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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 ?
From the article:
Why do people keep perpetuating this myth? It should be widely known by now that all the important Linux developers get paid by their respective employers to work on the kernel. That's possibly the most significant sign of widespread acceptance of the open-source development model -- that companies such as IBM would pay their own employees to do work on a public project that is not exclusively to their own benefit.
In the same sentence, the author managed to confuse "richest" with "smartest" as well. I'm not very impressed with this article.
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.
stuff |
I know, RTFA is a strange concept on /., but this time around it's really needed.
Why? Because the article is not about the downfall of MS as the headline seems to suggest, but about the way complex software is build. It suggest that building big, monolithic applications has reached an end as Vista shows that even a huge company like MS can't really write complex software in this way anymore.
Now agree or disagree with this, but please spare us the "OMG MS will never die" comments.
With new virtualization technologies coming through, I think it's about time for Microsoft to scrap backward compatability being built directly into Windows. It just leaves so many holes unplugged. Start Blackcomb with a clean slate, include a Win32 sandbox environment, and be done with it.
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
On a side-note: Windows monopoly also ensures you can go to inner Mongolia, switch on a local computer and with 90-odd percent chance make sense of whatever pops up on screen. It means everyone has a common UI that is known by many (most?) members of modern civilization. Easily, Windows is, barring the ill effects of monopoly on commercial businesses and security, the greatest single stab at standardizing computer UI so far in computer history. And quite sucessful at that.
Magna res est vocis et silentii temperamentum
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.
Building large, complex software in a monolithic way has always been at an end. This is why monstrosities like MS Windows, MS Office, Mozilla, and Linux are so full of bugs and so difficult to extend.
Interestingly, they have also all found the solution to the extensibility problem: modularization. Indeed, MS Office macros, Mozilla plugins, and Linux kernel modules are all popular ways to add functionality, and they work reasonably well. Of course, you need the whole of MS Office, Mozilla, or Linux (at least the binary and the headers) for this to work, and new versions of the monolithic software often break the modules. And it still doesn't solve the complexity of maintaining the monolithic software; thus they are all still full of vulnerabilities, Windows still crashes, Mozilla still leaks memory, etc.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think that for the next release of Windows, they should just stop trying to support old hardware and software. Just write a small, compact kernel that is secure, and have turn everything else into independent modules that can be easily switched out, similar to Linux and Unix. If you don't like your filesystem, change it. If you don't want IE, take it out and put in Firefox.
... they would make their lives a lot easier. Plus, without all of the old legacy code in there it would probably be more secure. And maybe for that version we could have WinFS.
I think the UI is fine and they should keep it fairly consistent. But if they'd just lose having to support things that ran on 95, 98, 2000, ME,
And dump the registry, that was a really stupid idea.
But I think this could work. Most new copies of the OS are sold on computers built by Dell and other pc makers so they can control what goes in them. Hardware could be certified to work on the new version. Fairly new hardware could get new drivers that could be loaded on and it would work too. But older stuff would just get left behind.
Anyway, just a thought. On a random note, painting a two story house by yourself sucks!
who warned about the risks of the Windows monopoly three years ago
What took them so long? That was 2003 - it was a "monopoly" (Not really - it never has been and never will be...) long before then.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
The end of the Microsoft monolith? I don't think so. OK, so Vista is bloaty, and a monoculture is risky. So what? Are the masses of IT directors going to think, "Gee, monoculture is bad, I think I'll replace all my Dell desktops with iMacs"?
There are approximately one grillion machines running XP and Windows 2000, and doing their jobs more or less successfully (if not securely), and being supported. Many (most?) will not be upgraded to Vista, given the high costs and dubious benefits. So they will stay the same.
How does this work out to the end of the monolith?
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
So we'll be lured in by the next solid, stable, safe NT3.5(1), and then have the rug pulled out from under us when the followon version comes out and all those safteys are scrapped for marketability.
Fool me one, shame on you...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
By using your custom "XP Home / XP Pro" CD (I have never heard of a MS printed disc that does that), you are using a different disrtobution of XP than the one that came with the laptop. While not as drastic, it would be like trying to fix a Red Hat install with your Ubuntu disc.
Windows does just work if you treat it like a Mac. Only use signed drivers, use the OS disc that came from the factory, etc and it works. Try to take it outside of that protected area and you risk running into problems like this. Some people are very familar with XP and tweak it to do amazing things just as some take a Linux distro and customize it, although the latter has far more room to customize and far more places that you can screw up if you don't know what you are doing.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Parent poster definitely gets it right:
The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.
Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
Some more elaboration of the idea: Software is meant to be free
So are you saying that their cathedral is bizzare?
The CISOs' concerns about the cost of non-standardization to an organization miss an important possibility: organizations can choose to standardize on a product or vendor without making the same choices as the majority of people in the world. For example, you can choose to standardize on SUSE Linux, and with much of the world's black hat population focused on Windows, you'd avoid many of the Windows attacks.
