious.
Untill that day; Linux = Anti-MS just as bad only free.
Untill now I see Linux as a sum of: BSD and Windows. Mix BSD and closed source and you get a GPL OS.
Cheers,
Smurf
There is a 0.7 probability that the article is a load of fucking crap…all based on assumptions.
Ms is going to die slowly but surely, server market is no longer theres as it once was going to be, linux has seen to that. The desktop market is so saturated that they can only lose sales not gain. Xbox is a joke just like everything else they do, they have entered a more competative market in which they cannot be outpriced or receive enough 3rd party support, the smartphone is rubbish as its trying to be a solution to everything for everything which is not what a phone is or does. Office is bloat and expensive, just basically full of waste and DRM, woohoo, i’m glad i switched platforms…its sliding o its sliding down that slippery slope.
Actually, capitalism is based on competition. Microsoft is anti-competetive. Also, communism does not allow for individual profit. The GPL does.
They forgot one thing in the article… the courts.
Microsoft and other IP-holders will surely use all possible legal options to take down Linux. They have the cash and the political influence to do so.
If you can’t beat’em, destroy’em.
— “I predict the opposite that microsoft and windows will eradicate linux by 2008”
What?? Believing Linux will not gain anymore market share or even loose it is one thing(and not based on reality either), but I hope you realize that unless Microsoft started giving away Windows for free and with source, and probably not even then, there is no way that Linux is going to be anywhere close to ‘erradicated’. MS would have to assasinate every known OSS developer on earth to successfully erradicate Linux.
Given the very good public records that exist for the origins of Linux technologies making an IP case stick is going to be very difficult. More importantly Linux would be willing to use arguments that could have the effect of destroying most software patents. I doubt Microsoft would want to go this road. The threat of software patent violations might be much more effective than the reality of the suit.
“…MS would have to assasinate every known OSS developer on earth to successfully erradicate Linux.”
Wasn’t this basically the plot of that movie “Antitrust”?
Hahahahahaha….
Seriously though, of any OS this site could possibly be biased towards, it definitely isnt linux. I find most of the time OSnews is more than fair in its coverage of many OS’s across the board. Where else will you find reports on Amiga, Morph and SkyOS?
Most of the time, not always, but most of the time. Hey, humans are humans.
Actually, I’d like to add another entry to your list:
1) Features
2) Reliability
3) Convience
4) Price
5) Applications
In the #5 category, Linux still has a way to go, though this is admittedly much less of an issue on the server than it is the desktop.
I understand why you would want to put applications on that list, but they actually fall under features. The reason being that Christensen’s model is an all purpose one, not specialized to computers. Applications aren’t technically features, but in a way they add features, like picking options on a car.
The list is meant to be very general (its Christensen’s list not mine). The book itself never discusses operating system (or for that matter computer software) at all. The examples are things like diskdrive technology, earth moving equipment, steel production, eletric cars, etc…
For an OS evaluation applications would break up on the existing matrix:
1 – features – existence of applications that can do X
2 – reliability – existence of applications that can do X reliably
3 – convience – applications the user is already familiar with or have a shallow learning curve
4 – price – applications which are cheap.
So lets take MS Office and the home/SB user as an example. They are collections of features that office provides that Linux does not, but there are less and less of these. Once Linux meets these feature requirements these users cannot switch. At that point they’ll switch providing:
a) Office remains as buggy as it is
b) The linux version is less buggy
c) The level of bugginess is too great for the home consummer
If Microsoft can get the bugs done then the battle becomes very difficult for Linux because the home user already knows MS Office and thus it provides a much higher level of convience. The appeal would be primarily to people that don’t know office very well (non power users) who would see the two products as equal and then would choose Linux on price. In other words even if Windows applications are expensive (providing they are affordable) and Linux ones are free its not until Linux can meet the demand for feature and convience that they even stand a chance. The list is in order
1 then 2 then 3 then 4.
“Untill that day; Linux = Anti-MS just as bad only free.
Untill now I see Linux as a sum of: BSD and Windows. Mix BSD and closed source and you get a GPL OS. ”
I’m sorry I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make.
From my understanding the GPL ensures that the code can’t be hijacked by a company/person without giving back the improvements/changes.
Unlike the BSD code wich can be used withouth “strings” attached.
Anyway both the GPL and BSD’s are good it is just sad that there is a need for a GPL license, if the world was a bit better all we would need is just the public domain and everyone would contribute instead of all this petty “it’s mine, MINE I TELL YOU, My precious code” etc
Kaneda’s 2 cents
This all sound like the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” with all this probability stuff… (The space craft was powerd by a improbability drive).
Anyway just my 2 (euro) cents worth!
nils
Good movie, Did anyone ever notice that Gary kinda looked like Bill Gates
Eugenia said:
“So, you are saying that we are FOR Linux. Funny, just yesterday people were saying we were for MS. Last week I was called a Mac zealot. Just this morning I was also called a BeOS cheerleader.”
