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."

Comments

End of a monopoly

[Jesrad]

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.

TFA perpetuates myth

[McDutchie]

From the article:

How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?

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.

Re:TFA perpetuates myth

[LaughingCoder]

Maybe it's because the world's number 1 software company didn't get to where it is today by outperforming its rivals

Talk about perpetuating myths! They did outperform their rivals, by definition. You can't argue that they abused their monopoly powers in order to *become* a monopoly. They outperformed their competitors, achieved market dominance, and THEN achieved their monopoly status. I know it's hard for you to admit, but at one time MS was the scrappy little guy competing against entrenched giants like IBM, HP, DEC, ... and the only way they could survive was to outperform them.

Re:TFA perpetuates myth

[rucs_hack]

agreed

If people know anything about the Unix wars then it would become very clear that Unix vendors were fighting amongst each other to 'lock in' customers by deliberatelly making their unix versions incompatible in the eighties. It was a real mess, because if you bought one unix licence, you had to have your apps written for it, and you couldn't move without massive expense.

This wasn't the unix philosophy, it was the 'make loads of money' philosophy, and it wrecked unix as a serious platform for most businesses at the time (not meaning huge businesses here).

Meanwhile this tiny little company called microsoft offered a cheap and easy way out of the mess, called DOS. Ok, it was a bit shit, and ripped off CP/M something rotten, but it did what business wanted, and meant they could get away from the ravages of the Unix wars. Plus it was offered by IBM, which sounded very good indeed at the time, and was available on other hardware to if the IBM stuff was too costly.

I tried DOS back in the day, and it was ok. Not great, but ok. I prefer Linux now, but back then Unix was what the cool guys down at the local powerstation used when I was a kid.

Nowadays I prefer Linux for coding. I never use normal Unix, except for the odd dabble in BSD to produce ports of software. Until Linix though I never would have considered Unix as a serious platform to develop for. When I encountered it at Uni they still had four different Unix versions, and I had to re-code for each one, which meant I used the Solaris boxes, and nothing else until the first Linux boxes appeared, as duel boots with windows, and I was hooked.

So yes, there was a time when microsoft were the good guys, just as there was a time when IBM were the bad guys.

Re:TFA perpetuates myth

[Overly Critical Guy]

You can't argue that they abused their monopoly powers in order to *become* a monopoly.

Sure you can.

I know it's hard for you to admit, but at one time MS was the scrappy little guy competing against entrenched giants like IBM, HP, DEC, ... and the only way they could survive was to outperform them.

Yes, they were the little guy. But that all changed when IBM stupidly entered into a contract allowing Microsoft to ship the OS on every IBM PC, while still retaining the software rights. This brought the company massive revenues as PCs became a commodity, allowing them to expand into other markets.

They did not outperform anyone; they were in the right place and got lucky.

Re:TFA perpetuates myth

[jafac]

This only really tells half the story. The software/OS half.

The other half is the Hardware Story.

SGI, HP, Digital, IBM, AT&T, all the big Unix vendors did have their own OS flavor. (At least shell scripting was mostly portable). But they also had their own hardware, mostly with different CPU architectures. Compiled binaries couldn't run on the different hardware platforms, even if they were written using the same damn libraries. The problem with this was that the hardware was damn expensive, so once you were locked in, they could totally assrape you on hardware.

Then the IBM PC platform came out, which was enough of a standard, and performed "good enough" on the low end, and was dirt cheap because of the fact that everybody could manufacture them to the same standard, and prices went down-down-down while performance improved. I remember paying $4000 for an IBM PC (an 086) with 16 MB of RAM, back in the 1980's. Monochrome screen. It had a "turbo" button you could press to make it run at 12 MHz instead of 10 MHz - (you could screw up timing in games and animations if you ran it at 12). When you look at the advent of the "sub-$1000" market in the late 1990's, those machines totally outclassed the top end in the 1980's, and they outclassed a lot of these proprietary Unix vendors' desktop machines as well.

DOS was just the cheap OS you could run on these cheap systems. But the real savings came in the hardware realm. They still do - compare perhaps the LAST hardware-holdout, Sun, to an intel-compatible system. Price-performance wise, it's not even close, in the desktop area.

One by one, these vendors either dropped out, got bought out, or switched to Intel architecture, to save themselves costs on the back-end. But most of them didn't forget their old "ways", and still charged a hardware premium.

Eventually, even Apple switched to intel chips; because the specialty CPU vendor just could not keep up, even with "superior" architecture. (whatever happened to "twice as fast"?).

The inexorable slide towards monoculture, ironically, was because of the overall cross-fertilization and competition in the huge intel-compatible-PC market. Within each Unix-vendor's hardware market, they were a monopoly, a monoculture. Each one lost out because, despite their best efforts to prevent compatability, the customers switched to the intel-compatable platforms.
While we still have competition on the intel-compatable side (many CPU vendors, many Motherboard vendors, many adapter card vendors, many HD vendors, etc.) - prices will remain competitively low. But the market is consolidating, and has been for about a decade. The best news is that intel is losing the overwhelming dominance it's had for a long time.

