Slashdot Mirror

Jason Jardine wrote to mention a C|Net article describing a new Dell deal with Vodafone to provide high-speed wireless access. From the article: "Dell said Tuesday that it plans to embed Vodafone's High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology into laptops built to order and sold in Europe. The technology will be backwards compatible with earlier 3G, or third-generation, wireless technologies including UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), the company said."

taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."

taskforce writes "Sun Microsystems Co-Founder Bill Joy claims that Apple nearly moved to Sun's SPARC chips instead of IBM's PPC platform, back in the mid-1990s. From the article: "We got very close to having Apple use Sparc. That almost happened," Joy said at a panel discussion featuring reminiscences by Sun's four cofounders at the Computer History Museum. An account of his entire presentation can be found on Cnet."

ZuperDee writes "It appears AMD has licensed Z-RAM technology from Innovative Silicon for possible use in future processors. According to the article, this could lead to caches about 5 times denser than the SRAM that is normally used right now. C|Net says they will probably make the announcement on Monday."

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Seibold over at Apple Matters, has written up an interesting analysis on Steve Jobs' suggestion that Microsoft make their own mp3 player. He argues that it is more bait than business plan, a deft move by Steve Jobs to lure Microsoft into a can't-win war. The key, according to the article, is the licensing of FairPlay." From the article: "The folks who stick with Microsoft get to fight over, roughly, twenty percent of the market. The folks that go with Apple would be aligning themselves with what has become the industry standard. The players that license FairPlay would have access to the iTunes store, backwards compatibility with the songs consumers have already purchased, and a chance to compete on a perfectly level playing field with the iPod. It doesn't take a Stanford MBA to deduce that the potential rewards of opting to use FairPlay far outstrip the rewards of going with PlaysForSure."

Billosaur writes "C|Net has an article by Katharine Q. Seelye of The New York Times, which indicates that the Washington Post is having to close one of its blogs, due to 'too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail directed at the paper's ombudsman.' It seems that Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman, wrote an article on the Jack Abramoff scandal which elicited a storm of protest and led to readers using profanity and making unprintable comments, which the paper had to take extra care in removing. This was apparently more based on the issue at hand, as the Post's other blogs have not experienced similar problems." What kind of precedent does this set for other mainstream news sites? What we'd consider a normal day around here has to look fairly intimidating to the average newspaper editor. Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?

JamesAlfaro wrote to mention a C|Net article putting a pricetag on computer crime. From the article: "The FBI calculated the price tag by extrapolating results from a survey of 2,066 organizations. The survey, released Thursday, found that 1,324 respondents, or 64 percent, suffered a financial loss from computer security incidents over a 12-month period. The average cost per company was more than $24,000, with the total cost reaching $32 million for those surveyed. Often survey results can be skewed, because poll respondents are more likely to answer when they have experienced a problem. So, when extrapolating the survey results to estimate the national cost, the FBI reduced the estimated number of affected organizations from 64 percent to a more conservative 20 percent. "

JamesAlfaro writes "After much wrangling between opposing interests among the members of the IEEE, a first draft for the Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11n specification received approval in a Thursday meeting. Final ratification of the standard is not expected until next year." Relatedly, judgecorp writes "The IEEE has disbanded its working group on ultrawideband. They are leaving the marketplace to decide between two competing approaches." From the article: "Freescale, first to the market with UWB products, believes its headstart will give it a long-term victory, while WiMedia, with the backing of industry heavyweights including Intel and Microsoft, reckons its punch will eventually win through, even without a formal IEEE standard."

Spinlock_1977 writes "C|Net is running a story that Intel is going back to software x86 emulation on Itanium in order to reclaim chip real estate. (room for another 9MB of cache?) One notable quote about x86 emulation: 'Basically, no one ever used hardware-based IA-32 execution, so better to use the silicon for something else,' said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. 'Of course, basically no one uses software-based emulation either, but at least that doesn't cost chip real estate.'"

diverge_s wrote to mention an article examining Intel's market share loss to AMD in the fourth quarter of 2005. From the article: "Sales of Intel-based desktop PCs fell 22.3 percent during the fourth quarter, according to Current Analysis. As a result, sales of AMD-based desktops took the lead during the pivotal fourth-quarter holiday shopping season. AMD chips were found in 52.5 percent of desktop PCs sold in U.S. retail stores during that period."

JonathanGCohen writes "News.com is reporting on a new machine that can tell you all about your skin's unique features (excessive oil, UV damage, etc.) using an image scan and software to analyze it. Its inventors plan on developing a version that can even detect skin cancer." From the article: "Apart from numbers, the technology, called Clarity Pro, can depict the depth and severity of wrinkles in a 3D chart, show the extent of bacteria-filled pores in a graph, or represent UV damage in purple dots scattered about your face in a white-light image. It can also calculate how long a person can be exposed to the sun, in minutes or hours a day, before incurring more UV damage."

