ESR: Microsoft Could Collapse In 6 Months (updated)

mjh writes: "ESR gave an interview in which he says, 'I now think that Microsoft monopoly is going to collapse for other reasons in the near future.' He basically says that the drop in PC prices will cut into the margins that PC sellers can afford, and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux. This was a very interesting interview." It's a good read, and ESR seems to be mellower in it than in some other venues (and to me, that makes him more persuasive than usual as well). However, the idea of Microsoft collapsing because of lost OEM-license dollars seems pretty stretchy -- they make money in a lot of other ways, and have a nice war chest to draw from if licensing losses should become anything like a crisis. Updated by timothy, 13 Dec, 5:52GMT: It's Microsoft's monopoly which ESR said could collapse, not the company per se. Apologies for the poor phrasing.

Comments

People still want MS

[enterfornone]

What the vendors do won't change the fact that most people still want MS products. MS is the "standard" on the desktop, if you want to share office documents you need MS products, if you want to play games you need MS products.

Vendor support for Linux will not happen unless a large percentage of the general public wants it.

Here's your Reality Check

[Greyfox]

Microsoft's monopoly isn't going anywhere anytime soon (Though with Bush in office, the case against them will be dropped.) Linux has come a long way in user friendliness since I first started using it, but it's still missing some very important pieces which it very well may never get. A decent word processor topping that list. Don't say Staroffice, I'd rather have my flesh flayed away rather than use that bloated piece of shit. I'd say a decent mail package, too, but at least the Helix guys are working on one of those. Many of the Linux users I've known use Netscape Mail, which sucks as a mail client.

Not to mention the fact that all the game people are still writing to Windows. Now you and I may know that you should play games on your Playstation 2 and leave your computer free to run stock simulations, but Joe Average Luser wants to play games on his PC. Telling him to buy a Playstation 2 is simply hiding your head in the sand, though he probably actually already has one. Loki's cool in that department if you don't mind getting titles that were released for Windows 3 years ago and you don't mind buying them off the Internet, because you're not going to have any luck finding their stuff in any of the local brick and mortar stores (At least not where I live.)

And don't think Microsoft is going to sit there and let Linux compete either. They're going to do their damndest to prevent the Open Source community from competing with them. Do you think it's a coincidence that Joe Average Luser can't get DVD player software for Linux? Microsoft is a BIG contributor to the DVD consortium. As more and more media gets tied up in copy-protected formats, Open Source software proponents will have a much harder time pushing their software since it won't be able to play any media off the net.

Listen up, shitheads

[Von Rex]

That's two totally misleading headlines you've posted about Microsoft in one week. Headlines that had nothing whatsoever to do with the story being quoted.

1. Today's story had nothing to do with "Microsoft" collapsing. The interviewee did make one offhand comment about their monopoly collapsing, but that's an entirely different thing from the company itself collapsing.
   
   
2. A few days ago you had a story about Linux "saving" Microsoft. The article in question had nothing to do with this headline, nothing at all. The gist of it was that Microsoft is powerful, will remain powerful, and as soon as Linux actually becomes relevant to more than the lunatic fringe then MS will make a definitive version of Linux and basically consume it. Only a diseased mind could even imagine that this meant that Linux would "save" MS, but that didn't stop you from making it the headline.

I suggest you guys take a course in remedial journalism. Better yet, get some kid from the local high school paper to help you out.

Re:MS Monopoly will not be threatened any time soo

[Chris Johnson]

Office revenues are down, and I seriously wonder whether your figures take full account of the stock pyramiding Microsoft (and Cisco) does. You've got no idea how expensive MS has become to operate- constantly increasing stock perks to employees to hang onto them, vast nebulous projects like .NET that lead nowhere and are money holes, branching off into completely new areas that are anything but powerbases supported by- you guessed it! spending and more spending and still more spending.

It reminds me of nothing so much as Apple at its deadly worst. Instead of OpenDoc and eWorld, we have SOAP and .NET. Instead of Pippin (remember Pippin?) we have X-Box. And instead of "beleaguered" (which ended up being a darn good wake-up call) we have "MS will never stumble, it always has more than enough money ahahahaha! It will never bobble, never never ahahaha! Here, have some more stock!" which to any normal investor or business person has to set off howling warning klaxons everywhere.

Tell me, if any other company was telling you about .NET, would you say it was even going to _ship_? If any other company told you it was going to expand outward into game consoles and beat hell out of Sony despite having no experience, console marketshare or reputation, would you believe a word of it? Do you seriously think _everyone_ is going to continue to believe black is white, X-Box is progress and .NET is the future just because MS used to have an awful lot of money?

