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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."
From http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46891.htm?DE=1 There's an article in there somewhere. Here it is:
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Rumors of Microsoft's Demise Are Premature...But Not Unthinkable
"The improbable is possible - leaders have been dethroned in the past"
October 29, 2004
Summary
Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.
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Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.
Software market watchers are now taking more serious assessments of the penguin versus butterfly competition, as Microsoft matures and Linux continues to put large growth numbers on the board.
The more vocal observers' voices in this choir are typically located outside the United States. For example, Tectonic, an online open source magazine based in South Africa, recently quoted Novell SA systems engineer and business manager Allison Singh as going on record that Microsoft's Windows juggernaut will become an operating system for niche tasks while Linux takes over the mainstream desktop and server roles. According to Tectonic, Singh forecast that users who need specific applications written for Windows only will stick with the OS, but for most other users, the rapidly evolving Linux desktop will become the standard operating system. Here's the link for that story: www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=324.
But wait! Tectonic calls itself "Africa's Source for Open Source
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.
Maybe MS has already recognized that the OS is a commodity product, and they don't care if linux succeeds. MAybe MS has already put the OS on a low priority, recognizing better ROI from office or integration of entertainment. In the long run, all technology becomes a commodity, and only monopolies (att ) or truly exceptional companies (ibm) who can reinvent themselves. can command high prices for more then a few years. So, in that sense,the demise of MS is inevitable. My dad always used to talk about the linotypers union: in the 40s and 50s, they were gods: nothing got printed without thier ok. today ?
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.
This is almost as bad as posting Roland Piquepaille submissions.
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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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.
Look at the UI. Look at the applications. The basic look and feel hasn't changed significantly since 1995. Almost every new technology "innovation" has been either bought or copied (poorly) by Microsoft.
OSS' growth has been more viral, more grassroots, more innovative than the top-down "we know better than you" approach that Microsoft has successfully imposed on its users in the last 5 years. It is with this suppression of innovation that Microsoft has directly spawned and contributed to the open-source revolution!
On another note, after 10 years on Wintel, I switched to Macintosh recently. After 5 minutes inside of OSX, I experienced more innovation and creativity than I had on Windows for as long as I can recall.
Thank-you Microsoft for helping me switch to truly useable applications.
I am a consultant with many small business customers. A few are pondering the use of Linux (I charge more for monthly maintenance of Windows systems because they take more of my time). But there are a few obstacles which completely prevent a few of them from using Linux (these are sufficiently small businesses not to have any dedicated servers).
The largest obstacle is that many of these businesses depend on vertically targetted web sites and programs which may not work on Linux. Yes, we could get many of these to work probable with Win4Lin or Crossover. However, the uncertainty and supportability is an issue.
But other clients of mine are already committing to Linux. In one case, we saved $20,000 for a customer in license fees alone, not to mention the support costs in network simplification by using Linux-based VPN appliances rather than an equivalent on Windows. In another case, we have a very successful Linux desktop deployment. In another case, we have a customer thinking about switching so he doesn't have to pay me to swing by every month to run a spyware/virus scan.
It will happen, but slowly.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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 work for my local school district as a PC tech. We have 12 primary, 2 secondary, 1 high school, and a central office. All network traffic from the primary and secondary schools plus the central office is routed to the high school over ISDN lines to the high school. There we have 4 T1s.
All of our schools except for the high school have always had slow internet connections due to the ISDN line. We don't have the budget to install T1s for all of our buildings. In the past I had suggested using a Squid proxy at each remote building to save on traffic going to the High School. He said he had never hear of this "Squid" thing and asked me about it. I told him it was a free proxy web cache server that runs on Linux. He sounded interested until I mentioned the words free and Linux. Instead my boss, after I warned him many times, decided to buy an underpowered 3com webcache appliance and put it at the high school. The appliance was rated for a medium sized business (100-500 computers) Our district has over 3000 computers, 1000 of which are at the high school. Even at the high school this device is not adequate. As a result, network performance has not improved anywhere and has decreased at the high school due to the bottleneck. Did I mention the cost of this device was $11,500.
After one of the computer labs of the high school was upgraded we had a surplus of 30 350 Mhz computers. During the summer we are usually installing new labs and installing new servers because all of the childeren are gone. Since all of the labs and servers and been installed there wasn't much more for me to do. My boss asked me to strip down the 30 computers and save any usable parts. I was to then recycle the parts that were not needed. I asked my boss if I could use 14 computers to test software on. Without questioning me he said yes.
For the next week I installed Trustix Linux on the 14 computers along with Squid, configured as transparent, and Sarg. Originally each computer had 128 MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. I decided to up the memory to 256 and install a second hard drive in each computer. One drive has the OS installed on it and the other drive is for the cached content.
After testing each machine I installed them at the schools. School started and the proxies worked great. My boss got a call from a Principal at one of the secondary schools. He asked how our department came up with the money to upgrade our network. My boss told him we hadn't upgraded anything as far as the network goes. He told me about this call during lunch that day and I told him it was because of the Squid proxy servers I had installed over the summer. He said to me with a confused look on his face, "Oh, ok. Well next time you want to install something let me know first." After lunch I showed him Sarg. He was impressed with all of the information available. I think in the future he may be more open to open source software. (Firefox will be my next project!)
If you have read to this point I thank you. The lesson I learned from this situation was that free open source software is looked down upon by some IT managers or those who make the final decisions. The common wisdom by some is since it's free it must not be good. This concept is hard for a Linux user like myself to grasp. I knew all along that a free and scalable alternative was available but my boss still decided to buy the 3com because it was expensive. It must be good if you have to pay for it right?