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How Many Applications Depend On Windows?
Alternatively, is anyone astonished that a number so arbitrary (in either direction) is considered a serious point of evidence? Not that there's a great way to weight the importance of programs in isolation from each other, but [random shareware X, even if business related] doesn't match the importance of, say, a major word processor in the real world. Isn't the flexibility that a given OS offers to create new programs, and the rate of change in the number of available programs, more important than the existing number anyhow?
Updated 20:05 by timothy: PJ Doland, Webmaster of the Cato Institute writes: "The article on Microsoft that you mention is now online at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-380es.html. I'm a slashdot addict. When I saw your link to the Institute's site, I convinced the higher-ups to let me post the report early for your readers. The full report is in PDF."
Here's my summary of some of the points from the report:
Don't take my word for it, read it for yourselves, its very poorly reasoned and uses the same types of arguments that it claims are bad when Judge Jackson used them.
Remeber when Windows 2000 came out? There were 65,000 documented bugs. This is eerily close to the number of "applications" that they say it has.... coincidence?
Kind on/off topic (depends on your perspective)
I'm not disputing Cato's claims or Microsoft's. I'm just saying be aware that the Cato Institute has their own agenda.
Cato self labels itself as "market liberalism". But if you also search a little deeper in the other links, you will see a link to the Institute of Objectivist Studies. And in case you don't know what Objectivism is, it is based on Ayn Rand.
I bring this up only because these guys are a bit aggressive and not very open about the ties between them and IOS/Ayn Rand. Everyone remeber the John Stossel Report "GREED"? Well, ALL of his experts were from Cato or IOS. So the whole report was basically a platform for Objectivism. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see the agenda behind all the rest of John Stossel's "insightful" reports. So perhaps Stossel really is an "objective" reporter :-)
If you read up on their site, you will find discussion about how they (Objectivists) are actively trying to place Objectivist professors at the head of philosophy departments.
So, as with all things on slashdot, I would take their arguments with a grain of salt, remembering their perspective and view. Because that is how you think critically. Taking in all the facts.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
The NYTimes report I read on this study implied that they are just counting commercial applications. Your thosands of internal applications and all the other internal apps aren't in the figure.
Even if it's corrent, the statistic is useless.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
The flaw in this argument is that the antitrust case is not about Microsoft's operating system monopoly. The actual cause of this monopoly (which in my opinion is a vicious cycle of application availability forcing users to use Windows, which forces software firms to write programs for Windows - but that's not important right now) is irrelevant. Microsoft has monopoly power. Anyone who questions that needs an emergency rectalcraniectomy.
...if Microsoft did what
monopolists are supposed to do: restrict
sales in order to raise the company's prices
and profits.
The reason Microsoft is being punished is because they misused their monopoly power, not to press their OS, but rather for other applications, such as IE vs. Netscape. You can argue all you want that Jackson's numbers are wrong; so what? He just needed to say, "Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems." Why waste a lot of time on something so obvious? Even M$ made at best only a half-hearted attempt to claim not to be a monopoly. The real case was what they did with their monopoly power.
The author also fails to understand the nature of antitrust law. An example:
The classic example of an antitrust case is the Standard Oil case. Standard Oil had a practice of buying out competing gas stations. If they wouldn't sell, SO would build a station nearby and undercut prices (even accepting a loss) until their competitors were out of business. This is not about restricting sales or raising prices - it is about preventing others from entering the market. If the author understood antitrust law, he would see that this, not the "restricting sales in order to raise the company's prices and profits," is the "misuse of power" that requires antitrust cases.
The Cato Institute's analysts parrot the agenda of corporate America, trying to influence policy and legislation to benefit the wealthiest groups and individuals in the country.
/., I guess that's why your computer was hand crafted by a tribe of indigenous people from the amazon, right?
Oh, please. The Cato Institute published well thought out papers that are Libertarian in nature and are dedicated to getting the government of your back.
I know corporation bashing is popular on
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
The article does make several points that are indeed valid, in that the judge made a big deal about some thing he didn't have to, and didn;t about some thing he should have..
The first thing addressed, or not, in the above article is that, yes, indeed, the judge *IS* making up a new meaning for a monopoly. In the past *NOTHING* of any value could simply be copied billions and billions of times at little cost. I can mass mail an application to a million people, at the total cost of 19.95. Heck, run a little banner ad proggy, and it's *FREE*. *NEVER* in *HISTORY* has a situation like this been present. No one could ever argue that Microsoft has not stopped people from developing alternate operating systems. They haven't. What they have done is ensure a closed and private 'public' standard.
Think about someone having a patent on the internal cumbustion engine. I'm sure someone had a patent at one point in time that applied. Now, along comes the car. Suddenly, you're forced to only buy the patents owners gas. And by the way, you'll need to buy a new engine for your car every few years, so you can run the new gas. Certainly, in no way has this patent holder stopped anyone from coming up with a new means of power. But if they can manage to get enough people using it, you *DO* have a monopoly.
