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Microsoft Advised To Learn To Love Linux
mikael writes "ZDnet is reporting that the management guru Clayton Christensen (author of "The Innovator's Dilemma") has advised Microsoft to learn to love Linux. In particular he advises Microsoft to purchase "Research in Motion", otherwise they will see their applications sucked off from the desktop and onto handheld devices such as the Blackberry."
Microsoft already loves Linux.
They bought SCO didn't they?
liqbase
Microsoft's revenues/profits have been positive so far. Maybe they will face "oblivion"...but not in this decade.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
As someone who has read much of Christensen's work, I am not surprised that he would make this suggestion (and I agree with it), but I am excited to see it out in public...
I agree with him that the greatest threat that Microsoft faces is the unwillingness to destroy its existing business to create a new business.
Why won't Microsoft bring Office to Linux? Because that would undercut the Windows business.
Why hasn't Microsoft gone ahead with a truly revolutionary approach to a MediaPlayer or Handheld? Because that would undercut the Windows business.
It is about keeeping the Windows business going. Think about it, how many differnet flavors of "Windows" have we seen for totally different uses and platforms?
Yours,
Jordan
I almost feel sorry for Microsoft reading this article. He's right, and what's more I'd be surprised if many people at Microsoft didn't know it.
But they can't; how precisely can Microsoft remain a profitable publicly traded company while embracing open source? Their software is all they have.
IBM was in a fortunate position of being a major hardware vendor and therefore capable of switching revenue stream focus.
But Microsoft?
Can anyone else imagine Microsoft five years from now being known more and more as that company that makes really nice mice and peripherals?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Microsoft advised to learn to love Linux
Martin LaMonica
CNET News.com
October 18, 2004, 09:40 BST
A US management guru has advised Microsoft to acquire Research in Motion and pay closer attention to open-source projects on mobile devices, or face oblivion. Management guru Clayton Christensen has a paradoxical answer for Microsoft to the challenge posed by open source: invest in Linux applications for handheld devices. Christensen, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, is the author of the 1997 "Innovator's Dilemma," a book that describes how good companies often fail because business managers don't embrace "disruptive" technologies. Open source is a clear disruption to Microsoft and the software industry in general, Christensen told attendees at the Future Forward technology conference here on Thursday.
"Where Linux takes root is in new applications, like Web servers and handheld devices. As those get better, applications will get sucked off the desktop onto the Internet, and that's what will undo Microsoft," he said. The software company can respond to this market disruption by setting up a separate business that will "kill Microsoft," Christensen said. If it doesn't react to the rise of Linux desktops on handheld computers, it will miss a coming wave of new applications and market opportunities, he said. Microsoft has already conceded that open-source software poses a significant challenge to its business. The company could not be immediately reached for comment on Christensen's remarks.
Christensen has observed that companies regularly stumble when they follow the well-established management practices of planning and listening to customers. To succeed, companies should not only cater to customers and continue improving their existing products, he argues. They should also set up separate business units to capitalise on new technologies, even though these may be poor-quality, low-margin products. Digital Equipment, for example, grew rapidly in the late 1980s by selling mini computers, which were a simpler, lower-cost option to mainframes, he said. But when other PCs began to take hold, the company didn't pursue that market for economic reasons: PCs offered substantially lower profit margins and didn't meet the technical needs of existing mini-computer customers.
In Microsoft's case, Linux applications on handheld devices are a threat to its lucrative business of selling desktop PC applications for its Windows operating system. "As computing becomes Internet-centric, rather than LAN (local-area network)-centric, their stuff runs on Linux, because it's all new," he said. He noted that people increasingly leave their laptop PCs at home when they travel and instead rely on handheld devices, such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry. Linux also provides a cheap, commoditylike alternative to Windows -- the basis of Microsoft's business. Although Linux didn't use to be as functional as Windows or Unix, adoption of the operating system grew rapidly because it met the needs of simple applications and is relatively cheap. A similar dynamic is now occurring in the database market with open-source products such as MySQL, Christensen said.
