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Harvard Concludes Linux Will Remain Second Best
watzinaneihm writes "A Harvard Study which uses formal economic modelling to determine "Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?" came to a (not so?) surprising result. Linux is likely to remain second best as long as Microsoft has a first mover advantage."
Intel always thought they'd be #1, eh?
I think Vista is where Microsoft will fork strongly. There are several smaller forks out there, people who refused to leave NT or 2000 or 98 SE, their PC's do what they want and they see no reason to buy new hardware everytime Intel or Microsoft say "Yow! New! Must have!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm going the opposite direction to most people. I started off with Linux because it was far superior to other options back in the nineties. When Win XP came out I slowly reduced my use of Linux because XP was "good enough", it didn't crash, it runs games and iTunes and some other progs I need. I use cywin to make it somewhat Unix-like. Now I've had enough of Windows, it's fallen behind where it should be, but Linux is still too unfriendly for the rest of the family. It's still hard to set up hardware, and the gui, while similar to Windows on the surface, still has an underlying clunkyness still. So I'm moving to OSX shortly. I still like Linux and hope one day it will lose the clunkyness, but life is too short to be spending hours hacking around problems and I'm too old for that crap now.
I disagree. The article is quite interesting.
/. summary doesn't quite get the conclusion right. From TFA:
They do point out that OSS is coming from behind in terms of market share becasue it is much newer. In addition, the
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position.
One of the things the study suggested that MS will have to do to maintain its dominance is significantly lower Windows' price to the point where price is not a factor when choosing between MS and OSS. There were cases in the model where OSS 'beats' Windows, but they all assumed a significant price difference between the two, which, as OSS threatens MS more and more, may become less and less likely, due to MS lowering it's prices.
The article also went into interesting points like which is better for the people. The conclusion was that an OSS monopoly is better than a Windows monopoly, but that a OSS-Windows mix is not always better than a Windows monopoly, due to a splitting of efforts. As a person who feels that the spitting of efforts in OSS is one of it's strengths due to the choices it gives us, I disagree with that one.
When we (and by we, I mean the linux community) hit a larger portion of user base, say 10% of desktop market (if that will ever happen) linux is going to be well known
You (and by you, I mean the linux community) have been beating this drum for a dozen years now. Somehow, I don't believe it will ever happen. If it will, it won't be the same Linux.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Exactly.
It isn't that Linux is not "better" than Windows TODAY.
It is that Windows was "good enough" YESTERDAY.
And yesterday, the companies deployed Windows and locked up their data / training / money in apps that are not supported on Linux
All the companies I see now have their data AND business logic locked up in Access database apps that have evolved over the years to the point where they are un-maintainable. But still "necessary" to the daily operation of that company.
Where the Harvard study went wrong is that new companies are constantly forming and old ones dying. The base of companies are not static. It is dynamic. The new companies will NOT be bound by the headstart that Microsoft has in existing companies.