Slashdot Mirror
Gates on Spyware and OS Competition
Ant writes "CNET's News.com has an article that says Microsoft plans to offer its own anti-spyware software." prostoalex writes "Both OsNews and InfoWorld talk about Bill Gates' speech at the Computer History Museum in California. Gates is noting that Linux is taking over, and claims that 10 years forward Linux and Windows will be the only OSs left in the market."
claims that 10 years forward Linux and Windows will be the only OSs left in the market
Um...Mac OS X is only getting better and more switchers from Microsoft, and FreeBSD is still running a lot of servers around the world (and ones that don't go down).
I predict that in 10 years from now, Microsoft will be dead, linux and FreeBSD will feed off of each other making both extremely good choices (FreeBSD for server, linux for desktop). Then the competition will be between Mac OS X and linux for the desktop.
There will be a number of OSS which will be around. In addition, ALL of the closed source will be sold to others. OS's make their real money (except for MS's) after it is put into maintence mode. Good example was hp-3000. Lost money at the OS level until it was put into mainence mode. Then it made big bucks for HP. Likewise, vms makes a lot of money for HP.
Apple, by being based on OSS, may be spared that death, but hard to tell.
All most certainly all the the closed Unixs will be in maintence mode or dead. What ever aspects of them that were interesting will be done in Linux.
While BSD will almost certainly be around, I doubt that it will capture a big market. Nobody can really take the chance of MS swooping in and killing them.
But Linux and Windows will probably be the 2 gorrillas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While I tend to be that last one to state that Microsoft has too much control over ancillary markets, I was rather disturbed by XP SP2s inability to recognize several third party Anti Virus products and cotinue to warn about the vulnarbility of the system. One wonders what F-Prot and Command-com antivirus need to do to get on the "trusted" AV list at Microsoft.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As hardware gets cheaper and more powerful and becomes a commodity, Apple is likely to have an increasingly difficult time selling its own line of expensive machines. With the Mac OS now a layer on top of Unix, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple eventually gives up reserving its software for its own hardware and begins to sell Mac OS as a GUI and software bundle on top of Linux, essentially a commercial counterpart to Gnome or KDE.
I wonder how the other folks who make and sell (or give away) anti-spyware software will react to the 800lb gorilla's entrance into their domain?
That's the least of their problems. The big problem is when the 800lb gorilla will patent anti-spyware software. How will the other simians react to that?
That "wizard" over at PCMag, John Dvorak, has been doing so for almost that long, and look at where that prediction has gone.
I met Dvorak recently, and I have to say, he's very difficult to talk to. He's one of those guys who has no ability to just listen. A poor quality in a journalist. I found it very frustrating. His opinions aren't total crap, though. I think he's wrong WRT Mac OS, but he would have been right if Apple hadn't finally gotten a real OS by now. Until X, the OS was a toy, inferior even to Windows. Now it's for real, and it's serious. Microsoft has a long way to go if they hope to rival it.
> People have been predicting the death of MacOS and Apple for
> almost 2 decades now. That "wizard" over at PCMag, John
> Dvorak, has been doing so for almost that long, and look at
> where that prediction has gone.
Almost? He's been there right from the start with his way off base 'predictions'. He's a troll, and it gets him paid.
"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
-John C. Dvorak, SF Examiner, Feb. 1984.
In 10 years from now I predict I will still be using FreeBSD on my desktop and probably MacOS on my Powerbook.
Apart from the Dell machines I have reciently purchased for my company for a web developer who needed photoshop dreamweaver etc I'd not have a single windows pc in my office. With the speed in which Eric Laffoon is pushing along Quanta and having it built into base KDE I can see a time very soon when I will make Quanta my only development platform, intergration with CVS etc just makes it a great choice for PHP and web development.
For mail I use Evolution and simply love it. Forget about all the virus problems that Outlook has.
