Linus On The Future Of Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes "There's a pretty good interview with Linus over at Good Morning Silicon Valley. The discussion seems focused predominantly on the future of proprietary software and what the tech landscape might look like if Microsoft's market share declines. 'Says Linus: I do not believe that anything can "replace" Microsoft in the market that MS is right now. Instead, what I think happens is that markets mature, and as they mature and become commoditized, the kind of dominant player like MS just doesn't happen any more. You don't have another dominant player coming in and taking its place -- to find a new dominant player you actually have to start looking at a totally different market altogether.'"

Comments

So, we can expect,

[Senor_Programmer]

if Linus is a true visionary futurologist

something like

a software version of

WalMart

beating suppliers into submission until wecome full circle to one huge vendor and a cornucopia of small speciality suppliers?

Does Bill G and company have the bux to take over software distribution in the area of commodity functionality?

Has he had that vision?

Yet?

Linux is not the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will die one day, or be relegated to an already-run, but it won't be to Linux or Unix. No, Linux and Unix are too ancient, backwards and messy to be a replacement for Windows and Microsoft. And the community is too disjoint to ever mount a successful attack against Microsoft like a corporation could. Heck, Linux already has many corporate backers and look how it still continues to flounder as Microsoft improves Windows by leaps and bounds.

Windows went from crappy 3.1/95 to very stable and potentially secure XP with a large amount of free and non-free software and hardware support. What has Linux done in the past 10 years? It is still behind Windows and always will be. It tries to be too many things to too many people and in the process fails at being good at anything. Sure, it's a good server OS, it's usable on the desktop, but Windows or Mac OS are better desktop OSes and there are other versions of Unix that are better than Linux in the server room (except the cost lots of money or don't have as much community and hardware support).

But more to the point, Linux is just old hat. It's based on a 30 year old operating system. Things have changed, and certainly Unix/Linux has as well, but wouldn't it be better to have an OS designed from the bottom up to be truly modern and not hold on to all sorts of anacronisms and baggage from those 30 years? An OS that will beat Microsoft will not be Unix or Linux (perhaps based on Unix, but it would have to be heavily modified -- see Mac OS X). Backwards isn't the answer.

Oh, sure teh Evil Google.

[Erris]

the kind of dominant player like MS just doesn't happen any more. ... Tell that to Google.

Right, the company with a motto of "do no evil," and has earned it's patron's loyalty by excelence wants to act like Microsoft which has to use dirty tricks to keep customers. I'll believe that when I see:

1. Websites that say, "best viewed with Google,"
2. Dell and others gumming up computers with "Designed for Google" stickers on the case,
3. Google is dragged into federal court for anticompetitive practices, such as making sure companies that offer computers preloaded with M$ search have to pay more to look at Google.
4. Google calls my ISP and tells them to block port 25 because Google flaws result in massive spam crapfloods from residential computers and because alternate software provides mail service easily thereby reducing Google's competitive advantage.
5. Google manages to suppres a superior technology like firewire.
6. Google tells representatives to lie to School teachers about who they are.
7. Google creates the Web Software Alliance. The new Alliance establishes fink lines for disgruntled employees to snitch on employers about illegal searches and shakes major public schools systems down in court.
8. Google calls M$ Search an "unamerican" "cancer".
9. Google hires people to polute blog, BBS and other web space with pro M$ spam.
10. Google hires PR firms to spam lawmakers.
11. Google creates the M$ Search "switcher" from stock model photographs and a poorly written essay.
12. and on and on and on and on.

    Linus Torvalds is only half right. Nothing can replace Microsoft but nothing should. The sooner they lose their ability to coerce [aka "dominance"] the better off we all are.

Open source in the long term

[Halcyon-X]

Open source is well equipped to survive because of its long term goals. Successful open source projects are built from the beginning to be extended, to incorporate functonality that was not imagined from the beginning, and to be well integrated and share data with other applications. These are all qualities that you cannot depend on proprietary software for, it is at the whim of the project directors and other developers and users have no direct influence.

If we take a page from the video game industry, american companies would often abandon ideas that were not immediately profitable, often passing over truly good ideas if they could not control them or exploit them as quickly as they needed turnaround. With this sort of hit-or-miss shortsightedness and not striving to build a good idea until it is profitable and to grow around needs/uses of consumers, it is extremely difficult to find a successful formula without lockin.

Nintendo took over the video game market because their vision was that of the long term, in fact they planned out the next 10 years, and rebuilt the video game industry in america when others believed that it was a fad that was dead and gone. They furthered the platform by sharing their experience and helped licensees as in the end it drove demand for more Nintendo hardware and software. But when Nintendo tried to place too many restrictions on third parties, they would eventually find another platform (such as the Genesis, which at its peak had a 51% market share over Nintendo).

Open source software does not have these restrictions, is built with the long term in mind, and users may have direct influence over the applications they work with. Microsoft's place in the market is determined by factors they must control, but to do so they must sometimes overlook the needs of the users, developers, or even their necessity to Microsoft as they must look to their profits to ultimately decide whether to continue development in a certain area. The platform is driven by the interests of Microsoft's profits and success in reality could well be arbitrary. This requires a streamlined and highly successful process and may in the end drive Microsoft closer to open source methods, as they have developed many initiatives recently designed to provide greater interaction and sharing of information with developers, provided more information on APIs, and even produced some of their own software which the user may modify and download without spending money. They have explored their "shared source" avenue.

It will be interesting to see what happens on both fronts.