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How Microsoft Beat Linux In China
kripkenstein notes an analysis up on TechRepublic detailing how Microsoft beat Linux in China, and the consequences of that victory: "With the soon-to-be largest economy standardized on Windows desktops, desktop Linux does seem to have an uphill battle ahead of it." "Linux has turned out to be little more than a key bargaining chip in a high stakes game of commerce between the Chinese government and the world's largest software maker... The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop."
But Linux has always had an uphill battle, the hill just got a little higher.
After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop.
.doc format. Sad but true.
That is exactly the problem with Linux. It's always almost ready dor the desktop. And it will always stay that way as long as there isn't a standard interface and and a good office suite that does MS'
-- Cheers!
(Of course there are many assumptions and guesses here - I don't think this is a serious economic prediction. But it does show the general idea.)
Two conclusions:
From TFA: Microsoft has made it easy for Chinese users to purchase legal copies by offering a $3 Windows/Office bundle to Chinese students.
I wouldn't be surprised if they still make a profit even at that low price.
-- Cheers!
It matters because nothing Microsoft does benefits anyone but them in the long run. You've got to have noticed this by now.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If Linux wins out in the end it will be in part for this reason. You can examine it for backdoors, concealed reporting etc, which you cannot do with a proprietary closed source OS. I have no doubt that if it was asked by the NSA to include that sort of thing in its product offerings to China, MS would be willing to comply. What company would be willing to rely on the goodwill of a foreign, potentially hostile or at least rival government's goodwill, when it can develop its own operating system and include these features itself and under its own control?
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The Chinese government wishes to control the use of the Internet and of computers. The Linux community is hardly likely to help China take control of computers away from the users. But with Trusted Computing, Microsoft may be able to offer exactly that capability.
For a government concerned about control, Microsoft's obvious motivations (control and profit) may be both more familiar, more predictable - and because Microsoft is centralized, mor tractable. This in comparison to the diverse coalition of interests making up the free and open source community.
Read the article again more carefully. The maximum price outside multinationals will be $3; nothing near $100. Most people will be permitted to "pirate". The lesson from this is that the only way to negotiate with MS is to have a serious and already deployed Linux strategy. RedFlag remains crucial to China's bargaining. If you country doesn't have it's own RHEL based Linux distribution, it's time to start asking for explanations.
Huh? As a graybeard I remember those horrible days where we got our OS from our hardware vendor, along with the "opportunity" to buy their crappy, proprietary, $10,000/seat applications. Further, as an application developer, I remember those dark, pre-Windows days when I had to test my software on reams of different hardware; it was not a good use of my time, but without a ubiquitous layer between my application and the hardware (any vendor's hardware), I had no choice. Counter to your assertion, I think Microsoft has played a major role in improving the life of people like me. Admittedly, they have gotten rich in the process; they weren't doing it out of altruism. But I do not begrudge them their profits. I gladly pay the "Microsoft tax", which is a pittance in the grand scheme of things, in return for the many benefits their efforts have afforded me.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I'm going to have to disagree with that. Overall, yes, MS makes money from their products - that's what companies do.
They have pretty well set the desktop standard and pretty much anyone that uses a computer can sit down at most any workstation and accomplish a task. That is a hell of a benefit. Unfortunately, it comes with a monopoly that makes it harder for other OS vendors to enter the market.
Personally, I've been running linux and bsd machines for the past 10 years. Everybody is running their own desktop that a majority of people don't know how to use without a bit of fiddling. There's nothing wrong with that, but moving towards ubiquitous computing, we need a) better interfaces and b) standardized interfaces or we'll just get confused by the multitude of UI's out there.
Until everyone can carry around their own UI chip that interfaces with the surrounding hardware, MS's monopoly and their desktop standardization have at least one benefit that we can't currently get from OSS.
Additionally, lots of OSS copies from MS on interfaces, software and protocols. I'm not saying MS hasn't ripped off their fair share of ideas, but the street does go both ways.