In fact the only thing I think windows has going for it is Photoshop. I've tried the gimp and sorry but it just isn't there yet for me, but in 10 years time I'm darn sure it will be!!!
Say good night Bill, you are history!!!
Now wait a minute,,
in the article, Gates states "Operating systems like Linux (Red-Hat) require capable system administrators to maintain.. I want to do away with that"
Does that mean that Windows sysadmins are less capable or will be less capable in the future??
Doesn't that say alot for their fearless Leader??
Doesn't that say alot for his Great intelligence( or lack thereof).
You tell me what you derive from this statement, much less the article..???
Gk.
As I said in another post, I think he knows darn well Linux isn't going to be the only other arround. He's just trying to get everyone else to gang up against Linux. It is a brilliant strategic move on behalf of MS, and a classic divide and conquer strategy. He's trying to do the same thing between redhat and novell too.
Reminds me of when the head of DEC said (a long time ago) that in the future, the world would only have something like 10 (mainframe) computers. He never foresaw microcomputers.
10 years ago, we were all cursing Windows 3.1, because it was so unstable. Very few of us even heard of Linux. No one, at that time, thought it would be as critical to our lives as it is today.
I predict that in 10 years, "personal computers" won't be the center of our computing universe, like they are today. We'll all have moved on to something completely different. WHo knows what that will be?
Nobody today can possibly guess what our future computers will be like. But I sure hope whatever they are, they don't ALL come from the tiny little imagination of money grubbing jerks like Bill Gates. And if it does, God help the rest of us.
--
Patrick Wolfe
"Stress is when you wake up screaming, and you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet"
When I got my 17" powerbook, I priced out a comparable dell - with you added all the things that apple included (wifi g, dvd burner, bluetooth), the apple was cheaper. Plus, I get 4 hour battery life, kick-butt looks in a smaller package, and a light-up keyboard. Please, put an end to the myth that it's more expensive!
If any of you did look at the WWDC keynote by Steve Jobs, I am sure you guys would have realized by now that this entire discussion is unnecesssary. Come on, the next version of OS X (Tiger) that releases NEXT YEAR has features that Bill Gates still plans to implement in his version of Longhorn. I was astounded to hear that the OS X API would support calls that would process stuff directly on the GPU. Searchlight will deliver what everyone has been waiting for. Even today, almost a year after Panther was released, when I show a Windows user Expose', they are amazed to see such innovation. Microsoft is a company that heralded COM and DCOM as the best thing that happened to mankind since computing was developed. But today with .NET, MS says that COM is for losers. How long will be be before they do the same with .NET? I agree change is the only constant, but come on this is taking it a bit too far.
That's your fault for getting upset by Dvorak. He is a professional troll. His job is to get various groups riled by his words which generate readership ("What will that idiot say next?") and thus generate revenue (subscriptions, magazine sales, ad revenue, etc). Dvorak is very good at what he is being paid to do. You provided a perfect example.
By and large, it doesn't matter.
Linux and other free software does not depend on the destruction of Windows to survive. It is not driven by a profit motive and cannot be attacked on that front. Windows' market share is irrelevant. On an economic basis, free software is unkillable.
The only real threat is legislation and/or patents. Keep that under control, and free software will prosper.
So mamy people get into this 'Linux versus Windows' thing, and get emotionally invested in it... but really, it doesn't matter. What free software is doing is changing the nature of the game, so that Windows has to play on free software's turf, rather than the other way around.
Microsoft is a smart company. They have more money than God. Windows isn't going to go away EVER, at least not in our lifetimes. But, aside from legislation, there's nothing they could really do anymore to lock out free software; the hue and cry if they tried would be vast. People just aren't going to buy DRM-enabled hardware unless they control the keys. If they'd done this kind of thing five years ago, it might have worked, but at this point Linux et al are too entrenched, and cannot be killed at a system or hardware level.... any attempt to do so would be a commercial failure.
Microsoft has to adapt to a world with a lot of great free software, not the other way around.