The MS monopoly is outrageously expensive to maintain- they must spend huge amounts on simply maintaining total money hole products like IE to win marketshare and there IS no more marketshare and there aren't any sensible proposals for how they're going to shift to a sustainable profit model not based on continuous exponential growth. If they were forcibly broken up this would be a very good scapegoat for a complete overhaul that would leave them in good shape for years. As it is they are cruising towards a collapse because they insist on treating everything the same way they did when they were unseating Netscape and flooding the world with W95- and they are only the 900lb gorilla in computer software, not consoles or back-ends or servers or media. I don't think they will be able to adapt unless forcibly broken up.

I had the opposite experience...

[tswinzig]

I love BeOS and use Windows all day at work. I've tried Linux several times, but have hated each time. Oh well, so it's not my cup of tea, but I gave it a shot. I'll try MacOS X eventually, too.

Anyway, I have an open mind, so I talked my roommate into buying an iMac instead of upgrading his Windows machine. Big mistake! I mean, I just ASSUMED MacOS was actually user friendly, since that's what all the Mac zealots are always throwing in our faces. The experience we had was definitely anything other than "user friendly."

First, we pull it out of the box. Cool design, cool keyboard, cool "zero-button" mouse, etc. We boot it up, the registration screens come right up to get us started. Mid-way through setting up the network, the thing freezes up solid. We wait 5 minutes and give up. Reboot. (Sound familiar?)

On the second attempt, it works OK. He starts trying out the different applications and getting used to it. He starts using the much-acclaimed MSIE for MacOS, and after browsing for awhile the system freezes up again. Reboot.

Later in the day, he wants some files off my Windows machine that he copied their before he trashed his old machine. Some MP3's. I figure, this'll be easy, right? It's fairly simple to access my Windows machine from my BeOS machine, so Mac must make it even more "user friendly."

Yeah right. Two hours (and several 3rd party application downloads) later, we've got a flaky connection to my PC using "DAVE." I don't remember the details (this happened a few months ago), but to put it mildly, DAVE was a pain in the ASS.

So we download these MP3's. Hmmm, what's this, some of them are not recognized? Oh shit the names got cut off because there was a shorter limit on MacOS filenames compared to my Windows MP3 filenames... so the ".mp3" got cut off and the Mac didn't make it too "user friendly" to get them working. (I ended up writing a perl script for the Windows machine to rename the long files before the transfer...)

The next day, he wants to get Quicken running again. I say, no problem, your iMac came with the latest version of Quicken! Surely this fine program will make it easy to import from your Windows Quicken files, right?

And so begins a day-long journey to get the Quicken files over to the iMac. I cannot describe how frustrating the MacOS file handler system is... it's ludicrous. BeOS is the king here with it's mimetype and smart filetype determination techniques. Windows at least let's me easily associate a program with a file extension. Christ I felt like a snake charmer trying to get MacOS to recognize the Quicken files we brought over from my machine! It was IMPOSSIBLE! The files would be sitting there, but you couldn't drag them onto Quicken to open them. If you double-clicked them, they opened in QuickTIME! I realize some Mac pro probably thinks I'm incredibly stupid, but I've been using computers for 18 years, and programming them for 5, and this was a huge pain in the ass!

Then on the third day, my roommate was getting pretty frustrated with the machine, and I was feeling real guilty for talking him into buying it. I tell him, if you will turn it back into Apple for a refund, I will build you a Windows PC that blows this iMac away.

Lo-and-behold, the company with the awesome hardware and "user friendly" operating system does NOT accept ANY returns WHATSOEVER. We told them everything -- it crashes, it's not user friendly, we are totally unsatisfied with the machine, etc. -- no deal! We complained to the BBB, and we got back a letter from Apple saying NO DEAL. I think that says a lot about their products. No money-back guarantee because they know (and I know now) that what sells the new Apple machines are the looks, and not the user-friendly OS!

So in rebuttal to the original post, the only way I'd give me grandma an iMac is if she put me in her will... if you know what I mean!

-thomas

opposite may be true, as well.

[small_dick]

1) Son of a Bush settles the federal case.
2) SOB pushes M$ throughout government.
3) M$ starts running a major PR campaign against linux, with a bunch of "frankenstein" horror stories, replete with viruses, hacks, etc from their "linux labs".

There is hope that the strong presence of IBM and AMD in Texas may well mitigate the uber-rights' influence on SOB to perform tasks 1/2...not to mention the close election...he may not want to infuriate the CA and UT reps/senators at this point.

But if the uber-right forces SOB to perform 1/2, I have no doubt M$ will push 3), then it would only be a short time till they control it all and start sending us monthly bills...the grand microsoft end game.

Then it will be up to a few of the euro and asian countries (perhaps china) to pull Linux back.

Great Big Googly Moogly, M$ has at least 30B in cash, plus a wide variety of investment income, and several apps that are selling at least somewhat at this point.

