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Windows Monoculture Myopia Revisited
round stic writes "eWeek magazine has an interesting look at the effects of the Windows monoculture on IT budgets, even as everyone agrees on the severity of the inherent security risks. The article contains interviews with Dan Geer and others who warned about the risks of the Windows monopoly three years ago. The article coincides with a piece in the Observer that suggests Vista is the end of the Microsoft monolith because of how complex the operating system has become."
Microsoft's monopoly is fighting against itself: newer versions of Windows are finding themselves to be in the "striving competition" position, trying to steal marketshare from older versions. This phenomenon can only amplify with Microsoft's inability to innovate. This is the end of the monopoly.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Let's assume that people buy new OEM PC's that have the newest Microsoft OS on them. If Vista provides new, "incompatible with old version" features, then the Windows install base becomes less self-compatible. If Microsoft fights to keep Vista compatible, there will be no real reason to upgrade. It's a catch-22 of being the monopoly OEM-installed OS.
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Just to play devil's advocate here (so don't bite my head off); while Windows may be complex, its ubiquitous nature does reduce the need for applications to be particularly portable, and for programmers to be particularly knowledgable. That's an arguable benefit, but it maybe the drive for varied OSes has its drawbacks.
It would obviously be preferable to have a well-written universal OS, but that brings us around to the old saying: The best kind of government would be a benevolent dictator, but how many dictators stay benevolent?
Windows and M$ may be evil, are certainly a pain in the arse, but are they also just an inevitable consequence of the technological and economic environment we have created? If it weren't M$, would we just be having the same problem with someone else? If the devil didn't exist, would it have been necessary for us to have created him?
What do others think about this? (Again, I'm only playing devil's advocate - I want to see how others view this situation)
Meta will eat itself
I can already hear everyone saying, "But Apple came up with the UI idea" or even "But Xerox came up with the UI idea." Be that as it may, it was Microsoft who proliferated it throughout the world and ingrained the idea of the particular UI into our brains. Like it or not, admit it or not, Microsoft has done a bit of good for IT in general.
With that being said, they have done quite a bit of evil too. But there's so many negative posts about Microsoft, I had to comment on the one positive post that I saw that wasn't just a "microsoft rules you lunix users muhahahaha" troll.
Ok, Mods, do your job. Mod me down for saying something positive about evil evil bad bad Microsoft.
Insert offensive troll-style sig here. Please mod or respond appropriately.
Really, I don't think it will be the end of a monopoly. Why would it? MS has every bit of steam possible in their engine. As a "Seasoned" (5 years or so) .NET developer, we cater to Windows. Therefore, we use windows. Furthermore, we use Office. Our clients use Windows (I guess we don't help things by not offering MAC IE/Safari or Firefox/Opera support, but thats another thread, honestly).
Another neat note is that MS's XNA framework and GAme Studio Express is just out in beta and quite a few people are liking what they see. Unfortunately, it'll take another beta release to get the Content Pipeline out the door, which means painful conversion of Mesh files, but thats ok for now, as people get to learn the IDE.
I've always been told that making money has nothing to do with having a decent base product. While that might not be the selling point, the fact that you have good accessories, or at least desirable accessories usually can push the fence-sitters onto your side.
*NIX will never die. Windows will never die. I don't think it matters how much each side tries, since the appeal (to the GP) of "Widely Used" vs "Better" have always offset.
Where would they both be now if they stopped fighting in, say, 1999?
In DRM hell, of course. There is where you can see how correct RMS was, back in the day. The GPL is of course the only thing that effectively stops MS from embracing and extending GNU/Linux. If Linus Torvalds hadn't learned about the GNU project and the GPL, lots of hard work by lots of people in the kernel could be made irrelevant.
MS outperformed, they got set up as the default and made their software good enough.
If we look only at PC hardware
People bought MS DOS, not PC DOS, not Dr DOS
There were a few windowing environments and task swapping/multitasking
Deskview (sp?) GEM, OS/2, GEOS
People still bought MSDOS (Dosshell swapping later and MS windows multitasking)
They also leveraged their default status, when they went QBasic and the default editor, did anyone notice it was very similar to the QuickBasic and QuickC environments? (I loved QuickC 2.5 at the time)
123-> Excel
Wordperfect -> Word
They simply make a good enough product, and work on the weak points till it's no longer clearly inferior to the competition.
It's a very effective way to compete.