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It'll Be an Open-Source World
sniggly writes "Quotes from Wired.com: "MS will become little more than a 'legacy vendor,' offering support for its antiquated products." - and "Oracle... will be forced to open its applications." - this according to a Forrester Research report (link requires a login) that Wired has an article about. Is it the inevitable future of software? Who will be affected, who will go south, who will surface and will companies like ID software, Adobe or Sonic Foundry be able to continue as they are?"
Well, they already have the antiquated products covered. I guess the article is implying they'll be adding "support" in the future. Wow, I can hardly wait.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
1. As a developer, software licencing issues do not normally effect my day to day work.
2. I am already used to going through a 'code review' process by outside personel, so that while additional eyes may view my code, it really won't change my overall developement style.
3. I suppose that it will make things 'legal' when I take my generic, private libraries and classes that I've written from one employer to the next, but who really concerns themselves about this anyway?
Someone, please, tell me how this will affect me, the average joe software developer guy?
-jerdenn
Come on people, let's be critical for once here when something goes our way.. does this realyl sound like sound research? They go on about "beware geeks with guns", etc? That sounds like they just want press, like most of these researchers do. The fact they mention Dell makes no sense whatsoever and just shows what a lousy "study" this probably was.
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
sirch wrote to us with the latest research from Forrester Reports. The report alleges that this year's massive hyping of Linux will fade in 2000, as well as stating that it's not probable that CIOs will be switching over in massive numbers to Linux.
And eight months later Forrester says Microsoft is doomed? I didn't take them seriously in the slightest then and I don't now.
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What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Lest you forget, their software controls nearly eighty percent of the desktops outthere. It doesn't take a genius to leverage that out for at least twenty more years.
Uhh....I must not be a genius then.
Can you kindly show this dumb-ass how to "leverage" 80% productshare in a volatile marketspace to 20 years?
Last I remembered, Apple has a 80% market share on PCs about 15 years ago, and they died 10 years ago.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
...get viewers. What does media want more than anything else? (It's not to tell the truth, although they do try to do that most of the time) Media wants viewers.
Just as provocative blanket statements like "KDE SUCKS!!!!" or "GNOME SUCKS!!!" starts flamewars and piles up the comments, provocative stories about how MS is going to completely disappear draws readers like flies to a pile of shit.
But that doesn't mean that it has anything to do with reality. I'm no Microsoft fan, but they do have one of the best PR and sales forces in the universe, and I really doubt that they're going to fade into oblivion. Maybe, just MAYBE in a few years linux could grab the majority of the market, but to say that MS is going to become a legacy vendor is well...
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Once you get past the annoyance of a daily reboot (which most users have been conditioned to accept), Linux doesn't offer much competition for MS on the desktop - and no, trying to turn the clock back to 1996 by building Office rip-offs isn't going to change that. Anyone who needs an office suite already has one - MS Office.
Linux is getting there - the core OS has great stability that MS products lack, but GNOME/KDE, multimedia support, browser technology, etc still has a long way to go until it even gets to Win95 levels.
No, one, I mean NO ONE would predict that they would just be a bit-player in the PC world 10 years later. OS/2? When released in 1987, everyone predicted it would replace DOS and Windows within a few short years. It couldn't fail, IBM was behind it. When PS/2s came out, everyone jumped and tried to catch up.
Microsoft blew that out of the water, as we all know now. Brought down the biggest computer company in the world and made IBM listen to THEM.
So I've been telling people not to expect Microsoft to be nothing more than yet another software vendor 10 years from now, and everyone thinks I am nuts.
I'm sure this subject will erupt in another OS flame war, but I still see it happening.
Will it be a good thing? I don't really know. At least when IBM was "in control" standards existed and they could change them. Almost over-night, 3.5" floppies replaced 5.25" floppies. To this day, we're stuck with the same 3.5" drives and a plethora of competing removable disk standards that don't have the backing of any major hardware vendor, so none of them become standard.
Will the software market fragment too? Will nothing go forward because no dominant player makes the standard?
Then again, the fact that Word .doc files are the defacto standard in document sharing now is a horrible travesty. XML as a standard at data representation is very exciting.
I just think Microsoft now is just too big and stuborn to adapt quick enough. Then again, they didn't think the Internet would be that big a deal (witness first version of Windows 95 and the hoops you had to go through to get it onto the Internet. The then-non-Internet MSN was the way to go...). Microsoft certainly moved quick enough to embrace, extend, and capture much of THAT world...
I still think they are in trouble. If I had any of their stock, I'd be selling it...