This may be the least negative thing I've ever said about MS.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
``The fact that... Linux failed to gain a major foothold in China is yet another blow to desktop Linux. After nearly eight years of being on the verge of a breakthrough, Linux seems more destined than ever to be a force in the server room but little more than a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop.''
Oh, come on. Just as those who have been proclaiming, the past few years, that whatever year it happened to be would be the year of Linux on the desktop were to early to proclaim victory, this is a bit too early to proclaim defeat.
I seem to recall something about one of the world's largest PC vendors starting to ship systems with Linux pre-installed. Does that sound like "a narrow niche and an anomaly on the desktop"? To me, it sounds more like one step on the road to being a recognized and respected operating system.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You can almost hear the author whisper to himself; "I hope this article turns out to be right.
So, in a country governed by a surpressive regime which wishes to controll and monitor it citizen's as much as possible, a proprieatry closed system controlled by a centralised body is standard software rather than a free open system with an ideological emphasis on the freedoms of the users. Doesn't sound to surprising does it ? Now the real WTF is that the democratic world is using it as well...
Unless the Chinese government outlaws linux and alternative OS, its only a matter of time for world wide open source software to improve beyond what microsoft can produce. Note, I said "Open Source Software" which is a wider base than the "Linux Kernel".
But for this to be promoted as Victory of MS vs. Linux. Certainly it is a hype, as GNU/linux continues to replace Microsoft products in governments around the world. Before GNU/Linux what was the option?
Sooooo, in the bigger picture, MS has been down graded from a sure thing, only option, to a need to announce and amplify the announcement of victory over the competition in specific cases.
You will not find MS announcing competitors victory over them and maybe not even teh same level of media coverage.
The fact that it took the open source software development model to create competition for microsoft, where all other MS competitors business models failed, says a lot as to what to expect of the future of open source software.
It exists, and it is more than GPL violating too.
When I saw it running a few years back (Chinese version) it was an extreamly shoddy red hat fork with KDE as the desktop and blatantly ripped-off windows 2000 icons. It was trying hard to pass off as windows 2000, but also there was no root password, user ran as root by default, and it seemed that some services...actually most of them, were running by default.
The whole thing was just so communist. As opposed to Linux.
Microsoft didn't kill that hateful environment. Unix (and I suppose some others) did. Remember the term "Open systems" from the early 1980s? It was the reaction to the situation you describe.
That too, wasn't Microsoft, but Unix and others. Heck, even the microcomputers of the mid-1980s had serious operating systems like AmigaDOS, RiscOS, Unix dialects ...
Is your beard really gray?
``These moves, coupled with building strong relationships within the Chinese government and opening a major research center in Beijing, completely changed Microsofts fortunes in China.'' (emphasis mine)
So it was good old favoritism. Buy a can of politicians, get one nation free!
This is why those with power should be watched and their use of said power closely scrutinized. Of course, there's no such thing going on in China.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The Chinese government has had access to the Windows source code since 2003.
Now when China uses Windows in President Hu's office, or for that matter in its missile systems, it can install its own cryptography. How Microsoft conquered China.
99% of Windows users don't know how to use Windows, at all. Really. They just know the couple of APPLICATIONS they use, and how to launch them.
Example: I had just this week to teach a windows user how to remove entries from boot loader menu. He had to reinstall windows and the reinstall process partially borked, like it usually does.
It was like 'start a command prompt' (+long explanation), change file attributes on boot.ini in C: root (+long explanation), launch text editor (+explanation), toggle back file permissions - oops I mean attributes... and boot and pray.
How this was any easier than modifying GRUB config escapes me.
'Readiness' and 'Intuitiviness' do not equal familiarity.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
Give the man a cigar!
I have gone through the Microsoft era, Unix era, Open Source era, Java era, and so on. YES I am a gray beard like the original grand parent poster. And if there is one thing that Microsoft has learned and keeps on propagating is that you can make money with Microsoft. This is not something to treat lightly.