Personally, I do not like Microsoft. I don't like their company, or how it treats its customers. Sure, they have some good apps. And yes, they've done some damned good buisness deals, and been sucessfull as hell. But at some point, it has to stop. At some point, it has to be said that you've simply made *to* much money, and you've locked in to good of a nestbed.
Anything that ends up being used widely in the public needs to be open eventually. It's in the general good of the public. In the past, things moved slower. No one could lock the public in, becouse of the length of time it would take. Microsoft locked over 90% of the OS market into place within a few short years, becouse of the success of the PC.
Whoever came up with the tarred road had a damned good idea. What if he was still recieving money for the idea? What if it cost the government millions of dollars, paying for the use of the idea? It's certainly in the good of the public to have these roads. It's also in the good of the public to have a well defined, standardized computing environment.
I'm blathering, I'll shadap and read some other opinions now..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I added it up with the Windows calculator ;-)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Cato Institute is scary in that they seem to believe that corporations should be running everything rather than government. They always rant about government regulation of business. They're running a piece now about the opening of broadband cable networks to ISPs where they claim that it's a violation of the cable company's free speech rights to make them open their networks to the ISPs. Nevermind the fact that their networks never could have been built without the government's permission and help (both financial and legislative). Nevermind that people don't want every damn ISP out there digging up our streets to lay cable for their own networks. There are many compelling reasons to make the cable companies open up access. Do the cable companies think they should be able to receive those benefits that give them a big boost in the market without having any responsibilities as well?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
70,000 figure might actually represent the number of applications that have been written during the entire history of the personal computer industry.
Oh, come on. This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
Hell, there have probably been around 70,000 bad first person shooters in the past few years....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
More than 70,000 I bet. Unless the average Windows developer has written less than one application, the number has got to be a lot higher than this.
Of course, it all depends on how you define "application". Does Hello World count? Does a screen saver count? Certainly a freeware app distributed over the Internet counts. Shrink-wrapped software counts. Does in-house custom work count? I've written apps in all these categories except shrink-wrapped.
If I had to put a number to it, I'd say I've written at least 10 apps, 2 or 3 of which are currently being used by at least one person other than me. I'm not counting the countless little test applications and scripts I've written that run in a Windows environment. If I did, the number would probably be in the hundreds.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is silly ....
I did a quick survey on the "Norman virus scanner, it knows about 18.284 viruses, that is more than 25% of all programs written according to the "Cato Institute". That simply has to be wrong, their estimate of 70.000 programs is way to low.
RFC1925
People didn't believe Cato when he testified at the OJ trial, and they're really not going to believe him now. This is a bit out of his league.
I know internally most financial companies have around 1200 applications in the windows environment. This number is pretty consistent within the top 50 financial companies. I would say about 70 percent of these applications are written in house. The number of these that are in use is significantly smaller. I'd say about 100 of them are actively used, but they all have to be working and installable because they are so specialized. I don't know any of the numbers for OTC apps but i'd say a good 20000 - 30000 of that 70k number are accounted for this way.
Seems to me this "report" serves more to justify M$ inocence than to provide actual figures into how many apps are available. The problem with it is the way it presents the facts, stating that there are no entry barriers for other OSes, but it misses several important points.
Drivers: Not an application per se but when you consider that in the Windows world most drivers come with tuning applications attached, whereas in the Alternative OS world if you have a binary driver you have to thank god six times in Swahili while you dance around a candle or something...
Office Applications: Oh yeah, we've got StarOffice, Abi, KOffice and their ilk, but since M$ changes file formats every three days you're facing incompatible/unformatteable files.
Vertical Applications: He's not going to find those on Amazon for sure but there are at least 70.000 custom vertical apps developed around the world. The cost of migrating those pieces of often klunky and badly documented code? Better not talk about it.
Games: The turning point of the Windows world, right now Alternative OS users are for the better part left out in the cold, it's changing but slowly. And if I count the number of games released every month around the world for Windows PC's only (Including stuff like card and hunting cames) you have around 100 games out per month.
Multimedia: Windows have at least 8 media players, 10 DVD players and at least 100 different media utilities not including music or specific software like codecs. Where are those for BeOS or OpenBSD?
Only there in those categories, you've got a 50:1 relationship between Windows apps and other OS apps.
He also talks about M$ not enforcing monopolistic pricing... WTF? does he at least compare prices in the Windows world?
For Office 2000 Professional you pay $240, for Lotus SmartSuite Millenium you pay $89 for the same exact features (And no annoying talking clip), for Corel is around $120... so in average M$ charges 200% more than their competition, and why do they remain the first choice? FUD, strong arming of OEM's and a lock in file formats.
And let's not talk about server software... sheesh...
