Virtues of Monoculture, Or Why Microsoft Wins

blackbearnh writes to ask, "Why does Microsoft win the development environment war so often, when we all know it's a lifetime lock-in to Windows? Perhaps it's because the open source community offers too much choice." From the post: "Microsoft offers the certainty of no choices. Choice isn't always good, and the open source community sometimes offers far too many ways to skin the same cat, choices that are born more out of pride, ego, or stubbornness than a genuine need for two different paths. I won't point fingers, everyone knows examples... The reality is that there are good, practical reasons that drive people into the arms of the Redmond tool set, and we need to accept that as a fact and learn from it, rather than shake our fists and curse the darkness."

Comments

Re:FAQ item

[Wonko the Sane]

The only definite point I got from that article was "sometimes too much choice is bad". I don't think you can really seriously argue with that statement, but on the other hand it'd not all that helpful either.

Re:FAQ item

[JohnFluxx]

> Does the open source community do anything to change it's fractured ways since the last time this was mentioned?

Take a look at freedesktop.org.

* Sharing of sound system - both Gnome and KDE 4 will work with gstreamer
* Joining of messaging system. It was dcop (kde) and corba (Gnome). Now both will use DBus
* Common themes that make kde and gnome apps look the same.

Plus lots of 'small' points. Both follow the .desktop standard for menu items, actions etc. Both use the freedesktop.org icon naming system, and mimetype system, and so on.

Re:Things to learn from Windows and OSX.

[vdboor]

because there is no standard GUI layer. Windows provides all that.

No, it does not. Well only sort-of.. The "standard GUI layer" of Windows is limited to the plain widgets we all know from Windows 95. The ones Notepad and WordPad still use. Ugly menu's and big bevel toolbar buttons. If you look closer you'll see Notepad, Windows Explorer, Visual Studio, Office all use different menu's and toolbar handles. They're all custom widgets, not standard.

Most advanced widgets for Windows are part of a commercial widget toolkit you've chosen. This can be MFC, ComCtl, VLC (Borland), Windows Forms (.Net), WPF (.Net3), Qt, and I'm missing others (e.g. remember those big sized OK-buttons a big green check icon inside).

All those different frameworks do have something in common. Windows provides central settings for fonts and color schemes. This makes them all look the same. That's something Linux should really improve.

his license and that license (really meaning, these liabilities and those liabilities.)

You have two good options for Linux:

• GTK+. Free for use in commercial projects (LGPL). It's the base of GNOME.
• Qt. IMHO a enterprise class toolkit (see customer list). Requires a license for commercial work, but I don't see how that's different from a license for Visual Studio. And you'll get commercial support in return too. Qt is the base of KDE.