Actually, Eugenia, you have a zealotry like everyone else, it’s called: nothing is the best, nothing is the worst. Hence, trying to shore up windblows when it sucks. Hence, finding something negative to say about apple whenever possible. There’s some truth to this “platform relativism”, but you take it to extremes. It’s not the case that there’s no objectively “best” out there right now. There is.
The movie “Antitrust” was the biggest load of unrealistic hollywood shit ive ever seen. And yes the CEO of the company (i guess Gary was his name i cant remember) was supposed to look like bill gates. The whole thing was supposed to be modelled on Microsoft probably to make some dramatic hollywood version of the MS antitrust case. The movie was typical hollywood crap where the techno geek plugs his laptop into a phone socket in a motel and downloads the entire life history of someone from the CIA main computer etc etc bullshit bullshit…
The package thing is a MAJOR hurdle that desktop Linux faces. You can’t just keep building all the software for every version of every distro and just adding to the number of CDR. Usually the reason I upgrade my distros all the time has little to do with the distro itself and more to do with getting the updated packages bundled with it. Lack of backwards compatibility often means updating libraries and breaking other stuff that depends on them. I would love to see a statistic on how many man hours this wastes. All sources seem to point to Linux getting much bigger in size (kernel, KDE, Gnome, packages). Many OSS coders like to add cool features, but going through old code and fixing it is much less a priority for most. In its current state, Linux is heading at becoming a maintenance nightmare. Not to mention that most Linux distros seem to agree that throwing all the crap in a handful of /bin /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin style directories is the best place for it.
My Red Hat install uses over 250 megs of RAM just after booting. After using it for a while it climbs over 400. Many would say that the idea of storing more in RAM is smarter for speed reasons. But 250+ megs of RAM just to boot is a hell of allot of code just to boot the system. KDE is slow and k-apps like to crash on my computer (must be hardware!). Linux chokes when it’s improperly shut down and there is a long list of bugs. Linux is stuck in perpetual beta.
Many people think Linux will take over the world, I think it will implode.
My Red Hat install uses over 250 megs of RAM just after booting.
Ouch! My Gentoo uses 160 just after booting with GDM, KDE, Kopete, and the info center all open.
You might want to throw in support as part of the decision process (falls under 3) all else being equal.
Jim you may need to turn off uneeded crap in your startup (if you havent already done this). It sounds like there is something wrong with your setup if it is eating that much ram just after boot. My RedHat 8 install has 190M free out of my 256MB of ram after i boot. Ive turned off all but the most necessary services (network,at,cron,xfs). This is a desktop machine so i dont need any network services running. My machine has no ports open at all.
This is my main reason for using Linux as my internet access OS-i can secure it tighter than a frogs ass and as long as im logged in as my normal user i dont have to worry about malicious web pages and stuff i download killing my system.
I have 2 computers-one runs Linux and connects to the internet and the other runs win2k and has all my games and windows stuff. I can also use the win2k box for any new hardware i might buy that Linux doesnt support. The windows box never faces the internet.
This is a good setup that has worked for me for years.
But actually I think this article is quite realistic. If my memory serves me well Gartner was sponsored by Microsoft, but if I read this those visions are quite realistic (I would say the same trusting my gutfeelings) and I think that, is Microsoft wishes to retain their successfull business, they need to follow Gartners estimates.
Sincerely,
Remco
—
1*HP Omnibook 4150/P2-400/256M/gentoo
1*K6-3-400/128M/gentoo
1*need to by a fast new pc now/Win2K SP3 on my harddisk
JBolden:
Excellent analysis in your comment. I myself, not being an strategic planning expert, already concluded M$ would follow the way of the old Unix, aimed at clients which could pay a lot. Problem is, are there such clients? Perhaps.
on Eugenia:
Eugenia (and OSNews) seems neutral. That doesn’t mean she must have equal opinions about all OSes; she just doesn’t favour any of them, IMO. I disagree with 90%+ of what she says, but then I’m no editor.
on the article:
ZDNet is a mess with pro-Windows *and*pro-Linux guys (and neutral, too). The article itself looks good, but maybe the need for interoperability is fundamental. MS already acknowledges that (against will, probably) with XML file formats (“extended” right now, I’ve read).
For this reason, I see MS putting stronger emphasis on middleware and the OS losing importance much faster than predicted.
They might offer solutions for Linux sooner than most imagine; problem is: how could they change their image from “most hated” to a perceived “valuable alternative” on Linux?
By talking business lingo, IMHO.
Excellent analysis in your comment.
Thank you.
I myself, not being an strategic planning expert, already concluded M$ would follow the way of the old Unix, aimed at clients which could pay a lot. Problem is, are there such clients? Perhaps.