Christensen said that Microsoft should move progressively into Linux applications over the next six or seven years, because that sector will offer better opportunities for growth than operating systems or databases. He suggested that Microsoft acquire Research In Motion to accelerate the move, rather than continue to invest in making Windows run better on handheld devices. "As the BlackBerry becomes more capable, applications will get sucked onto it. Those are kind of places where growth is," he said. "If Microsoft catches it, they'll be all right."
All of the above will receive scant support and will be axed after one release. A MS spokesman will cite 'no interest' for the reason even though the half-baked, shitty software and uncertain future has more to do with it.
But it seems wierd that the guest speaker at an event hosted by Research In Motion would advise Microsoft to purchase Research in Motion.
That seems a little, um, strange.
1) MS Linux exists, and has existed, for a while. It'll appear whenever there's a business need for it.
2) What's stopping MS from having a non-GPL applications layer which enables them to deply Office and whatever they'd want on THEIR linux. Assume they'd charge a little under the standard distro's, or even include it in the cost of Office for Linux.
The only hassle will be hiding the DRM for said Office where it can't be seen/modified - so it can't go in the kernel, etc. Could a binary loadable MS Driver do this for them?
It's an obvious business tactic to mimic a competitor if he is successful. Microsoft has done that before, and still does: Look at their Monad shell, which is designed by a team with an extensive Unix background. Microsoft is slowly testing the open source waters (f. ex. FlexWiki).
It's not like another poster said that they fear it would undercut their Windows business. Why would there be an Office for Mac?
So in conclusion, thanks for telling me the world isn't flat, Mr. Christensen
...microsoft is about to show you some hard lovin'
While I think this is encouraging, I feel that it's a little alarmist: Microsoft still have an incredible monopoly. Of you non-techie friends (if you have any unconverted) how many *don't* run Windows? How many are terrified by the prospect of having to learn something other than Windows? How many think that Windows, OfficeXP, IE, and Outlook are the only applications they need, apart from games, which lets face it, are mostly written for Windows.
I think Microsoft would have to play a lot of consecutive bad hands before they'll cede their desktop stranglehold.
History is full of companies who fell out of the limelight because they couldn't or wouldn't adapt to new technology. One is happening right now as Kodak struggles to remain relevant in the world of digital photography (and it seems to me, they are trying to earn money from "traditional" photographic services such as printing, applied to digital photography - I'm not sure this will be successful). Where are all the typewriter manufacturers in a world of word processing? Despite the FUD and lock-in tactics (tactics that are becoming less and less successful with each iteration IMO), the same fate awaits Microsoft it they refuse to adapt. In contrast, look at IBM - in hibernation throughout much of the 1990s but emerging ready to do business with open source - and that's just one example of how they've adapted over the course of their history. Gates and Ballmer would do well to study this.
That's just it though - it's a "cant beat them join them" scenario. I doubt Microsoft feels that threatened by Linux's current market share in relation to their own - sure, it's a threat, but nowhere near as that of, say, MacOS.
But Research In Motion's Blackberry is not any kind of free-software platform. It runs yet another proprietary operating system, requiring (at the moment) proprietary development tools. It has nothing to offer over Windows CE (except possibly quality of implementation).
Netware (hammered throughout the 90s by Wintel servers) and Unixware (offloaded to Santa Cruz Operation after only about 3 years) was "all" that Novell had. They are going through a painful, but necessary and promising, transition into a software services company. I think the more accurate summation of MS' problem is that they've angered far too many people for far too long, and even if they take the Damascus road tomorrow they may find a severe lack of partners and customers would kill them instead.
keep their RIM jobs?