I will give you another example; AutoCad. They are essentially the last standing CAD software. Yes there are others, but none as popular as AutoCad. Why? Well one reason is that you could copy it. BUT another bigger reason was that from day 1 AutoCad could be extended so that you could add value to AutoCad. AutoCad created an environment where people could prosper and thus secured their place in history.
Open Source did get one thing right in that they solved problems that people were having. Open Source did not focus on features. What Open Source got wrong is making money for people. The environment around Open Source is a cheapskate environment. Redhat offered Fedora because people stopped buying Redhat Linux. People did not buy software, and to this day still don't buy software. You have more people using for free than adding to the ecosystem, and that hurts!
Yes there are big companies using and supporting Linux. BUT add together the economies around Microsoft and I would not hesitate to use trillions of dollars. First you have Microsoft, then you have people selling software for Windows, then you have consultancies supporting Windows, then you have custom coders for Microsoft, then you have conferences, then you have trainers, etc, etc. It is an incredibly HUGE ecosystem that is profitable for everybody involved.
If you look at the latest incomes of the Open Source vendors it is down right disappointing after a decade of potential. For crying out loud Ubuntu is the result of a guy who made his money with something else and is supporting Ubuntu because he wants to have fun!
If Linux and Open Source REALLY want to beat Microsoft, then Open Source folks should STOP BEING DAMM CHEAPSKATES! I am sure everybody is capable of forking over 50 USD per year. If we use a conservative number of 1 million users world wide that would mean 50 million dollars income and that would mean a heck of a lot programmers could be hired to solve those darn user interface problems!
Do I buy and support software? Absolutely, as a matter of principle because I earn my money from software.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I don't know but, if I were a Microsoft product user, I'd be mighty peeved that some guy on the other side of the world is paying $3 while I'm paying $150 for the same exact piece of software.
Where's the fairness in that? Why the preferrential treatment? Are we rewarding criminals now?
Pffft!
Gross oversimplification. The real difficulty is what happens after one of the applications is closed. This post explains how the Windows clipboard works: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2003-September/msg00257.html
That's a bit of an odd thing to say. Applications on all OSes are developed somewhat independently of each other; that's what makes them individual applications. They aren't developed entirely independently of each other, otherwise they plain wouldn't work. They make use of each other's APIs, they talk to each other, they collaborate and depend on each other. A lot of apps on Linux tend to cooperate very well considering that they are developed pretty much all by third parties. 3rd party applications in Windows tend to be pretty bad for cooperation with each other and the OS in general... they tend to try and all compete for the user's attention in a highly uncoordinated way.
Copy and pasting from Excel into Word works fine. As does copy and pasting from OOo Calc into OOo Writer. This covers 95% of use cases. I wonder, though, how well things like Lotus 1-2-3 or Gnumeric/Win32 works when copying into Microsoft Word... I don't know, I've never tried... but I do know that a lot of the cooperation between Microsoft Office and third party applications isn't because of their solid foundation on standards, but rather because support has been hacked into the application. There may well be standards, but Microsoft in particular seem to be pretty good at diverging from even their own standards. Admittedly, clipboard is a bit of a soft spot
There is lots of session/system communication in Linux, all for different purposes and with different ideas. Many are agreed upon and collaborated with. DBUS is one.
You've fudged an awful lot of information here....
It is true that NFSv3 works this way, but it is also true that NFSv3 should only be used on trusted networks. This is nothing to do with filesystem security being at the OS level. It's true that this is the case, but that's nothing to do with the fact that being root allows you to behave as root on other computers... this is purely the way that NFS is implemented. Filesystem security should be at the OS level... that's merely how applications interact with the filesystem. Applications mediate the network access to filesystems, so if they're running as root and allow external users to access as root, it's their fault. NFSv4 fixes a lot of these flaws.
Samba/SMB/CIFS (or indeed AFS, DFS, or many of the other network filesystems) do not have this problem whatsoever. They work exactly the same as Windows File Sharing and in the case of Samba, is completely cross compatible with Windows.