Sure there will be. Take people who’ve invested heavily in VB/VBA/macro application design. They may have millions or tens of millions of dollars in in house design already invested in the office platform. They’d pay a fortune not to move.
Just to pick an example I’m familiar with I’ve worked with a lot of publishing / workflow systems which use word as a front end. Prices range from 60k-500k per server, so often investments in base software over a million are not uncommon. Now throw in something like 200 man months of templates and workflows at $3k per man month… They would pay a fortune to have features in word designed to cooperate better with their commercial based systems. For example:
— tighter integration with Postscript ripping engines
— advanced support for Xerox decomposition services
etc…
Right now Microsof doesn’t focus on thsee upmarket customers as much because they still own the core windows market. But if you figure something like:
3 workflow solutions x fortune 2000 x microsoft sells 1/2 the solutions x $1m revenue each sale x one sale every 3 years = $1b revenue from the US per year. Now double that for the world market….
And that’s publishing workflow. Take the same thing for the accounting / finance people who have very complex VBA driven Excel documents…
Yes I absolutely think there is an “up market” where Microsoft can move to quite comfortablely. Culturally there aren’t used to it. So far they seem perfectly content to sell Word at $50 a pop while documentum, document sciences, doc1…. pulls down the millions but once they lose the $50 a pop..
At the time I first started using Linux (early 2000) Microsoft could have done one thing to make Linux a pioneering footnote in PC history: GPL Windows 98. Now, it’s just too late. In 2006 it’ll be even later.
a flip.
this is the same garb reiterrated… “ms is dead”, “linux will rule”. Is this Highlander? Can there be only one?? give me a break. Microsoft isn’t going anywhere, and that is that. They may not always have the monopoly they do now, but they sure as hell won’t go out of business.
I find funny the degree of precision with which Gartner researchers made their predictions. I always thought that even psychics could not be so sure of events to come.
More seriously, some assertions made in the article are not supported by facts :
<<It (Microsoft) had long been considered the champion and enabler of end users, as well as an overall force for lower software prices — until recently.>>
I beg to differ with the preceding belief : is repetitive BSOD an enabler of end users ? Back when I was still using Windows, I never considered Microsoft to be some sort of champion : exactly what were they defending ? I don’t remember at what time was MS Office less expensive than WordPerfect, for instance.
<<Trustworthiness through security-oriented initiatives, such as the Windows secure base platform, which was previously called “Palladium.”>>
Yet another apology of vaporware. Why not read the description of some of the software produced by open source developers to find real security-oriented initiatives ?
<< Concentration on the lack of accountability in Linux and other open-source software. Total cost of ownership.>>
Don’t MS products come with an EULA that specifically says that Microsoft can’t be held responsible for any damage resulting from the use of their stuff ? Maybe Gartner regularly receive checks from Redmond to compensate them from the loss of productivity or revenue they suffer whenever their Windows servers go down…
As for the TCO, what about throwing away thousands of dollars for Windows licenses ? Add to that the expensive computers, the antivirus yearly subscription, the MSCE wages and so on …
<<With Linux, the GNU’s Not Unix (GNU) General Public License requires that any changes to the code be made available to the open-source software community.>>
How hard is it really for Gartner to read the GPL in its entirety instead of publishing inaccuracies ?
<<Even if high-growth Linux server forecasts materialize, most of that growth would likely be at the expense of Unix.>>
Somebody, please tell Gartner that Evans Data conducted a survey that pointed to Windows as the main victim of Linux growth, at least among developers …
I can’t stand a site that is biased towards Windows and Linux. Couldn’t we find some other up and coming thingy to gloat over…., hummmmmmmm, let me see….., what shall it be….? How about Fink?
You lowly peasants fail to realise that anything based on a failing architecture which is the x86 series, will always be substandard.
You ppl are riding on a refurbished typewriter from the 70s. Your architecture and beloved x86 died years ago. Intel and AMD just don’t know it yet. But how long can you zap a frogs legs to get a involuntary reaction. You decide. But I will be looking a greener pastures, namely the PowerPC series and beyond. Well at least Linux use PPC as well, they got that much going for it.
I agree with all those saying Linux isn’t currently making a dent in the server market.
It isn’t. Why?? Because Linux is actually slowly shifting target audiences without knowing it (at least to the mass public eye). Also with Microsoft you get a nice familiar operating environment with semi-understandable options (though there are many areas where some Linux distros outshine M$ handsdown in this area).
Everyon knows I’m biased. But not towards Linux or M$ junk. BeOS BABY! We will soon be decently viable for small web-servers (I plan to test it on a site with about 100,000 hits/week then go up). Our only need is to adjust one or two security measures, but in reality a router with port forwarding is better anyway 😉
–The loon