RomanianClimber writes to tell us News.com is reporting that SWSoft is trying to get OpenVZ into the Linux kernel. OpenVZ is an operating system level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. From the article: "In this, it has a major ally: Red Hat, the top seller of the open-source operating system, which plans to add the software to its free Fedora version of Linux for enthusiasts. The companies' move to make OpenVZ partitioning standard in Linux is timely, said Pund-IT analyst Charles King."

Glyn Moody writes "C|Net has a surprising story about a seminar given by a top judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law. According to the article, he has "questioned whether software patents should be granted, and has criticized the U.S. for allowing "anything under the sun" to be patented." Is the tide turning?"

SierraPete writes "CNet reports that Thomas Millot, a former systems analyst for a major pharmaceutical company, has lost his appeal on a computer intrusion charge. Mr. Millot was convicted of unlawfully entering the system that he used to work on and deleting a colleague's account after his job was outsourced. Mr. Millot's attorneys argued that his actions did not amount to $5K in damage--the threshold for the crime he was convicted of. The court disagreed, saying that IBM had done over $20K in work to undo his handiwork." Update: 01/14 19:55 GMT by J : Typo corrected; turns out the word "not" is important...

RemovableBait writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 has sold over 600,000 units so far and is on track to sell over 4.5 million consoles by the end of the business year. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft could have sold many more as 'video game publishers and retailers have said shipments during the key holiday season fell short of expectations'. If Microsoft's predictions are correct, this could pose a major threat to Sony's well-established PlayStation line of consoles." Relatedly, Saige writes "The Live Arcade on the original Xbox was ignored by just about everyone who owned that console. However, the updated version on the Xbox 360 is getting a totally different reception, spearheaded by the popular Geometry Wars, an old-school style 2-D shooter in the vein of Robotron: 2084 that has eye candy deserving of a next-gen title - all for $5. The demo has been downloaded 200,000 times."

bonch writes "Nine years after Michael Dell said he'd shut down Apple and give the money to the shareholders, Apple has passed Dell in market value, at $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell's $71,970,702,760. Analysts expect Apple to continue to outperform competitors, citing 2006 as 'poised to be the year of both iPod growth and, more importantly, Mac market share gains,' with earnings growing more than 35%. I should have bought stock two years ago!" We talked about the approach of this moment back in November of last year.

Ant wrote to mention a C|Net article reporting an agreement by The Anti-Spyware Coalition on some standard methods for identifying and combating spyware. From the article: "The Anti-Spyware Coalition, whose members include Microsoft, Symantec, Computer Associates, McAfee, AOL and Yahoo, said on Thursday that it has finalized its spyware detection guidelines. The final version takes into account public comments on a proposed version introduced in October ... The Anti-Spyware Coalition's guidelines, or risk model description, aim to provide a common way to classify spyware, based on risks a piece of software poses to consumers. They also suggest ways to handle software, based on those risk levels."

alphasubzero949 writes "According to News.com, Microsoft has had no plans to update or improve Windows Media Player and has instead thrown its weight behind a third party plugin to fill the void. Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, told News.com, 'It's basically a business decision for Microsoft. Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.'"

Ant writes "CNET News.com and ZDNet News report that security attacks over instant-messaging (IM) networks became more prevalent in 2005, according to a new study. MSN experienced the largest number of IM security incidents in both 2004 and 2005, while year-on-year incident growth rates were largest on AIM."

An anonymous reader writes "CNET is reporting that the US Department of Homeland Security is extending its support to open source software. The DHS will be giving Stanford University, Coverity, and Symantec a $1.24 million grant to improve the security of open source software. From the article: 'The Homeland Security Department grant will be paid over a three-year period, with $841,276 going to Stanford, $297,000 to Coverity and $100,000 to Symantec, according to San Francisco-based technology provider Coverity, which plans to announce the award publicly on Wednesday.' It's nice that our tax dollars are being used for the right stuff."

theodp writes "After initially rejecting Microsoft's File Allocation Table (FAT) patents, the USPTO has ruled them valid. From the article: 'Microsoft has won a debate where they were the only party allowed to speak, in that the patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting arguments made by Microsoft, said unimpressed Public Patent Foundation President Dan Ravicher.'"

An anonymous reader writes "CNet reports on an analyst's prediction that Dell will begin using AMD chips, instead of their much-touted Intel processors." From the article: "Dell likely will reverse course and begin selling computers with Advanced Micro Devices' processors, Piper Jaffray analyst Les Santiago predicted Tuesday, sending the chipmaker's stock up 4 percent in midday trading."