But aren't they adapting? Here are some of their major complaints:
1) Criticized of security problems
-- Put a team of developers on making XP more secure. Release SP2 with focus on security. It isn't perfect, and there are still flaws, but they are listening to the critics and working on the public's number 1 concern. I believe we'll see Longhorn as a very secure. Does that mean it will be full-proof? No, that would be impossible, but I do think that it will be much, much better. After all, Linux has security problems. Mozilla has security problems. They just don't get as much attention and are fixed slightly quicker.
Look for this as the number 1 improvement in the coming months / years.
2) Product Quality
-- In the past MS has sacrificed security and to some extent quality for ease of use. I think they will still but ease of use as a top priority, but look to see the quality level increase. They have already delayed Longhorn and cut feature in order to really nail down the important ones.
It is very hypocritical to read here how people blast MS for their quality problems and then blast them again for delaying a future product in order to enhance the quality. I just don't get that.
3) This article talks about apps being sucked away
-- I fail to see this. It will happen to some extent. That is inevitable. MS can't do everything (nor do I or anyone else want them to). So they have to pick and choose.
So let's take a look at a few things they have done:
- MSN - recognized the AOL threat and jumped in to compete
- online music - recognized a growth opportunity so they are now competing with iTunes
- XBox - jumping into the home gaming / entertainment center market
Again, note the hypocrisy. Blast MS for being a monopoly. Blast them for not adapting to the business market...effectively losing market share. So what do you want? A monopoly or a competitor?
To me MS screams adaptation. Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just a little dense. Or maybe people just love to hate MS...no matter what.
Before I get modded down let me also say that I'm not advocating MS. There are many, many superior products on the market than theirs and I urge everyone to use the better products. After all, why not use the best? I'm just trying to point out the hypocrisy.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
why waste the breath on microsoft - Billy and Steven are going to do what they want to do rather people like it or not - I personally think microsoft is going way of cable companies except they are going to take it further by providing end devices in the house that either connect to fiber/cable/or dsl. they have been working with a major telecom giant in getting fiber to premis - bet ya you can only have microsoft products to use it. this is where they are going next and they will put in writing with the companies they contract with that they don't work with linux. so I think we should all save our breath and quit trying to tell Billy and Steven what to do.
Microsoft embracing Linux would immediately convince many people, particularly in the small business market, that they can dump Windows. It would imperil other sectors of their business that currently are solid. Also, many environments are 'anything but Microsoft' as much as they can be. RH and Novell would do fine in that kind of world.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Take what Christensen says with a grain of salt. I used to admire Clayton Christensen, but over time found he was more business pop culture than substance. John Dvorak put it better than I could when he wrote a piece ome time back http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1628049,00.as p
Christensen's 15 minutes is up. Back to business.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm not arguing about the TCO of a Mac, but when I've proposed the idea of "have you checked out a Mac", they always say that the price is too high. Although, many people I've met who own them consider that the extra cost outweighs all the Windows hassles.
Well, Christensen argues, according to many examples in many fields, ranging from excavating equipment to department stores, the new businesses, despite being apparently inferior in some ways, will end in dominating the whole field. That happens because the new way of doing business will evolve faster than the old, established way. Why evolve, if it's the best and most lucrative way? And, when the old managers wake up, it's too late.
If M$ bought RIM, they would move them out west anyway. They have a history of doing this, despite promises to the contrary (they purchased the company that made Fox Base, promised to keep them in Ohio and promptly closed the Ohio facility and moved its operations out west).
. there used to be a sig here.....
Here is a reality check for you guys caught in the Slashdot distortion field:
- Microsoft had 36.8 BILLION dollars in revenue last year (up from 32 BILLION the year before)
- Microsoft had 8.6 BILLION dollars in NET PROFIT last year (I wish I could fail that much)
- Microsoft has 70 BILLION dollars of cash
- Microsoft has seen revenue and profit growth for every year of their existence
Thank You. Now wake up.
MS Office is the only tool that can correctly render *ALL* Microsoft Word .doc documents. Anyone who collaborates with clients by passing Microsoft Word .doc files around needs to use Office, with the exception of those who do not use custom templates or other Word features.