I don't think it will ever be, and I think this is the idea of NFS. I don't think NFS was ever meant to be "just
Except this year, they changed how they book those sales. In the past, they would spread 1/3 of the profits out over 3yrs. This year, they changed that to booking 100% of the profit at the time of the sale. Time will tell how this pans out, but it does not look like the moves of a strong company that is comfortable in its profit potential.
In many countries it is a common business practice of giving "gifts" to the "right" people if you want to get something done. If you need a license in four months and not four years you bribe officials. Of course you don't do so in an obvious way but they reap your generosity anyway.
It's usually done through third parties that are hired and given a large operational budget.
Linux may be better for China but Microsoft money is better for some key officials.
And that folks is the way it works.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
i thought what MS is doing in China should be called "dumping". other software companies in China should be able to sue MS according to WTO rules. $3 for a license would kill any domestic or international competitors.
Whoa, Nelly! This article - and the discussion here - is rife with untested assumptions. Let's establish a bit of context here before going too far.
Microsoft beat Linux? That most certainly is how Microsoft sees the situation. But their entire ethos is of conquest, control and coercion. None of these apply to Linux. While it's true that some have used Linux as a tool to gain leverage with Microsoft, Linux as an operating system has no goal, except to be good at what it does. Unlike Microsoft, Linux is not controlled by any single actor, or even by a like-minded group of actors.
Linux doesn't fight Microsoft (though MS does fight Linux and FOSS in general). It just keeps improving for its own sake and for the sake of its users. If that has detrimental effects on Microsoft's control of the operating systems market - and it does - well, that is nothing more than a collateral benefit.
So, from Microsoft's perspective, maybe they did 'beat' Linux, but even that defeat isn't complete or permanent. When China donates PCs to its development partners, what OS does it ship? Linux. Is Red Flag dead and buried? No. Is China dependant on Microsoft for its IT infrastructure? Hardly.
What price victory? A more honest evaluation of the circumstances of China's decision to accept Microsoft at all shows that Microsoft's 'victory' may be more pyrrhic than anything. With trademark deftness, China has largely de-fanged one of the most effective and brutal corporate negotiating teams in the world. This is the corporation that managed to buy off the US government and avoid any real punishment following its conviction for abuse of monopoly powers. It's the company that has consistently and rather successfully thumbed its nose at the European Union, the largest economic entity in the world today. It has controlled standards processes, locked in countless corporations and ruthlessly dominated the supply chain world-wide.
Yet Chinese negotiators got everything they asked for. Price reductions? They pay about 10% of what other governments do per seat. Control? They not only have access to the source code, they have to right to alter it to suit their purposes.
Think about what that means to the Chinese. In economic, political and strategic terms, they've negotiated unprecedented access to an invaluable resource, and they've done it in a way that costs them next to nothing. Truth be told, Microsoft got almost nothing out of this deal. China still uses Linux whenever and wherever it wants.
A deal that would make Stallman laugh. If we think about the Four Freedoms that underlie the GPL, the same four freedoms for which Richard Stallman and the FSF have fought so desperately to support and preserve, the same freedoms that are so perfectly antithetical to everything that Microsoft stands for... these are exactly the freedoms that China has preserved in its deal with Microsoft.
Let's be honest here: Microsoft may have won the battle, but only by utterly compromising itself and its future in China. They have placed themselves in a virtually abject position vis à vis China. Happily, the Chinese know enough about loss of face to ensure that they never rub this in Gates' face.
Bottom line: This is not a Linux/Microsoft story. Linux is a bit player in this story, a Rosencrantz to Microsoft's Hamlet. The real story is how China managed to pull a classic con on one of the toughest negotiating teams in the corporate world, and how they did it so well that Microsoft keeps coming back for more.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Microsoft attempted a strategy of lowering prices for Windows/Office while pushing for anti-piracy action from the Chinese government. These efforts failed, repeatedly, and the end result according to this article is that Microsoft will sell Windows AND Office, combined for a price of $3.