On Thursday, President Bush signed into law a must-pass DoJ appropriations bill which contained a little gotcha for the internet. For decades, making anonymous abusive phone calls has been a federal crime, good for up to two years behind bars -- and the term "abusive" has included threats, harassment, and the much weaker "intent to annoy." Now, that telecommunications law has been extended to include the Internet, so when you post an anonymous troll to wind up your least-favorite blogger, you may break the law. This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts. A 3 AM phone call is different from a post to blogger.com calling me a jerk. I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.

Aviran Mordo writes to tell us that the Governor of New York is pushing hard for the widespread availability of both ethanol and biodiesel on the New York State Thruway and 100 more locations around the state. From the article: "Costs and further details of the plan, which Pataki first sketched out in his State of the State address on Wednesday, will not be disclosed until he makes his budget proposal later this month. If the plan is approved by the Legislature, it will give New Yorkers one of the nation's most diverse ranges of fuel choices. Only Minnesota offers an ethanol-rich blend known as E85 at more than 100 stations. Likewise, biodiesel is offered at only a few hundred of the nation's roughly 180,000 stations."

FancyKetchup writes "This time, C|Net is caught up in cookie paranoia with their 'special investigation' into use of cookies on the Senate and House representative websites." From the article: "Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for instance, has been a longtime advocate of strict privacy laws to restrict commercial Web sites' data collection practices. In a statement posted on his own Web site, McCain assures visitors that 'I do not use 'cookies' or other means on my Web site to track your visit in any way.' But visiting mccain.senate.gov implants a cookie on the visitor's PC that will not expire until 2035. " Follow up to a story we reported on earlier.

An anonymous reader writes "Burst.com, a patent holder of many patents covering streaming video and time-shifting of video, has been sued by Apple after license negotiations broke down. Apple is asking the court to invalidate Burst.com's patents. Burst.com is the same company that successfully sued Microsoft over patent infringements. Many comparisons will likely be made of NTP and Burst.com, but Burst.com actually has useful technology, has owned the patents for over a decade, and most importantly, actually had highly regarded products that made use of the patents."

John H. Doe writes "According to CNet, tiny worms kept in special aluminum canisters aboard the space shuttle Columbia (which broke apart in the atmosphere back in Feb. 1, 2003) survived their fall to earth. The small (about 1mm long) soil roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans was found alive in four or five of the recovered canisters, after an impact 2,295 times the force of Earth's gravity."

Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior

If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.

This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.

Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World

A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.

Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.

'The Network is the Computer'

I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.

Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.

Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."

I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.

If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.

Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors

It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.

We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.

I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.

Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.

When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.

The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.

So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.

Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products

Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.

A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.

Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?

The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.

The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over

IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)

The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.

Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.

This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.

But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.

Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.

-----

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).

Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior

If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.

This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.

Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World

A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.

Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.

'The Network is the Computer'

I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.

Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.

Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."

I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.

If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.

Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors

It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.

We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.

I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.

Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.

When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.

The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.

So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.

Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products

Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.

A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.

Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?

The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.

The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over

IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)

The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.

Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.

This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.

But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.

Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.

-----

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).

Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior

If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.

This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.

Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World

A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.

Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.

'The Network is the Computer'

I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.

Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.

Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."

I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.

If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.

Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors

It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.

We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.

I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.

Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.

When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.

The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.

So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.

Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products

Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.

A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.

Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?

The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.

The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over

IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)

The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.

Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.

This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.

But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.

Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.

-----

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).

Microsoft Windows still dominates the desktop. But in many other areas, including Web servers and supercomputing, Microsoft is just one player among many, and often a weak player at that. On the gaming side, despite the latest xBox getting all kinds of media buzz as "the" console to buy, Sony's Playstation outsells the xBox at least two to one, and many analysts expect Sony to widen that gap even more when Playstation 3 comes out in the Spring of 2006. On the Internet, MSN and MSN Search are so far behind AOL and Google that it isn't funny. And even on the desktop, Linux keeps getting stronger, while Mac OS X is commonly accepted as more reliable, secure, and user-oriented than Windows. So why do we keep saying Microsoft is a monopoly? Microsoft (Slowly) Moves Away from Monopolistic Behavior

If a major IT user tells a Microsoft salesperson that he or she is thinking about switching to Linux, Microsoft will usually come back with a cut-price offer, something the company never used to do. Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price, which is not monopoly-style behavior.

This does not mean Microsoft has suddenly adopted a "let's all love one another" attitude.I believe Microsoft is getting more concerned about interoperability not out of goodness, but because of market pressure. But in the long run, as long as Microsoft stops treating every other operating system and file format as some sort of devilspawn, life is a little easier for those of us who would rather not use their products, and that's what really matters.