All they need now is for SOB to make DOJ settle the fed case...after which several states will drop out...and it will be back to "fleecing as usual".

I can't believe people are buying into the whole "oh yeah, i want to pay a microsoft bill every month, just like my phone bill". Geez, people, just stop using their crap and help Linux...that's the single best way to get rid of M$...and insure you never end up with a monthly software "Bill".

Hey Timothy read that again...

[The Big Bopper]

...ESR didn't say that MICROSOFT was going to collapse. He said that their MONOPOLY would collapse. In other words, they would have to compete on more equal ground. Given how many people read your editorializing, I think it is important to make that distinction in your comments.

ESR = Extremely Stupid Reasoning?

[Chester K]

ESR sez: and that they'll drop the M$ tax, and replace their bundled OS with something cheaper, like Linux

....and completely ignore what the general public wants, selling them computers that can't run their favorite software and games. Yeah, companies last real long when they do that. I hear DVD drives are expensive too, perhaps OEMs will drop them and replace them with Betamax drives.

We're not there yet

[verbatim]

I'm not going to claim to be an authority on this, just gonna give my two cents and let the slashdot crowd tell me if I'm off my rocker here.

Linux is good. It's not great, yet, but good. I can name several big institutions that run their entire network with Linux, FreeBSD, and DU. It's a great system for computer enthusiasts, "hackers" (not necessarily the malicious kind), and geeks. It is still not ready, however, for the average computer user. I know this because I work support for the average computer user and have a good understanding of what users want.

Users DO NOT want to spend days figuring out how to setup a device. Nor do they care about kernel level optimizations or text-file configurations. They, as their name implies, USE the computer to play games, browse the Internet, process documents, and draw pictures. Linux HAS all of this, except it is missing the components that keep the low level "tech" from them. Case in point: most Windows users will stare at you blankly if you ask them ANYTHING about the "command prompt" or "dos-mode". Isn't that something they got rid of a long time ago? Wasn't it something only used when computers were a geek toy? The answer is YES. Windows, for the most part, does not require the user to operate the CLI at all. Linux, OTOH, almost requires the user to have at least some familarity with the console and text-files, directory structure and conf file locations. Why do some "personal" versions of Linux come pre-installed with a web-server? Huh? It's still AIMED at people interested in computers.

Maybe a splinter group (or is there one out there?) should focus on adapting Linux to the common person - one that my mother could use, and one that I don't have to spend days massaging (note that I enjoy playing with Linux on a lower level, so this isn't really a concern for me).

I think, at the present time, Linux can NOT replace Windows on the average desktop - and possibly not for at least another year. Add to that the fact that Linux/X is a much different experience than Windows.

BeOS, OTOH, is a much better direction in terms of something to de-throne the giant.

Bah, but what do I know anyhow? ;)

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated

[bugg]

I think that predicting the death of the monopoly of Microsoft is a bit presumptious. Given it's current share, even winning the new PC market (which I doubt for other reasons that will come later) won't lead to the death of the monopoly.

Microsoft's dominance of the desktop has reached such a critical point where it's hard to expect the entire world to change. Predicting that [one | some] free operating system(s) will cause Windows to lose it's majority (a prerequsite for Microsoft losing it's monopoly) in six months is a bit like predicting that the US will convert to metric in six months.

Sure, we use base 10 for everything, so one could argue that the US will switch to metrics shortly because it makes sense. But we (as a nation) are so comfortable with the english system, as we are with the Windows platform, that change will be slow and painful. ESR says that the fact that PCs are getting cheaper is a good indicator that PC manufacturers will get fed up, but this I doubt.

I say this because PCs have always gotten cheaper, and hardware is getting cheaper as well. Given how most people see windows as indispensible, they have no objection to paying for a license. If the so-called "MS Tax" ends up being a much larger percentage of the total cost of the computer, I think the logical response from Microsoft would be to lower their prices; not to keep charging an amount people won't pay until they die.

Microsoft keeps up with things; they aren't about to lose their monopoly due to changes that were expected (cheaper, smaller, faster) but will rather require many more unexpected events to appear on the horizon: but note, MS has their radar up.

Re:I'm fed up of this windbag

[AintTooProudToBeg]

Imagine if MS spokesmen spent their time with unfouded attacks on Linux.

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/news/msnw/Li nuxMyths.asp

Other prognostications

[The Pim]

ESR has been variously predicting the collapse of Microsoft's stock and their "collapse into irrelevance" since about 1998 (example). And "Windows 2000 will be either cancelled or dead on arrival." He blindly fails to recognize the qualities in Microsoft that allowed it to lead the PC revolution, and will keep it a dominant company for many years.

And remember what he said about Y2K?

I admire and like Eric--he's an uber-hacker--but I think in his zeal to sell "Open Source", he's become too confident in his theories.