2 21&tid=185) I tried to summarize some of the major points that were repeatedly mentioned, and a major point was:
.doc. Just like MS Word saves documents by defualt in it's (proprietary, closed-source) native format, .doc, to leverage all of Word's features (instead of .rtf or .xml or .sxw), OpenOffice needs to store documents in it's native (non-proprietary, open-source) format, .sxw, to leverage all of it's features.
.doc files. A simple PDF of their sxw document will do and it's a hell of a lot cheaper (free).
.doc support in OpenOffice is one of about three remaining things that keeps me from moving to Linux in the workplace.
In a recent thread about OpenOffice, (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/13/1339
OpenOffice's storage format is not
However, OpenOffice is a great tool to give to developers, IT staff, and anyone else that does not have to collaborate with clients, executives, and managers by passing around Word
The lack of full
2) Assonine developers that insist on perpetuating Microsoft's browser monopoly and closed standards that use Internet Explorer only technologies to deliver their content. (ActiveX tops my list here). Unfortunately, to do my business, I am unable to boycott all of these sites.
3) The MS Exchange connector tools for Linux email clients are not yet capable of dealing with some of the features of Exchange / BackOffice that are leveraged by my employer.
- Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?
Please don't give microsoft any survival tips.
signed,
A guy who does not miss macro viruses. (or any viruses for that matter.)
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
As for as operating systems that can run on 90% percent of the world's desktops go, Microsoft's only competition is linux. It's in their best interests financially to keep surpressing linux, cutting deals for people who consider switching, and spread FUD so people are afraid to switch. They want people to think of Microsoft when it comes to software, not choice.
But can't you just see Steve Ballmer thumping his shoe on the table and proclaiming "We will Berry you!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If Microsoft really wanted to get rid of Linux they should do exactly what they did to Java. Create a horrible version of Linux. Release it as an easy to use Microsoft branded version of Linux but purposely cripple it. People that don't know any better will try to use it. They'll notice that it's doesn't work as good as Windows (Due to the crippling by MS) Microsoft will then say that it's not their fault, it's innate to Linux then everyone will run back to Windows and believe that Linux is innately broken just like Java.
I mean, not adapting as in sticking to the model of proprietary software that may have served them well for 15 years, but is now becoming unmanageable. You cite the security issues and the steps they are taking to address them - I think this is a symptom of a much bigger problem, namely that Windows is now too big a project to manage in house. CPU power doubles every 18-24 months (a la Moore's Law) and that means your software has to increase in complexity to take full advantage of it - distributing this workload is one of the chief advantages of the open source model. IMO the delays to and feature losses from Longhorn are a symptom of the same problem.
Their products do have something in common
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
But portible devices are just too popular, and someone else will step up. There may be some patents to get around, but MSFT might face an anti-trust suit if it tried to enforce them.
Maybe you shouldn't be such a tight ass and spend some money on software. The people who like to get there software for "free" and only for "free" are the people who will kill the open source software movement. As much as it is about lower cost software somewhere along the line somebody has to pay for the development cost of the software so programmers don't starve to quickly (well at least for now here is a good example of why http://www.golden-orb.com/).
/.'s have made financial contributions to open source projects (sure alot of you would have purchased a Linux distro, I have) or better still how many companies have you worked for that have made some financial contributions to the developers of the open source software they use?
:).
How may
As for the MS Office issue I would love to see an application like that for Linux, unfortunately OpenOffice is still go a way to go yet! Anyway I don't think Microsoft can separate it from the OS enough to do it
But aren't they adapting? Here are some of their major complaints: 1) Criticized of security problems -- Put a team of developers on making XP more secure. Release SP2 with focus on security. It isn't perfect, and there are still flaws, but they are listening to the critics and working on the public's number 1 concern. I believe we'll see Longhorn as a very secure. Does that mean it will be full-proof? No, that would be impossible, but I do think that it will be much, much better. After all, Linux has security problems. Mozilla has security problems. They just don't get as much attention and are fixed slightly quicker.