Microsoft Explorer No Longer Rules the Online World

A majority of desktop computer users may still run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, but it no longer has 95% market share. In a 2002 book, and again last year in an online article, I warned Web designers not to make IE-only sites, just as in the (distant) past I'd warned them not to make Netscape-only sites. Some listened. Some didn't.

Firefox adoption may have slowed in 2005, but it certainly hasn't stopped. Opera has become enough of a force that we hear rumors about first Google, then Microsoft, buying it. In any case, whether MSIE is currently running on 90% of all desktops or on only 70% (as a few surveys indicate), it is becoming less popular every month. Now Microsoft has decided that Explorer is no longer fit for Mac users, so its market share will drop even more. Sure, there's a new version of Explorer coming out, but it isn't going to help the millions of "legacy" Windows users who don't want to buy XP. If they want modern browser functionality, they must switch to Firefox, Opera or another non-Microsoft browser.

'The Network is the Computer'

I don't think this is quite true today, if by "the network" we're talking about applications delivered over the Internet instead of over well-maintained LANs. Back in October I explained why I don't think Internet-delivered applications are quite "there" yet. More recently, Salesforce.com had an outage that angered many of its (claimed) 350,000 subscribers. Worse, ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright pointed out that Salesforce.com compounded the problem, and possibly made users leery of all Internet-delivered applications' claims of "99.9% reliability," by poor communication with its users.

Most of the Web 2.0 (and even Web 3.0) stuff that's getting so much hype these days is not OS-dependent. You can run things like Google Maps on Linux, Mac OS, Unix, and even Windows, using any standards-compliant browser you choose.

Even Microsoft is trying to get into the Web 2.0 game. I got a press release from their PR people that included this sentence:"And if you enjoy taking a drive to check out your neighborhood’s Christmas lights visit this great Windows Live Local developer application at http://msnsearch101.com/searchmap."

I found this online utility's behavior strange and primitive, not nearly up to the standards of Google Maps and some of the mashups based on it. "Ah," I thought, "that's probably because I'm trying to use it with Linux and Mozilla." So I turned to my one Windows (XP) computer and checked the site with both Firefox and Explorer. For some reason the map background didn't load at all in Firefox, on Windows, and its behavior in Explorer, on Windows, was just as clunky as it was in Mozilla, on Linux.

If this is supposed to be a sample of what Windows Live Local can do, I don't think Microsoft is headed for any kind of monopoly -- or even much market share -- in the online map business. Not only that, it makes me wonder how good their promised Microsoft® Office Live is going to be. If even a quarter of the rumors we've heard about Google and Sun joining up to produce a Webified version of OpenOffice.org are true, I suspect Microsoft is going to be a distant also-ran in the (inevitable) Internet-delivered office software business, too.

Hundreds of Thousands of Competitors

It's fun to play the "Google is cooler than Microsoft" game and talk about how Google, not Microsoft, has become the hot place for top-end programmers to work if they want to make their mark on the world, but even Google can only hire a tiny fraction of the world's software development talent. There are over 100,000 Open Source projects on SourceForge.net (which is owned by the same company that owns Slashdot), and SourceForge.net is but one of many Open Source and Free Software hosting services out there. There are literally millions of programmers working on Free and Open Source Software, plus countless others working on personal proprietary projects.

We've all heard -- probably too many times -- the old saw, "If you have enough monkeys banging randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of William Shakespeare." This may or may not be true. But it is certain that if you put millions of programmers in front of millions of computers and let them do whatever they want, some of them will turn out brilliant, world-changing work. Even if 999 out of 1000 of our putative programmers work on established projects or never finish what they start, that still gives us thousands of potential world-changing software projects, most of which won't be developed by Google (or Microsoft) employees.

I've been to India, and the smartest programmers I met there weren't working for outsourcing mills but worked for themselves. I'm sure there are plenty of self-employed programmers in China, Brazil, Kenya, and almost everywhere else on this planet, too, and there are certainly plenty of them here in the United States. And, all over the world, millions of programmers have day jobs doing routine work for corporate employers to put food on the table, and do their "real work" at home, at night.

Neither you nor I nor Google's management nor Microsoft's management know what might be going on right now in the mind of a brilliant Saudi woman with a computer science degree who can't work outside her home because her country's laws keep her from mixing with men who aren't related to her. There may be a poorly-dressed young man coding furiously in a Beijing Internet cafe, while you read this article, whose new operating system will make all current ones obsolete -- and you may not learn about his work until it shows up in a Chinese-made $100 laptop computer.

