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Vista the End of An Era?
mikesd81 writes "The Times Online has an article about the uncertain future of Windows. Even Microsoft, it seems is admitting that Vista will be the last OS of its kind. With the push towards a constant presence on the internet, and the churn that entails, the company has admitted that even with a two year delay 'it is not really ready'." From the article: "Security experts are acknowledging that Vista is the most secure of Windows to date. However, 'The bad guys will always target the most popular systems,' Mikko Hypponen, of F-Secure, the security group, said. 'Vista's vulnerability to phishing attacks, hackers, viruses and other malicious software will increase quickly.' But the current fear is that the Internet will kill Windows, with Google being Public Enemy No. 1: 'Microsoft is way behind Google when it comes to the internet,' Rupert Godwins, the technology editor at ZDNet, the industry website, said. 'Building Vista, Microsoft is still doing things the old way at the same time as it undergoes a big shift to catch up.'"
If we start seeing companies go down the software as a service model, we may well see vista as a cut down but free product, with Microsoft's revenue coming from on-line productivity services. Games will be relegated to the console (where they can also be locked to the hardware or only available on-line).
This would be good for the companies that are currently seeing losses due to copyright infringement, just imagine if all your media was only available on-line - you could only rent it, it would be playable on your PC but only if the platform had sufficient technical measures in place to prevent you from copying it. You couldn't copy Office or Photoshop because its run directly from someone else's server. This would be a dream for software providers as they could charge you on a per use basis, and lock your data into their services. No more trying to sell upgrades as you wouldn't have a choice.
The only thing that stands in the way of that is a decent and mostly feature complete open code base, something that would allow you to do what you want with your computer, your "Intellectual Property" and the media you buy, or already own. We are seeing the end of the huge revenue streams for those people who provide a product that is easily reproduced. Those providers are looking for ways to re-generate those revenue streams, and I dont think the scenario I have outlined above is too outlandish for them to consider.
"Security experts are acknowledging that Vista is the most secure of Windows to date."
I realize this isn't a thought original to me, but - this would appear to be a ridiculous statement on its face. Only time will determine whether Vista is "the most secure Windows". We heard these sorts of statements at the release of XP as well; those were obviously incorrect until SP2 came around (after how many years?).
Steve Gibson (I know, I know, right there people turn off) pointed out the problems Vista's rewritten stack encountered during Vista's beta testing. We really have no idea how good of a job Microsoft did right there - again, only time will tell. But the initial experiences don't appear to be encouraging.
#DeleteChrome
How is the free software/open source community dealing with the changing landscape?
Sorry I'm only going to respond to this small part of your post :) . The open source community has the advantage that at present everything is much much more modular than in the world of windows. there is no requirement for any of the disto's to maintain the entire code base that their distro relies upon. Further more the producers and providers Open Source code are generally not looking at their product in terms of monetary value. Debian don't have to include features to entice SUSE or Red Hat users over to their distro, nor do they have to worry about Ubuntu using their code base and passing it off as something else entirely.
In my opinion the open source landscape is so different from that which Microsoft inhabits that the issues facing Microsoft will simply not figure on the OSS radar. There will certainly be other issues to contend with (such as driver support, copyright and patents) but most of these are also issues for Microsoft. So in short, how is the FOSS community dealing with the changing landscape? well it deals with it in an asymetric way, it is made up of a huge number of small cells, each one more able to adapt to change than the monolith that is Microsoft. (Just realised that that makes the FOSS community sound like an insurgent / Terrorist group, but that may infact be more accurate than I would have thought.)
Google doesn't make Windows irrelevant. Windows is here to stay.
It's here to stay because no matter how little their operating system changes or improves, it will always be at least a little bit better than the previous version, and as such it will always be the default on new machines.
Microsoft is saved by the fact that PC's are now a commodity, and people don't mind throwing old ones away every couple of years for minor performance improvements. The newest version of Windows will always succeed, because it's the default. All Microsoft has to do is maintain backward compatibility.
The only way Windows will ever be displaced is if another competitor offers something significantly better, which is unlikely. Operating systems are now a commodity, so the possibility that one could be significantly better than another on the same hardware is remote.
Another possibility is that a new hardware platform could displace Intel, but that is so unlikely because the economies of scale almost guarantee that the Intel architecture will always dominate desktop computing.
That is, until we hit a threshold where the hardware can't be made much faster. Then we might see some real innovation in hardware and software.
But until then, learn to love Windows.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Well, F/OSS grew up with the internet, for us the landscape isn't changing, rather it is tending to validate the whole approach as being essentially correct. Microsoft have always had a problem with the way they design software, as monolithic intertwined, horrendously complex packages. In the past, the marketing (and black-ops?) departments at Microsoft were enough to gloss over these problems, but as the complexity of all software systems increases, the Microsoft approach must become unworkable. The stupid car analogy would be trying to build a modern hybrid by progressively adding bits onto a model-T until it looks, to an outside observer, like a Prius.
Due to its essentially distributed nature, F/OSS software is inherently modular. This is its greatest strength, but also a problem as everyone can (and does!) choose their own slightly different way of integrating all of the parts together.
Hmm, there may be a few such large servers around, but are they really going to dominate the industry? What is stopping a proliferation of home users running their own servers? 3 things: NAT, poor security, and asymmetric connections with poor upload rates. The solutions to this are, respectively, IPv6, anything-other-than-Microsoft, and customer pressure on ISP's (and to some extent technology will solve this problem anyway, as broadband rates improve generally the class of services that can be run on the bandwidth of a basic connection will increase).
Yes, it is unfortunate. It would be great if google's searching stuff was all Free Software. Imagine, instead of linking to a google.com search on your website, just use a mod_google extension to the webserver to automatically keep an up-to-date index of your website stored locally. But the history of Free Software suggests that eventually, someone will write a free replacement and, eventually, it will come to work better than the proprietary alternatives. But it isn't clear that something like a distributed database replacement for google is even technically possible, although in niche areas it surely is (for example: scholar.google.com is pretty good for searching journal articles - but this is something a consortium of universities could get together and provide themselves).
F/OSS doesn't need a vision. While programmers scratch their itch and write code, artists and designers improve the look and usability, and end-users give feedback, F/OSS will grow. It isn't any more complicated than that.
Actually what's funny is that the whole availability and popularity of open source is made possible by the internet. Linux's collaborative development model is much more of an example of "the internet being the OS" than even Google could dream of.
I have mod points and I generally agree with your comments that it's about the users but MS had nothing to do with the success of the PC.
At the time the first IBM PC (8088) came out with "IBM DOS" (MS DOS), the home computer was already on it's way. Apple was already there, as were others. The reason the PC took off and surpassed the Apple ][ was due to IBM opening up the hardware specs, which permitted innovation and later competition with the arrival of clones. IBM the gorilla tried to impose it's will which opened the door for MS.
As far as I can remember the software side was always about tie-in. WP, IBM, NOVEL, APPLE and especially MS. MS can't "come back". They never cared about the user. From the start they only cared about sales. They haven't changed and they don't know how to, or if you prefer, the markets will not allow them.
FLOSS has come around to resolve the final issue. Users creating software for users.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...