This is much smarter security-wise and economically than trying to support many different operating systems in production systems. For one thing your support costs go way down, especially if you choose the right vendor, because you are buying and deploying in quantity. While you as (for example) a SUSE shop will still get slammed hard when Linux is targetted, the shop that tries to suport Linux and Windows at the same time will get hit with Linux AND Windows vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it's likely that no matter what operating system is vulnerable, some mission critical system some place will be compromised.
So, a possible strategy is to standardize, but on something that is not a dominant "de facto" industry standard. For larger outfits, you may choose to standardize differently for different divisions and subsidiaries. You still get the scale effects of standardization, and while it does mean you respond to more security problems, you're probably scaled and organized in a way that makes this possible to handle.
One problem of course is that presumes you have a choice of applications which can meet your needs. One of the arguments some economists (who have magically rediscovered some of the disadvantages of competition) is that software is subject to the "network effect", which amounts to that if there is only one platform to target, then the market for software for that platform is bigger. This means you benefit from the competition in the application space. The downside of course is that you suffer from lack of competition in the OS space, from the OS vendor's attempts to tilt the playing field in the application space, and of course the monoculture effect.
These days various flavors of Linux are at least as good as Windows by any reasonable standard, when considered as an operating environment for your computer. Linux and BSD fall short availability of suitable applications for these customers, and support for those applications. In some application areas, Unix flavors are a bit ahead of Windows IMHO, but overall the Windows market has the full spectrum of applications better covered than Unix. This barrier is a catch-22; developers will come to a platform when there are adopters, and adopters will come to the platform when there are developers.
So, a legitimate strategy to avoid the monoculture problem is to use a Unix derivative such as Linux, BSD or MacOS. However the practicality hinges on the differential in application availability being less than your concern for security.
MacOS is probably the most important player to watch. It may well break the network effect log jam, to the benefit of Linux and BSD as well.
The one place where movement towards this rosy future can be thwarted is in standards compliance. Consider the number of web servers that run on Unix variants, but whose clients are overwhelmingly Windows desktops. The standardization of HTTP, HTML and these days javascript makes this possible (although failure to support standards inflates costs). Standards for data interchange and communication are a critical enabler of a heterogenous software ecology. Without them you cannot work with suppliers and customers who make different vendor choices than you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That convenience of one platform means less management expense. So far, companies are going with lower costs over susceptibility.
Alternatives to Windows are free. As in beer. As in licensing costs: $0. License management costs: $0. Time spent calling to re-license the operating system because you installed a sound card: $0. License audit exposure: $0. As in infinity% cheaper than Windows. As in incremental cost per unit = 0. The cost of alternative supporting application and utility software is $0. Alternative database application software is $0. Alternative firewall softare is $0. Alternative antivirus software (if and as applicable) is $0. Word processing software - $0. Systems/network management tools - wait for it - $0. Documentation,comprehensive howto resources, and technical support - all $0.
Turning away from solutions such as Linux because of cost is like being on fire and turning away from a bucket of water because the water might be too hot. Arguing against alternatives to Windows on the basis of cost is the very height of idiocy and is ultimately disingenuous. The real issue when considering alternatives is the fear of change and organizational inertia. How much of either can your company afford?
Fact of the matter is, nobody (who makes the purchasing recommendation) gets fired for choosing Microsoft if their products fail as a result of a design flaw that causes an application/OS crash or security hole that results in someobody taking control of systems you don't want. You can just say "it's windows...everybody runs it. Not my fault!".
If you go out on a limb and choose something different then your "risk" of getting the crap beat out of you if you fail is HIGH and the return is LOW.
Accountability for the people who choose MS products for their organizations will help. If your boss said "if a SINGLE desktop gets infected with a virus or spyware you are fired" would you choose Windows as your desktop/server OS?
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.
I can't really agree with this. The major problems came when Microsoft decided, after about two years in development since the start in ~2002, that they were to change the foundation of "Longhorn" from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Server 2003. This was also by the time Microsoft changed their goals of what their next OS should be. Yes, when it was in the middle of development! Development managers may start feeling dizzy now and consider leaving Microsoft.
I wouldn't even want to do it in a personal software project.
To see the problem, check out this build 5048 review (build 5000 was the kernel switch) with screenshots. It looks almost like "old Windows" again with mostly the same old features after a few years in development? Windows enthusiast Paul Thurrott is screaming blood. What happened to the progress they had made? Well, they had to strip a ton of features to get their stuff working again. Say hello to huge two year delays, feature cuts, and sweating.
So Vista seems to me to be more about a planning/design mistake than a complex beast that will take around 5 years to get out the door. Vista has actually only had around 2-2.5 years of uninterrupted development on the correct kernel and with the final goal of what it should even do!
I'd like to object to the article and actually claim I'm impressed by how quickly Microsoft put together something that looks to even end up as stable during that short time with this many features, given the stupidity that went on in planning. Or rather in-development-planning.
Of course, WinFS and other technologies had to go due to this wild change of focus in mid-development, but that's not surprising or a lack of efficiency due to having think of backwards compatibility, like this article claims.