When Bill Gates and his friends started Microsoft, it was one of very few companies that sold nothing but personal computer software, and the others were so small that Microsoft managed to buy most of its competitors -- or at least license their best work or hire away their best programmers. Back then, programmers were scarce and expensive, as were the computers they programmed on. Now there are both programmers and computers all over the world, linked together by the Internet. The Internet not only helps programmers collaborate with each other across geographic boundaries, but allows them to distribute their work without shipping physical products.

The only reason to have a software company's employees work in an office these days is control, both of employees' schedules and of what they work on. Self-motivated geniuses have no need of offices and may even resent being asked to show up at one on a regular schedule, which means that many of the world's best programmers will never work for Google, Microsoft or any other company. Instead, they'll start their own software companies or, in many cases, Open Source-based consultancies.

So Microsoft doesn't face a few dozen competitors, as it did in the 1980s, but hundreds of thousands. And these competitors are spread all over the world. This kind of competition is a lot harder to co-opt, buy out or fend off than competition from a single company, a la Netscape, or even from a group of companies as substantial as IBM, Sun, Oracle, and their computing industry peers.

Competition has Forced Microsoft to Improve its Products

Microsoft may no longer be able to hire all the top programmers it wants, but there is already plenty of talent among its 60,000-plus employees, and they have done some excellent work in recent years. Windows XP is immeasurably better and more stable than Windows ME or Windows 98. The next generation of Explorer will have many of the modern browser features that those of us who use Firefox or Opera have gotten accustomed to. Microsoft Office may not have some of the features OpenOffice.org users take for granted, like a built-in graphics utility, the ability to act as a front end for industrial-strength free databases like MySQL, and the ability to save your work in 30+ different Open and proprietary formats, including PDF. But Microsoft Office today is a lot better than it was 10 years ago, and the next version may even use a sort-of free XML file format that may not be as open and standardized as the OASIS Open Document Format used by OpenOffice.org, but is less closed and less proprietary than previous Microsoft file formats.

A true monopoly would not need to make these improvements in its products. It would give you whatever it wanted, at whatever price it wanted to charge. It would not be selling cut-down versions of its products at cut-rate prices in developing countries -- many of which, you may note, are rapidly turning into "software developing" countries.

Without Linux, combined with Apple's move to BSD-based Mac OS X, I doubt that Microsoft would have put much development effort into Windows. They sure didn't do much with Explorer between the time they crushed Netscape and the time when Firefox started making a big splash, did they?

The U.S. antitrust case against Microsoft wasn't about the company being a monopoly (which courts agreed that it was at the time), but about illegal misuse of that monopoly. That case was settled in a way that left Microsoft essentially unharmed, but with a judge overseeing its actions for five years, a time period that is going to end before long.

The Age of the Software Monopoly is Over

IBM tried to create a monopoly in the business desktop computer business, but failed to hold onto its market-leading position as dozens, then hundreds, and later thousands of competitors made better/faster/cheaper PCs. Even today, while Dell is the world's largest personal computer vendor, if you add up all the market share reports from major computer vendors in this C|Net article, you'll see that they account for around 60% -- not 100% -- of total sales, with smaller companies getting the rest. (And some of those companies are *really* small, like the one-man Bradenton, Florida, shop where my sailing buddy Gene just bought his latest home computer.)

The personal computer hardware business has become totally demonopolized, decentralized, democratized, and internationalized. If you have enough mechanical ability to assemble components neatly (and enough sales ability to get people to buy what you make), you can get into it yourself with a very small investment, just as Michael Dell started out reselling computer components and assembling systems in his college dorm room.

Starting a software business takes even less investment. If you're a competent programmer -- or you have a friend who is a competent programmer and you are a whiz-bang marketing person -- you have everything you need to get going. You can either produce and sell proprietary software or customize (and probably install and maintain) Free or Open Source Software for corporate clients. If the Internet is your primary sales and distribution channel, you don't need to live and work in expensive IT business hotbeds like Silicon Valley or Boston, either: JBoss, for example, is based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Digium, the company behind Asterisk, is in Huntsville, Alabama.

There are software businesses springing up all over the place. Most of them are tiny, and few of them will ever get big enough that analyst firms like Gartner or IDC will track their market share (or even notice them). But there are so many of them being started that, in aggregate, they are becoming a more significant market force than any single big software company, even Microsoft.

This doesn't mean Microsoft will be replaced next year by 100,000 startups. The company will still be around, it will still get lots of press, and -- assuming it embraces (but does not keep trying to extend and extinguish) Open Standards -- it will still be a powerful force in the software world.

But no matter what Microsoft does, it will never have a software monopoly again. Nor will any other company. The barriers to entry in the software business have become too low for that to happen, and too many skilled software developers are learning that they can earn at least as much working for themselves as they would by working for big software companies.

Small is Beautiful was a fine book title in 1973. Today, it's a fine description of the software industry's future.

-----

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org the complete article (or an article proposal).