Yes but as far as I can tell home installs still default to administrator, so regardless of how many patches they apply to their software, they still have to user running in the MS equivalent of root. They probably won't fix this in the near future since all normal install processes are based on having Administrator access. And until they fix that they will never have a secure home distribution.
Look for this as the number 1 improvement in the coming months / years. 2) Product Quality -- In the past MS has sacrificed security and to some extent quality for ease of use. I think they will still but ease of use as a top priority, but look to see the quality level increase. They have already delayed Longhorn and cut feature in order to really nail down the important ones.
Apple seems to have balanced out ease of use with quality and security with out having to choose only one. Yet somehow MS can never do this, despite the fact that they have over 10 times the budget. They haven't got it right yet and probably won't for some time, I can't imagine Longhorn being some kind of silver bullet that puts it's security up there with BSD/OSX.
It is very hypocritical to read here how people blast MS for their quality problems and then blast them again for delaying a future product in order to enhance the quality. I just don't get that.
Not hypocritical at all. They spend billions of dollars more than other software companies on there products yet take years to make any improvements, and when those come out the quality is crap, even though it took them foo years to make it. To me the two go hand in hand. If they are going to take forever making there product then the quality ought to be pretty decent when it comes out.
So let's take a look at a few things they have done: - MSN - recognized the AOL threat and jumped in to compete - online music - recognized a growth opportunity so they are now competing with iTunes - XBox - jumping into the home gaming / entertainment center market Again, note the hypocrisy. Blast MS for being a monopoly. Blast them for not adapting to the business market...effectively losing market share. So what do you want? A monopoly or a competitor? To me MS screams adaptation. Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I'm just a little dense. Or maybe people just love to hate MS...no matter what.
Actually they are a monopoly for OSes and Office software only. On all other fronts they suck. I don't see how those three things show them as adapting. How many people use MSN as there ISP? I don't think very many. iTunes is used MUCH more fequently then whatever MS has made...I've actually not heard of it yet. And the XBox is one of their biggest failures. They had lower sales than the PSOne in Japan last christmas which wouldn't be a big deal except that alot of the games people are interested come from Japan, so maybe they can keep it afloat with sports and shooting games in the U.S., but I'cant imagine them making much from it. Other notable endeavors include: portable devices, tablet devices, multimedia centers, and I'm sure there are many more.
MS tries to keep a monopoly on OSes and Office Suites because it's all they can do. They've repeatedly demonstrated that can't do anything else. But I do agree that software won't be siphoned away like it talks about in the article, since people will make there software MS compatible until MS isn't the leading OS.
So, um, when do they love you?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If people are so willing to shell out all that extra money for Apple's GUI on top of an open source operating system (Darwin), why wouldn't they be willing to pay something extra for a system that runs a Windows desktop and applications on top of Linux? They'd have the speed, reliability and security of Linux, together with that good ol' Windows look and feel that we all know and love (cough).
Seriously, though: if Apple can do it, there's no reason Microsoft can't. If they wait too long, there is indeed a danger that the open source community will, slowly but surely, end up pulling a Netscape on them (oh, the irony). However, if they act soon enough, I can even imagine them retaining a bit of their current monopoly (apps that don't work without the MS desktop).
If you take it in the context of his books, it is clear that he can offer that advice knowing that there are three very real possibilities. First, MS might very likely ignore it. Second, they might buy RIM and gut it, which is not what he's advising. Third, they could buy it and do what he suggested.
His advice won't be the deciding factor in Microsoft's strategy. So RIM has no reason to believe that his advice is going to sway MS. What he is really saying to RIM is that RIM's strategy is going to win out. If MS wants to ride that wave, they have to buy into it. It's too late for them to compete with it.