But it's at the same time very visible how Microsoft is struggling, and I'm doubting we will see a clean release of this one when it "goes gold".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i think the article raises an interesting point. virtualization technology.
if you think about it, this could mean that ms ships as a host operating system and one preinstalled 'guest' operating system.
from this point on, anyone can run his sw in windows, older versions of windows (with which it is competing) and most of all: any linux distro or other OS.
this further on means, that non-technical people will run linux on their boxes, like any other application. for them, there is no big difference whether it's an application or a complete operating system. this means also, that ms has found it's niche, where it always was. the end user. i doubt that there will be many non-technicals, that will later change to have another OS as their host operating system.
this also solves the 64bit problem, the old 32 bit apps can still be run.
So you're assuming that at least 50% of the people using Windows are going to get new machines in less than 6 months? Ha! I'd say at least 50% of Windows machines in existence are enterprise/corporate desktops/workstations, and many of those are finally upgrading to XP. Maybe in 6 years Vista will be the most widely deployed Windows OS, but in the meantime, XP and 2000 will continue to dominate.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
no, it's not a rant. it's english journalism. the idea of english journalism is to entertain the reader. you have to be able to separate the facts from the polemnic. it is an established tradition in england.
It's interesting the unstated assumption in the arguments against heterogenity: that any given company must support multiple platforms for heterogenity to work. I don't think that's true, though. If any given company uses a single platform, but different companies choose different single platforms, the end result is much the same overall: exploits have a much smaller target they'll work on.
And further, I don't think the arguments about the cost of supporting multiple platforms hold up. There's more than enough research supporting the contention that it takes fewer people to support Unix-based desktops than Windows-based ones, and that makes sense given the remote-admin capabilities built into desktop Unix that come from it's server roots. So suppose a company switches to a 50/50 mix of Windows and Linux desktops, and a Linux tech can support twice as many desktops as a Windows tech could. Yes, supporting two platforms costs more than supporting one. But at the same time you've just halved the number of Windows support people you need because you've got half the number of Windows desktops (assuming you've got more than 1 or 2 people could support). You need to replace them with Linux support people, but you only need 1 Linux guy added for every 2 Windows guys you're dropping. If you started with 4 Windows techs, you'd drop 2 Windows techs and add 1 Linux tech for a total of 3 techs now. That's a 25% drop in personnel costs. When figuring costs, you have to add in the reduction in personnel costs as well. Plus there's the reduction in licensing costs that offset any increase from having multiple platforms.
And finally, there's the BSA. We've all read the reports about their audits and the havoc they create. If your company's already supporting non-proprietary platforms, you're in a much better position to do an Ernie Ball if the BSA gives you grief.
There is most certainly a monopoly, but the Windows monopoly is a secondary effect of the Office monopoly. People just are not trained on anything other than MS-Office, and naturally jump back in fear at the very idea of using something other than Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. This is a cycle that is difficult to break, especially at larger, well-established companies that often have hundreds of documents that simply do not render right in OOo or Wordperfect (to name the two most popular non-MS-Office suites). Startups still need to hire people, and finding people who put OpenOffice on their resume is difficult, and migrating from Office to OOo is very difficult, despite the fact that most business tasks are covered by OOo. I know people who run Linux but still have to get Windows and Office licenses and run them under VMWare or QEMU -- OS migration is easy compared to document and software migration.
Palm trees and 8
I think this is screwed logic. First off, you would like everyone to buy a new computer, every 6 months? Most people I work with (private people, small businesss, etc) Don't have a clue why they should upgrade. Heck, one guy thinks that his computer is "full of bugs" (adware)! The standard upgrade time for computers, at least, around here, is 4 - 5 years, with quite a few buying 'new' machines in the last year or so.
Next, a lot of the business from the big companies comes from Celeron / Athlon / P4 business. Most of these computers don't have the memory, CPU power, or even the video card (most use on-board accelerators) to power Vista.
I know, I know, RC1 looks a lot better than Beta2, but it still won't run on my "noob-machine" (Celeron 1.2Ghz, 512 RAM, Intel graphics solution). And this is the typical type of homebrew computer you'll see in use.
The way I see it, I don't think that many people will upgrade to Vista, at least, not right away. Vista is terribly complex, and for some things, XP is actually easier to use - I wouldn't be surprised if some people actually go back to XP, after their experience with Vista.
-Christian
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
MS made their bed they can sleep in it. Windows is too complex because MS MAKES it too complex. When you strip everything down to the (very stable) NT kernel, the design is pretty good. Then come on the layers for the GUI and things get muddled quickly. But even that isn't a big deal. Now lets consider the other crap that really has nothing to do with an "operating system", but is simply bundled in. You have junk like Media Player, Internet Explorer, notepad.. The list of apps that is just bolted on top goes on and on, but these things should be completely modular. MS is unwilling to decouple these things and is now mired in overcomplexity which is compounded by attempting to manage a team size needed to complete these tasks.
I'm starting to get the idea that MS doesn't even LIKE their OS anymore. It's just too much to maintain, while other programs like Office provide lots of money with less than half of the development costs.