An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"

linumax writes "Windows Vista will improve search functionality on a PC by letting users tag files with metadata, but those tags could cause unwanted and embarrassing information disclosure, Gartner analysts have warned. Search and organization capabilities are among the primary features of Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP due out late in 2006. While building those features, Microsoft is not paying enough attention to managing the descriptive information, or metadata, that users can add to files to make it easier to find and organize data on a PC, according to Gartner. 'This opens up the possibility of the inadvertent disclosure of this metadata to other users inside and outside of your organization,' Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald wrote in a research note published on Thursday."

linumax writes "Windows Vista will improve search functionality on a PC by letting users tag files with metadata, but those tags could cause unwanted and embarrassing information disclosure, Gartner analysts have warned. Search and organization capabilities are among the primary features of Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP due out late in 2006. While building those features, Microsoft is not paying enough attention to managing the descriptive information, or metadata, that users can add to files to make it easier to find and organize data on a PC, according to Gartner. 'This opens up the possibility of the inadvertent disclosure of this metadata to other users inside and outside of your organization,' Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald wrote in a research note published on Thursday."

HikingStick writes "News.com is reporting that the Texas attorney general is expanding the allegations against Sony. It seems the software would install even if users declined the EULA. From the article: 'The Texas attorney general said on Wednesday that he added a new claim to a lawsuit charging Sony BMG Music Entertainment with violating the state's laws on deceptive trade practices by hiding 'spyware' on its compact discs ... The new charges brought by Abbott contend that MediaMax software used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs violated state laws because it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement.'"

JamesAlfaro wrote to mention a News.com article about a pair of game store owners charged with Xbox modding. From the article: "Jason Jones and Jonathan Bryant, two Los Angeles residents who own the ACME Game Store on Melrose Ave., allegedly sold Xbox game systems that had been modified by Pei Cai, of Pico Rivera, Calif. Cai allegedly equipped the Xbox consoles with modification chips and large hard drives to allow the user to copy rented or borrowed games onto the device for future playback. Buyers would pay from $225 to more than $500 for the changes."

mrops writes "CNet is reporting that Texas will soon be getting broadband over power lines. From the article, "Broadband service over power lines (BPL) is not a new technology. People have been experimenting with building communication networks over power lines since the 1950s. But it hasn't caught on due to its low speed, low functionality and high development cost." Unfortunately this technology matured a bit too late and has been subdued by recent rush of wi-fi products. The technology has a lot of potential and wi-fi black zones are not an issue in simple home setups."

PseudoSapien writes "A Dutch consumer media company is hoping it can tap the power of the VIC 20, the PET and the Commodore 64 to launch a new wave of products, including a home media center device and a portable GPS (Global Positioning System) unit and media player. They're talking about Resurrecting Commodore." From the article: "Commodore is far from the first company to try to revive a once-popular tech brand. The Amiga, Commodore's onetime PC brand, has had its own decades-long history as fans tried to preserve both the computer's operating system and brand despite the lack of strong corporate backing."

Lord Haha writes "It appears that Google may be on the verge of purchasing a 5% stake in AOL." From the article: "A tie-up with Google would make sense. Time Warner has been losing out online to rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo. For its part, Google may be interested in getting access to AOL's e-mail and instant messaging service. It would strengthen Google's hand against rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, who have well-established webmail and instant messaging services. Google is a relative newcomer to this area with Gmail and Googletalk." More commentary on News.com. Big change from just a few days ago.

Dave Rosenberg, Principal Analyst, Open Source Development Labs, contributed this commentary piece: Despite all the open source software and services companies funded in 2005, the associated business models are still considered experimental and unproven. The new crop need only to look to the past avoid missteps. At the Open Source Business Conference in November, VCs and open source software company executives wondered aloud if what we’re seeing today is a “bubble” of open source start-ups being funded. One journalist’s recap of the event cited $144 million in open source start-ups receiving VC funding in 2005, double the venture capital flow for open source start-ups in 2004. Bubble or not, there is a company that every would-be open source start-up investor should learn a lesson from: LinuxCare.

LinuxCare was born in 1999 -- venture-backed by top tier VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, with total funding in the ballpark of $70 million.

Those were the frontier days for Linux. There was a ton of industry interest and activity despite the fact that the jury was still out with respect to end user adoption. Nobody really knew exactly how Linux was going to be used – would it be for the desktop, servers, etc.? The company used the vast venture coffers to promote the brand and staff star-power (even Linus Torvalds consulted for them briefly)– and LinuxCare quickly became the recognized name for Linux services and support, doing work for big systems vendors like Dell and IBM in addition to developing device drivers and offering education services.

Red Hat had the Linux OS and software, VA Linux had the hardware – and LinuxCare had the services. It was a theoretically perfect enterprise Linux ecosystem triumvirate.