It's ironic, that one of the tools for eliminating hardware dependency, Java, came out of the last hardware-holdout, and it perhaps saved Sun from losing the last slice of marketshare it had. (in addition to their intel offerings). Sun embraced multiculture, and it saved them. I would say, too, that IBM was probably saved by their embracing Linux (another "tool" of hardware cross-compatability, by virtue of it's Open Source foundation).

Microsoft, however, continues to reject multiculturalism, cross compatability. They really screwed the pooch with Java, and they also fucked themselves by taking a cross-platform OS (NT, ran on x86, MIPS, and PPC, at one time - Proof: xBox 360 uses some of the PPC fork of NT), and their rejection of anything Open Source. And their last gasp of a power-play, .NET, where they pretended to be "open" - but not really, has (in my observation) done nothing more than alienate formerly loyal Developers for the Win23 platform (particularly among the VB-set). This was really Microsoft's strongest asset: the legions of Visual Studio users out there, who coded exclusively for Windows, because Visual Studio was such a far superior IDE (others have been closing the gap lately), and it was so difficult to produce co

sabotaging own install base

[192939495969798999]

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.

Please read the Observer article before commenting

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm no expert, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

End of the monopoly...

[tygerstripes]

We can but hope.

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)

Re:End of the monopoly...

[WhiteWolf666]

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?

It would be vastly better if we have well-written universal API layers. Like Java, C#/.NET/Mono, Qt, GTK, and other beautiful cross-platform toolkits.

Unfortunately, except for Java and C#, we don't have any toolkits that go "all the way" in being cross platform, with the possible exception of Win32 (WINE), but Wine is reverse engineered, not bottom-up designed, so there are limitations.

There's no reason for application interfaces to be deeply tied into the OS. Properly engineered, a user-space environment on Linux should be able to run Windows or OS X or whatever applications, and vice versa. The reason we do not have this is not because of engineering limitations, but because of vertical vendor lock in. Lately, this seems to be easing slightly.

I envision a future where applications come with API requirements, not OS requirements. "Requires GTK 2.42, OpenGL 3.0, and SDL. OpenAL 5 required for 3D audio." Software manufacturers would probably support particular "distributions" on the box ("Runs on OS 12.5, Mandriva 2012, and Windows Super-Next-Hubble-Viewpoint"), but like *current* binary software for Linux you shouldn't have many problems installing on the "wrong" distribution; with minor API-requirement caveats.

Think Python applications (these are often cross-platform). Think Java. Think C#. As CPUs get faster, we can put up with some of this overhead; and indeed, in some cases there is very little overhead (WINE does Win32 in userspace on Linux really quickly. Imagine if Microsoft gave up the OS business, but just started selling something like Wine. The "Windows" application layer for Linux, OS X, Unix, Solaris, whatever.

If you want an example of this environment, look at Linux, Solaris' Linux Application Environment, FreeBSD's Linux Application layer, and lxrun, the Linux application layer for (ick) SCO Unix. IIRC, AIX is also Linux compatible.

I think it can work; and giant commercial developers have no problem operating in this multisegmented space. Sure, there are a few more compatibilty bugs than in the Windows monoculture, but there's a greater diversity of applications and environments (from very small systems to giagantic systems), and if the commercial OS space was more competitive in the Desktop world (multiple vendors of multiple pedigree OSs) we would see these compatibility issues worked out quickly.

Windows monopoly

[geirhell]

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.

Just to add to this....

[AriesGeek]

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.

End backward compatibility

[Bob_Villa]

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.

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, ... 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.

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!

Re:Please read the Observer article before comment

[Bobby Orr]

TFA is a rant. A sentence like "The Vista saga has two interesting lessons for the computer business." would lead you to believe the author intends to take an objective look at some sort of a case study. However, pay attention to other verbiage within TFA. This is not an objective, fair, reasoned attempt to learn any lesson. It is a rant:

• ...marketed to people in poor countries in a futile attempt...
  
• Security vulnerabilities come free with all versions
  
• There will be a predictable (and expensive) PR campaign ... But in Redmond ...
  
• How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?
  
• And here's where the delicious ironies begin.

But what about INERTIA?

[HawkinsD]

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?

I don't think its the end of a monopoly

[Siberwulf]

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.

Re:Top Windows writer abandons Microsoft

[Aqualung812]

If you were really asking the question "WHAT THE FUCK IT IS IN THE FREAKING STICKER UNDER THE NOTEBOOK", I have an answer: It is for the CD that came with the laptop, or the OS image that is on a seperate partition. If she lost the disc that came with it, or you repartitioned it and blew away the other image then you do not have the same software that the sticker was ment for.

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.