If that if a victory I can't imagine what a defeat would look like. If they are going to get $3 per copy of Windows+Office Microsoft would be lucky to break even on the raw materials, packaging, and shipping. The thing is Microsoft can't afford to just break even, they have tens of thousands of employees, including many lawyers and accountants and sales people involved in pushing their products, plus the support staff for all of those employees. And for those that would say "well Microsoft is sitting on a huge war chest" this is correct, they aren't going to go out of business any time soon, but they also can't bleed money indefinitely and watch potential revenue streams dry up without their stock tanking.
It looks like their game plan in China is to sell their software at break even or a loss just to get people used to the idea of paying for it and hopefully maintain market share. I guess they could make a profit in 5-10 years assuming:
people in china get used to the idea of paying for their software AND they have the money to pay more in the future AND they are willing to do so AND a suitable alternative (desktop Linux) hasn't risen in popularity. Which to me sounds more like a pipe-dream than a game plan.
I wish Microsoft many more of these sorts of "victories" in the future. Though their shareholders may feel differently.
Yeah MS is in such deep trouble they made record profits this year.
In an inflationary economy, every year is a record. Vista and Office 2007 should have made a difference but did not. Imagine a flat line, your brain and your balls are dying but non free CPR takes six years. The game is over - without money, they can't attract the programmers and vendor "support" they need to make product, and without product they will run out of money.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But they all came back to Windows, because there are Windows input methods and word processors for Simplified and Traditional Chinese that kick the pants off of anything available for Linux. The wife doesn't even care so much for Mac OSX compared to the one for Windows. And the fonts for Simplified Chinese in Fedora are mediocre at best, and awful at worst. Looking at a Google.cn search in Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04 is hideous even to my untrained eyes -- you see many characters missing, and the characters that are there look like a mish-mash of multiple fonts.
So, if you care about this issue, this is what needs to happen.
This is one of those times where we need to recognize that the better product won. And the only thing for us to do is to make ours better.
You're absolutely right, both about the motivations and benefits of maintaining independece from Microsoft. However, I have a suspicion that to the government hierarchy in China (and equally for many corporations everywhere), free and open source software may also appear to be outside their control. It's an alien form of organization to them, one not amenable to the forms of influence to which they are accustomed. In that vein, the interests of China are not identical with the interests of the people making the decision. Microsoft may be able to offer them inducements, while the FOSS community will offer them nothing.
These days, the Chinese government is in the business of making deals with corporations; they may be betting that their power is sufficient to guarantee their interests. Given the recent phenomenon of corporations "going along to get along" in China, they may be right. Eric Raymond's remark (from the TechRepublic article) that "any 'identification' between the values of the open-source community and the repressive practices of Communism is nothing but a vicious and cynical fraud" points to a risk - China's influence on Linux might have been anything but positive, either symbolically or in practice. We may have dodged a bullet. China, on the other hand, may have lost an opportunity to address (at least in a small way) its tragic situation.
So, the reality is that Linux on the desktop is growing at 20% per annum in the commercial market which lags the personal/free market by a large margin. M$ had to cut its price to $3 just to stay competitive. That is all Linux needs, to be allowed to compete on price and performance. For years, M$ has had a free ride. That is soon stopping. Get used to it. It is doubtful that Linux will KO M$ because some will always want to pay too much or be swayed by sales campaigns , but M$ will fall into the pack with realistic prices and market shares. Remember the glory days of the Soviet Union, when every election resulted in the landslide for a single candidate of the party's choosing? Those days are gone forever in Russia and they will soon be gone for M$.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Imagine that you are ill and the doctor offers you a choice of two drugs. One is free. Another works. Which one will you take?