But it wasn't meant to be.

The demise of LinuxCare can be attributed to many factors. The first was that enterprises were slow to adopt Linux – in the early ‘00s, IT spending came to a grinding halt with the dot-com and stock market crash. But the key factor to LinuxCare’s spectacular death spiral was the fact that they were going up against Red Hat, the very company they were basing their business on. Red Hat not only developed their own distribution of Linux, but also started offering support for it. Red Hat offered a one-stop shop for Linux software and services regardless of hardware. Enterprise customers decided it was easier to buy from one vendor. This same sentiment is what drives sales of Microsoft software in enterprises today.

LinuxCare suffered a painful public death over months of executive departures and layoffs, VA Linux abandoned hardware for software, and RedHat, with the cash to weather the tech spending downturn, expanded its revenue streams and became the de-facto enterprise Linux distribution.

It's easy to dismiss LinuxCare as "ahead of their time", which is definitely true. But the fundamental and fatal flaw was that they based their products on someone else's IP, with no IP of their own. When the market tanked abruptly, LinuxCare didn't have the money to weather the storm and didn't have consistent alternative revenue streams to combat the lack of services income.

Some of the executives from LinuxCare went on to start a new company called Levanta, which focuses on Linux systems management. They have since developed IP in software and hardware that can sustain the business beyond the services revenue.Their LinuxCare experience taught them how to build a sustainable technology business model on top of open source software. No longer do they rely on IP that walks out the door every night in their employees' heads.

In the end, it all comes down to IP. Building a business on top of something you don't own is extremely risky. Companies need to develop their own IP to be innovative and have competitive differentiation. And if they don't develop it themselves, they need to acquire or license the relevant code to protect themselves and ensure they aren't caught without alternatives.

An Open Source Danger Zone?

In my eyes, the bubble associated with open source is less related to the millions of VC dollars and more related to the reliance on software and components that are not part of a company's internal IP. When Oracle acquired InnoDB, it had a less than positive effect on MySQL, but MySQL is a smart enough company to not bet the farm on something it doesn't own. It owns enough IP to sustain its products-and it's business from the risk associated with relying on someone else's code.

IT Groundwork has built a business on top of an open source network monitoring project called Nagios. They don't own the copyrights and they don't employ the creator. Kleiner-backed SpikeSource offers "certified stacks" of open source software components, but they don't actually create the open source components themselves.

And in SpikeSource's case, Red Hat announced that they too would offer "certified stacks." Who do think is going to win that battle? Red Hat, the one-stop shop that offers the OS and the apps, or the company that offers merely a portion of the total package. Does SpikeSource have the IP or alternative revenue sources to withstand Red Hat? Let's wish them luckand hope they know the LinuxCare tale.

If there is a bubble, it will burst when the open source projects these new company's products and services depend on go private, fork, or get acquired. The market for open source is so new we haven't seen much of this yet. Only time will tell if the recently funded open source companies can build sustainable businesses, or if this grand experiment will result in a few 800 pound gorillas and many tiny monkeys.

Have something important to say to the Slashdot community? Email roblimo at slashdot period org with the complete article or an article proposal.

C|Net reports that Microsoft's Entertainment and Xbox division heads have been given new positions with greater influence in the company. J. Allard is now the leader of the new Experiences and Design for Gaming and Entertainment Group, while Robbie Bach now oversees a reorganized Entertainment and Devices division. Gamasutra has commentary as well. From that article: "Once confirmed by Microsoft themselves, the changes will essentially give a larger company-wide influence for executives involved with the Xbox, presumably to counter rival next generation formats being released next year. It will also help with the integration of the Xbox brand and technologies with other areas of Microsoft's business - such as the compatibility between Xbox Live and MSN that has already been hinted at by the company."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is reporting that Philips plans to soon bring the TV-on-cellular chipset to the US. TV enabled phones should be hitting the stores sometime in 2006 and to ensure that they meet their goal, Philips has partnered with Crown Castle Mobile Media to help make it happen. From the article: 'The company announced a similar chipset--which consists of a TV tuner, a decoder and peripheral components--for the European market earlier in the year. Three out of the six largest handset makers are currently building phones containing the chip for trials that will likely start soon. [...] The U.S. chipset is essentially the same product. "It is a small shift in the frequency band. The rest is all the same," Kaat said.'"

Ant writes "CNET News.com is reporting that 'after almost a decade of explosive growth in its electronics sector, China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest supplier of Information Technology goods, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.' From the article: "The most spectacular demonstration of China's ambition to become a consumer electronics heavyweight came in May this year when Lenovo, the Chinese computer maker, paid $1.75 billion to buy IBM's personal computer unit."