In the end what could've been an interesting report (Despite the pro M$ bias) ends up being a big FUD spitting piece. It might raise some interesting points like the real availability of shelf windows apps but the narrow minded view enforced by the author really kills all chances of enlightenment or at least food for thought.
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
66,372 Applications which suck and never should have been marketed by anybody.
1,654 Games.
1,104 Applications which cling to life even as Microsoft threatens their very existence.
795 Microsoft applications which have built in flight simulators which make install take up half of disk.
47 Fun Games.
36 Applications which actually perform some sort of work.
1 Bug Free. (ain't tellin' which, neither! :)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What question are we trying to answer?
How many applications depend on Windows?
How many applications run on Windows?
How many applications Windows users can use?
The first two are both mentioned in the Slashdot summary, but the three are largely unrelated. Consider programs that run on multiple platforms (via porting), consider Java, consider mainframe apps with customized (or telnet) front ends. I'm sure MS Marketing and MS Legal are both exploiting the vagueness of English to pull the wool over our eyes. Don't let's help them with misleading (and even contradictory!) news stories.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I suspect Microsoft's "70,000" can easily be justified or villified, based on your definition of application.
It's all a matter of complexity and perspective. Like most things in life.
I tend to think of an "application" as a collection of programs and libraries that work together in to provide a solution. I wrote a specialized encryption program today, in a few hundred lines of console-based Visual C++; I don't consider this to be an application. In the last decade, I've created a couple of hundred Windows-based EXE/DLL/OCX files, but I've written perhaps a dozen "applications."
Considering the number of people who code for Windows, however, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are 70,000 (or more) pieces of executable code for it. Hell, my Windows NT 4.0SP6 box has 3500 EXEs and DLLs alone, and I'm sure that doesn't even scratch the surface...
All about me
I think a metric like app count is a bit ridiculous.
voila (stick it in a file like "manyapps.pl" and run with "perl manyapps.pl"):
#manyapps.pl
#create 100,000 C++ applications, each of which
#sums a different number of integer inputs
#you can test them with something like:
#"yes 1 | add100000"
`mkdir manyapps`;
for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++){
open CURFILE, ">manyapps/temp.cpp";
print CURFILE<<'END';
#include <iostream.h>
int main(){
long sum=0;
for(unsigned long i=0; i<
END
$num=$i+2;
print CURFILE "$num; i++)\{\n";
print CURFILE<<'END';
long addthis;
cin>>addthis;
sum+=addthis;
}
cout<<sum<<endl;
return 1;
}
END
close CURFILE;
print "g++ -o manyapps/add$num manyapps/temp.cpp\n";
`g++ -o manyapps/add$num manyapps/temp.cpp`;
}
#end of Perl code
--------
As other posters have said, "Is the hello world program an application"?
The number also depends on what you count. If you look at in-house applications as well as anything sold in the shops, or on internet sites as freeware/shareware, then 70,000 might be incredibly low. There may in fact be hundreds of thousands of applications if you include everything.
If you include only shrink-wrap boxes on shelves, and only add one per app (not per version of the app), you're probably talking a few thousand.
What's my point? The thing is - few people in the general populace have any skepticism any more. People just lap up the tabloid journalism that Fox News at Nine pump out every evening, being wowed by the sensationalism then believe it without question. This means the kind of spin such as "70,000 applications" works with the general population because they don't even think to question it.
And this lack of skepticism is why Microsoft's marketing is so successful. Most of the population aren't people any more, they are sheeple who blindly follow the marketing man.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm the Cato Institute's webmaster (as well as a Slashdot reader). I convinced the people upstairs to let me post the report a early because of Slashdot. It's at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-380es.html I hope this will clear up some questions.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
I don't understand why this is news on slashdot. You are disputing the number? Are you seriously that out of touch with the marketplace?
70,000 sounds quite low actually. That must be commercial apps, not all the custom in-house stuff companies write.
When you consider there is something like 5 million registered users of Visual Studio...
That number is way too high
That number is way too low
Are they counting all the virii/Hello Worlds/shareware programs/versions of Windows?
Kato is on crack
I coded more applications on my weekend
Linux r00lz
Any obligatory joke about Micro$oft
You're welcome.
That question and those like it can never really be answered honestly because no one will ever define what gets counted.
Does that junker up on blocks behind your neighbor's house count? Maybe. What about that 1948 Ford that's rusting in the creak down near the mill? Probably not.
When it comes to cars, I'd say the right count would be the number of registered automobiles.
With applications, I think the count would be the number of products on the shelf plus those actively supported by in-house staffs.
I can't say that 70,000 sounds all that unreasonable. There are hundreds of thousands of companies in the United States alone. If just a quarter of that number wrote one application, you could easily hit 70,000. Add to that all your shrinkwrap commercial products and shareware and you've got far more than 70,000.
Heck, looking at all the legacy crap I've got to support, built by employees who have long since moved on to bigger and better things and I can come up with almost that many applications at my company alone.
InitZero