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An Open Source Tipping Point?
jg21 writes "Over at LinuxWorld there's an article arguing that open source will be propelled to market predominance by the same disruptive mechanism that brought Sony, Microsoft, and others to be market leaders at the moment. 'The improbable is possible - leaders have been dethroned in the past,' writes the author, who is also apparently the producer of an upcoming documentary entitled, 'The Digital Tipping Point' to be released in September 2005. The story refers to a corroborating article from South Africa and to Clayton Christensen's Seeing What's Next which backs up this general idea."
If the sleeping giant that is America's small business community goes for Linux (possibly as a result of being introduced to the open source concept by Firefox), Bill has a really big problem on his hands.
I've seen many articles like this in the past that suggested there was some "boiling point" at which Linux / OSS / Free Software would be unstoppable and would take off like wildfire. They are fun to read and dream about, but they don't reflect a realistic view of the software scene. Linus has often said that Linux on the desktop would be a long, tiring battle. I agree. We will never hit a point where Windows will suddenly be rejected and open solutions will become the de facto standard. I think we need to fight for every % of market share we get. It won't be easy but -- to be honest -- I find the challenge pretty damn fun. :)
It could happen that MS will become a niche player, but if I had to bet money, I'd bet on MS surviving with a large market share. There's jsut too many people who have budgets to justify, and the one thing that Libre software can't help you do is squander money.
See what I've been reading.
It happened not too long ago in the video card arena....Voodoo anyone?
I don't doubt open source will dominate in many areas, but I doubt it will overtake Microsoft anytime soon unless there's a major shift torward software compatibility and enhanced intuitiveness for Windows users.
For instance, I'd switch my Mother to Linux just to degrade her chances of a virus, but 3 or 4 little games she plays; Kyodai Mahjongg (this isn't normal mahjongg) Bubble Shooter (There's a similiar one, but it's got a ways to go to catch up to Bubble Shooter), Bookworm, etc. aren't available on Linux that I know of.
The other issue is that, people are comfortable with where to go & what to do when there's trouble brewing in Windows. In Linux, even veteran Windows users are often at a loss.
If you do something wrong installing video drivers in Windows, you get a smack on the hand by the OS forcing you to 640x480, where you have to deal with what you did. Make that same mistake in Linux, and without knowing what file to edit in a command line editor, most Linux newbies are looking at an OS reinstall. That's way too harsh and unfortunately, drives users right back into the open arms of Microsoft.
Heh a blunder
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Microsoft has made some amazing improvements on the performance of Windows from the average user's perspectives. Face it, Windows XP was a very big and impressive release to the average user. MacOS X, even more so.
Linux now has the big players' attention and they are busting their balls to compete on merit. How are Linux developers going to respond to the tight integration in Windows and MacOS between the different teams building the parts of each OS?
What Linux developers will need to do is make sure that there are no weak links.That means that X.Org, Linux, KDE/GNOME, etc will have to fit into each other's design very well and as tightly as Windows and MacOS X.
So far so good, but just remember that these companies have a big advantage int hat area that cannot be underestimated.
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Awwww, bugger. I thought he posted it that way to make a sarcastic point about how unreadable the LinuxWorld web site is. I mean, is their webmaster on drugs? Does Sybase pay money to be associated with such madness? And what the heck did that article say?
Call me ambivilant, but so what? I find it irrelevant to wonder whether Linux or open source software in general will perhaps have the greatest market share at some vague point in the future.
The fact is there's a lot open source software available that solves problems now and solves them well. I use it exclusively at home and at work because I like the general philosophy and more importantly because it gets the stuff I need to do done.
Whether or not Microsoft lives or dies or becomes a smaller company is (for me at least) not important. This may not be true if your business relies heavily on Microsoft products and/or apis.
its going to be brought about by Brazil, India and Germany when they hire a couple guys to sit down and hack some software to deploy linux to their COUNTRY.
/w unified userdb for nfs, samba, ftp, web, shell and a powerful web admin system. good outward scalability. i mean, hell, dragonfly bsd might have a better chance than linux when you think of how far there is to go. ;)
linux remains a very difficult thing to deploy. there are going to have to be better tools for centralized system management before linux can roll out and roll over microsoft. corporations arent the place to foot the development of these rollout-configurators, countries could concievably be. in the end, everyone will benefit.
i'd say when a country doesnt have much difficulty doing installing linux, microsoft is going to have a hard time justifying themselves. thats a long way to go though; we're talking automagic kerberos+ldap
Myren
No they don't. What Linux developers will need to do is nothing in particular. In other words, they just need to continue to make sure the stuff they work on makes them happy. Everything else follows quickly and easily from that.
MS is faced with a problem. Their major money makers are Windows and Office, both of which are facing rapidly maturing competition from open source alternatives. They can continue to try to grow their market, but it will not be easy (must combat piracy in the third world, and expand the markets for those two products elsewhere). Their other products and services are two small to deliver the revenue that Microsoft and their stockholders expect.
So what happens as Linux and OpenOffice expand? The cost of bringing Windows and Office to market is astronomical, and the cost to produce each unit is very small, so each sale lost hits Microsoft surprisingly hard.
This quest to expand the market shows up in Media Center and Automotive editions of Windows, and in the new services which come as a part of office.
There is a problem. I have learned that if you "innovate" for the sake of innovation, your ideas will be only useful to a few, and the good enough solution takes over. I don;t see a unifying strategy for Microsoft anymore. Disclaimer: I am a former Microsoftie.