Anna Merikin writes to tell us that Sony has begun shipping a new digital camera, the R1. With the R1 Sony has married the big digital SLRs' sensor with the live preview display of the compact cams. But to do so, it is not an SLR although it is about the same size as one. The new architecture also allows wider-angle optics to be used, but it does not have interchangeable lenses.

theodp writes "Addressing 5,000 developers in Bangalore, Bill Gates announced the Code4Bill contest, a nationwide talent hunt which will begin in January and last eight months. Twenty finalists will receive internships with Microsoft India before one Superhero is selected to join Mr. Gates's own team."

ThatGuyGreg writes "C|Net is reporting that an unpatched exploit in Firefox 1.5 has been made public, making it very easy for ne'er-do-well-sites to cause your browser to crash on startup with a single visit. Until a patch is released, it is recommended that you disable your history.dat file."

goldseries writes "A new study released by ID Analytics says that only about 1 out of every 1000 stolen identities are actually used, due to the amount of time it takes to use the identity, limiting a single thief to 250 identities a year. The likelihood that your information will be used increases drastically when the size a the theft is small. So size does not matter, in identity thefts at least; the identity thefts you need to worry about aren't the big ones heard on the news but the small unreported ones." From the article: "While the findings will provide some comfort to consumers whose credit cards are lost or lifted, or whose sensitive information is compromised when, for instance, a laptop is stolen, as recently happened at Chicago-based Boeing, some of ID Analytics' suggestions could be controversial. The company suggests, for instance, that companies shouldn't always notify consumers of data breaches because they may be unnecessarily alarming people who stand little chance of being victimized."

Ant writes "CNET News.com and MSNBC report that a survey of home personal computer (P.C.) users found 81 percent lacked at least one of three critical types of security. However, the number of consumers using firewalls and updated antivirus software is improving, according to a report released Wednesday. The vast majority of consumers surveyed were found to lack at least one of three types of critical security--a firewall, updated antivirus software or anti-spyware protection, according to a report by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance. Of this group, 56 percent had no antivirus software, or had not updated it within a week, while 44 percent did not have a firewall properly configured, according to the report. Meanwhile, 38 percent of survey respondents lacked spyware protection..."

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including the demystification of Australia's "Mystery Cat", the US Government backs Microsoft in their battle against Korea, RedHat joins the fun and decides to invest in India's economy, the ICANN community slams the VeriSign deal, and Clinical results from the cancer-killing virus trials - read on for details.

Australia's mystery cat demystified. Bitsy Boffin writes "Back in October Slashdot ran a story from the Herald Sun about the shooting of a mystery "Big Cat" in Australia. At the time the tail (the only part the hunter brought back) of said cat had been sent off for DNA testing. The Herald Sun reports the findings of those DNA tests which show that the mystery cat wasn't a leopard or jaguar, just a really, really big feral cat."

US backs Microsoft in Korean antitrust case. CODiNE writes "Stating that 'Korea's remedy goes beyond what is necessary or appropriate to protect consumers' the Justice Department's antitrust division rejects the recent Korean FTC ruling. 'Sound antitrust policy should protect competition, not competitors, and must avoid chilling innovation and competition even by "dominant" companies.'"

RedHat follows Indian investment trend. An anonymous reader writes "After several other companies have decided to invest in the Indian economy it looks like RedHat will be following suit. According to the article, RedHat plans on hiring about 300 people for an investment of about $20M."

ICANN community slams VeriSign deal. Rob writes to tell us that an overwhelming amount of the ICANN community recently took a stand against a proposed deal that would allow VeriSign to raise the price of .com domain names by up to 50%. VeriSign accused ICANN of illegally "regulating" its business. ICANN had previously blocked services VeriSign wanted to launch on the grounds that they would harm the stability of the internet.

Clinical results from cancer-killing virus. just___giver writes "Results from human clinical trials show that terminally ill patients with aggressive metastasized cancer are receiving benefit from the recently covered virus that kills cancer when it is administered intravenously. They still have higher doses to test in this ongoing study. This safe, naturally occurring, unmodified virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells. Numerous other third party studies show that the Reovirus should be an important discovery in the treatment of 2/3 of all human cancers. It is patented, easy to manufacture in large quantities, and even increases the effectiveness of conventional chemo and radiation therapy. Numerous phase 2 studies are being planned for 2006." OncolyticsBiotech also has a short video describing the process.

goldseries writes "CNet is reporting that a new IM worm chats with users to get them to down load a file containing a virus. The virus replicates its self and sends its self out to user's buddy lists. The virus will reply 'lol no this is not a virus.' The virus hides users from seeing the messages sent out to members of their buddy list. Viruses are evolving; now they will even talk to you."