What if Microsoft decided to put some support behind Linux? Suppose they take the current source, fix the issues, get decent drivers and make it look pretty. They then slap their logo on it and release it. (Either by download or sticking it on a CD and charging for it.)
OK, they've lost money on it. But if they suddenly switch half the Linux community to Microsoft Linux (never thought I'd say those two words together!) they then control that market too.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
This guy's just an academic. As a business owner & manager, I tend to listen to people that have a proven track record, as opposed to academics who haven't spent much time with real life business.
I don't respond to AC's.
To put it succintly.
Linux is to Microsoft today
what Microsoft was to IBM/OS in the 80's:
A cheap low quality alternative.
Seems fate is not without a sense of irony.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Agreed, at times people seem to think that Microsoft could just implode one day due to a bad business decision and almost immediately cease to exist.
I think that Microsoft *as we know it* could implode one day doe to a bad business decision. Does this mean that they will still be making software? Don't know....
People seem to forget that if Microsoft were to completely pull out of the Operating System, Office, games and internet markets (and just about everything else) and devote themselves to say... selling sol.exe (Solitaire for the non windows persons) for a dozen different platforms... even without a single sale, the pile of cash they are sitting on, in addition to their assets would be sufficient to keep them afloat for many many years.
The business has decided to give away a large portion of its cash pile to its stockholders in the form of a buyback program and a huge dividend.
That is not to say that Microsoft could not sustain their operations for a long time via debt financing...
Now, the software suffers from an extreme economy of scale (variable costs are very low, fixed costs are very high), so if sales of Windows start to fall, it impact's Microsoft's budget really fast. THey are still forecasting something like 6% growth next year. But what happens if they end up losing market share to Linux? They can afford to cut prices *now* without endangering their operations, but if they lose market share this will not necessarily be the case.
Microsoft is under attack from multiple angles from rapidly maturing and credible compeition: OpenOffice, Linux, etc. These programs threaten their conjoined twin cash cows of Windows and Office. And if they can get 30% of the market (assuming no market growth), they will render Windows and Office unprofitable at current prices and budgets. Even half that would cut their profit by 50%. Now if the market grows those numbers grow with it, of course. At that point, Microsoft can either increase prices (damage their competitivity) or cut costs (pay programmers less and spend less on marketing, thus damaging their competitivity).
At this point, I do not see a long-term future for Windows in the face of Linux. And by the time Longhorn ships, we may be at a critical point.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Perhaps they're realizing that they should listen to the old saying:
Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Available candidates:
Christensen tells you not to listen to your customers too much.
Drucker says that above all you must listen to your customers.
Peters says you must have a corporate culture in place and it's more important that you follow the values of the corporate culture than what those values happen to be.
I'm afraid I don't remember the name of the current that stress how vital it is to deliberately piss off and drive away the customers that are costing you money (e.g. by asking for tech support)...
Whatever you feel like doing with your customers, you can find a management "expert" to back you up.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why should a company abandon its business to start on another, apparently less lucrative line, which offers less utility to the company's clients?
I think Microsoft has done something smarter than what Christensen suggests in his book. Why should Microsoft "abandon" its once-and-still-successful business to start a new one when it has enough resources to keep the old one and start 100 more?
Have you heard of:
- XBOX
- Tablet PC
- Windows Media Center
- Windows Mobile
- Smartphone
- Visual Studio
- SQL Server
- Microsoft Games Studios
- Business Management Software
- MSN, MSNBC, MSN Messenger
Not to mention all the stuff Microsoft Research is cooking up with 5 billion in cash.
Of course you can say: none of these businesses are successful, but that's exactly Christensen's point. None of them are at first, but if you don't get into new markets, your company will die.
"John Dvorak put it better than I could when he wrote a piece ome time back"
I disagree - that link sounds like more of Dvorak talking out his ass again. Example:
"The closest Christensen comes to a real disruptive technology is digital photography. But it was invented in 1972 and has never been "cheaper" than film."
In what universe? The Land That Time Forgot? My digital camera saved me more than the cost of the camera itself within 6 months of purchasing it! The cost of a 36-exposure roll of film + development really adds up fast.
And that doesn't even factor in the cost advantage of being able to review a shot immediately to know if that rare family reunion pic actually turned out. Not only is digital definitively cheaper in raw dollars, it's far cheaper in terms of recovering from lost/failed photo ops.
Frankly Dvorak has sounded like a tired worn-out gasbag of punditry for over a decade. Maybe two decades - I'll have to check my back-issues of Computer Edge. ;-)
I for one don't welcome our (potential) new Microsoft overlords -- everything they touch turns into poor quality crap. That's why I started running Linux in the first place, I needed something that was reliable and just plain worked day after week after month after year.
...profit!
The IT guys where I work have figured it out: The only way to keep Microsoft products stable and secure is to run them as little as possible and to severely restrict what can be run and where they can go. Even then most of IT's time is spent trying to keep the Windows boxes working. Why? Because Microsoft makes and markets garbage, it's their business model: Just good enough to get the cash from the suckers who are fooled by a pretty GUI. Make the user sign a EULA agreeing that Microsoft isn't responsible for the poor quality of the product and
The only thing Microsoft should be doing in the future is pushing up the proverbial daisy. A fitting end considering that is what Windows machines do best: Sing Daisy.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
"Open Source has its benefits, but I don't think it has proven itself in the main-streem market yet."
Err...Apache remains the number one web server; most of the time when you are looking at a web page, it is served via Apache. Now, if you are limiting to the desktop market, then no, open source is unproven as a mainstream source of desktop software. Open source will continue to be mainstream in servers and workstations. Note how Microsoft is having to add open source auditability to their software to work with governments. They will also need to offer the ability to offer custom versions (another feature already part of open source) if they want to be a serious player in the embedded market.
The chief advantage that proprietary software offers over open source is that it includes a mechanism for people to group together to trade money for software. However, as we shift from general purpose appliances built by third parties (i.e. PCs) to special purpose appliances built by the same people who are specializing the software (e.g. router, Tivo, PDA, web server, etc.), the advantages of this fade.
It makes more sense for Tivo to share the same OS as Linksys or IBM. By submitting their changes back, they get free support from other companies. Further, they don't need bells and whistles (they will develop their own), just the basics. Amazon currently has a Tivo for $80 after rebate; they can't afford to pay a $50 Microsoft tax out of that. Linux saves them the $50 and is better suited to their needs (because they can trim out the parts they don't use, saving resources and increasing security).
Ah, but how long do they have? That's the unanswerable question.
... those guys.
And it doesn't even matter what most people have on their computers. Most people will never install an operating system. Most people will never purchase an operating system. Most people will never purchase a Word Processor. So what matters to MS is what the computer comes with. So far MS is nearly unchallenged in this area, but that could change VERY quickly.
Fortunately for those of us who prefer something else, we aren't the major enemy of MS. They are their own worst enemy, but next to that it's the threat of rebellious customers. And in this case it's not the end-user, but the company that forks over the cash to MS. HP, Dell,
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I recently had a hardwood floor installed. The underlayment used was kodak photo paper. Turns out they have surplus, and rather than take a total loss they sell it as underlayment. I now have 700 sq/ft of Kodak paper sandwiched in my floor.
OK, how about BIND? Every time you type a domain name into, well, anything, it's about 99% likely that open-source software is doing the hostname lookup and translating that domain name into an IP address for you.
Sendmail, Qmail, and Postfix are also pretty entrenched when it comes to Mail Transfer Agents (aka, software that actually routes your mail from you.com to them.com). When it comes to these bedrock network services, it's closed proprietary software that's the new kid on the block. OSS has been the standard for decades.
Samba is another good example of enterprise-ready OSS. File servers running Samba tend to out-perform Windows file servers on the same hardware.
Causation can cause correlation