I see Microsoft as going down surprisingly quickly. It won't take long once the tipping point is actually reached (maybe with Linux hitting 10 or 20 percent of the desktop).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not sure if you are trolling. But anyways....
:-)
Businesses tend to be risk adverse, which is generally a good thing. This means also that they are afraid of change. So this slows down Linux quite a bit.
Home users tend to stick with what they use at work. So until Linux takes over on the corporate workstation, it will be a slow tough fight.
All that being said, I think that Linux will kill windows. It will just be a slow process until a certain market share is reached. At this point application compatibility will be less of an issue. But progress is occuring much faster than some people realize: Linux is certainly killing proprietary UNIX (as is Windows), and the fate of OS X is uncertain, though I suspect that it will slowly be open sourced bit by bit, and they may slowly subsume eachother.....
Consider that 5% of the PC's which shipped last year ran Linux (mostly Linspire and Mandrake). Even after you count those where Windows was later installed, that was still up to three percent of *new* PC sales. Yes, Microsoft's monopoly has begun to collapse already. This year, maybe, it will be more.
Linux is already causing Microsoft real headaches in a few very key markets such as internet server and embedded system markets. The real beacheads are business web application development, desktop, and groupware now. But it is a slow process at the moment and will be for some time. I do predict though that it will be a fierce war for the desktop by the time Longhorn ships.
BTW, Linux has been good enough for the desktop for the last 5 years. It is just getting better
Also, Microsoft's last year of record profits was the year XP was launched. This is to be expected. But their market share is another question-- how do you measure market share? In dollars? If so then the slow demise of proprietary UNIX and Netware gives Microsoft greatly inflated numbers. If in deployments, then the simple answer is: we don't really know what real numbers are because we have no good way of measuring them.
Now, is there a tipping point? You bet. At a certain point, people won't write their business web tools for IE only (as Safeco does). Vertically targetted tools will be available for Linux, etc. and all basic productivity tools will be open source. At this point, I expect Linux useage to take off much faster.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I disagree. They could ALREADY sell a MS shell over a *BSD core, just as Apple has. Linux is not their only option, the BSDs are incredibly robust and advanced operating systems and MS wouldn't have to fight the GPL. I would argue that it would be even be an easier transition than using Linux since it's developed by a smaller and more centralized authority rather than total bazaar style development.
I would suspect the reason is applications; Microsoft is making money hand over fist on the current 9x/NT based systems, so why try to fix a system that's already pulling in more dough than the corporation knows what to do with?
Secondly an adoption of a core that was once open source means that without serious overhauling that current *NIX-compatable sources will be (relatively) easy to modify applications to run on "Windows POSIX Edition" That means more applications will be available to your competitors.
Apple had something to gain from this: they have small market share and were switching to a new kernel in OS X, losing their old applications, but started out with a significant boost because *NIX sources were not terribly difficult (relative to *NIXwindows ports) to coax to run on OS X. Microsoft would be doing the opposite, it would be opening a bunch of vital applications to "alternative" operating systems, making them far better competitors and far more lethal to their dominance.
... is that one day they'll be right, and everyone that said it in the past will suddenly be thought of as prophets. If you back enough new trends, eventually you'll pick one that hits the big time.
I think the most important aspect of Linux growth is that it does not seem to have ever gone down. Linux has gradually grown year after year. Now that it is much more mature, it should continue to do the same. Even if it maintains it's present rate, it seems likely that Linux will achieve at least significant market share, if not dominance, in many of our lifetimes.
Also, the article does not mention that growth rates are almost always exponential. If Linux continues to grow market share like it is, it will begin to grow at a much more rapid rate. The reason for this is word of mouth. Linux share is now in the 3-4% range. That means 3 or 4 people out of 100 use it (on the desktop). That means chances are that the average person doesn't know anyone who actually USES Linux. But once you hit the 10% range, that's 1 in 10 people that use Linux. Suddenly many more people know someone that uses Linux, and many will probably be willing to give a try. Suddenly you're shooting up to 25% share and you're in the trend/fad range. At this point momentum will usually swing completely in your favour. Not are you the trend, you're comeptition is looking poor for losing so much share. Chances are that at this point, market share will flip-flop and the underdog will be the leader. The Desktop OS market isn't like most other markets where there is a lot room for competition. It's very much a single product dominated market. It will likely always be that way. If GNU/Linux succeeds, however, it iss likely to also share a fair amount of success w/ other open source OSes like BSD.
I am afraid that is simply not the case Most PC's are bought by companies fitting out their offices with servers and general purpose desktops.
In fact, it is widely beleived that the PC as a gaming platform is declining due to rising problems with piracy and the market dominance of consoles such as the Gamecube, PS2 and XBox by an large offer a much better return on investment than PC games.
DirectX games do not rule the world. DirectX is a facilitator for games. It doesnt matter whether a game uses Direct3D or OpenGL its the game, and its gameplay that matters most. Also you might have noticed that many of the next gen card manufacturers (NVidia & ATI) are offering OpenGL support in addition to DirectX. You might also notice that many of your favorite 3D games have a video setting for OpenGL. This is something you will find more and more often as it is much easier for software developers to write a Crossplatform/console game using an Open/Crossplatform 3D graphics library than it is with a closed one such as D3D.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp