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

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.