China is so complicated and so tragic. The control of the central government there is weakening. Much of the evil in China is a consequence of that loss of control. Recently, for example, up to 53,000 slave workers were discovered in the brick industry Shanxi province. That's 50,000 pepole in one industry in one province. The central government doesn't want this. Nor does it sanction the kidnapping and mutilation of children used as beggars, or the sale of women in the countryside or any of the many other terrible things that happen in a country encompassing over a fifth of the word's population.
What do you do if you have political power in a place like China? Do you try to further weaken the control of the central government? Or do you try to work within the system? There aren't a lot of alternatives in a system that does not permit other power bases and where capitalism appears to be in its most destructive, dynamic, and materialistic phase. This is a place where one of my first impulses on arriving in Beijing a decade ago was that the pollution was so bad that cleaning the air was more important than democracy. I can't bring myself to blanket the human beings running China with the label "evil". Some of them, I'm certain, are heroes.
The government has lost the moral authority of Communist ideology, so it's trying to leverage nationalism without letting it get out of control. China has a deep-seated sense of historical wrong, a memory of millenia when it was the only civilized place in the world, and an insecurity about the disrespect of the West that wronged it (and don't doubt that our ancestors did). China makes me very sad, but it also scares the hell out of me. If it collapses, watch out: the first half of the 20th century saw the horrors of a fragmented out-of-control China. Right now, I fear it looks at least a little bit like pre-war Germany.
Yours is a good post, but one that I disagree with.
Well, I actually would agree with you that there is less money in open source software. However, I think this indicates not a failing of open source, but of commercial development. I agree with you that the commercial software ecosystem is very vibrant, with great profit potential. But I view this as a drain on the rest of the economy. Just think about how many web startups are using a LAMP stack... would their businesses be possible in a purely commercial software world?
I'm not looking to see the software industry destroyed, or even crippled, since I hope to soon get a job developing software. I think there is money in development on demand, where developers make money for their labor in custom-tailoring software to a customer's demand. The software would be free, but of course the labor wouldn't.
Now, this kind of business won't thrive in current climates, because there is more money and easier money in commercial software. But eventually free software will dominate, because in the long term how can something be more attractive than free? Of course there is support to think of, but I don't see any inherent reason that free software should be more expensive to support.
So I think that whether we like it or not, free software is the future. And I choose to see that as a positive future, where software becomes more pervasive in our environment, more adapted to our specific needs.
There'll always be money in software development until we create machines that are smarter than us in every way.
-------
Incite and flee.
And let me say, first, that MS obviously has a very strong position in the desktop market here. Windows is at least as ubiquitous here as it is in the States. But why would it ever be any other way? MS has millions of dollars to play with, cozy/exploitative relationships with most makers of PC's here, and a huge base of GAMES to draw Chinese users in. Chinese people love their video games, and 70% of internet users here are online for games (I got that from Harper's, I think...).
Not to mention the fact that business in China is a cultural obsession here, like movies in LA or food in France. This makes Bill Gates, Richest Man on Earth, everyone's Cowboy/Doctor/Rockstar/Boyfriend, and creates a lot of goodwill towards MS products.
Anyway, Linux was never going to emerge as a majority operating system in China for the same reason that it's had problems in the US- it's not coming pre-installed on most people's systems. MS cut a deal with the PRC and, in return for givin' up the code, got broad market access. They probably had to grease wheels, too, but again, they've got the money to do it.
Chinese nerds I talk to like Linux because it (potentially) can be hardened against government intrusion, but the average Ah Q takes intrusion for granted and would rather play WOW. All the issues that get American FOSS advocates' thongs in a twist are in operation over here- pervasive censorship, domestic spying, code piracy, plutocratic monopolists upsetting markets by fiat.
What's hopeful about Linux and the OSS movement over here is the potential for the technology to circumvent all the meddling. I mean, plain ol' HTML has been incredibly disruptive to the government's media control, and technologies like Tor potentially allow any Chinese citizen to read any Taiwanese newspaper. It's had a huge impact on issues like environmental awareness, minority and gay and lesbian rights, local corruption, and development issues.
So what I'm saying is, there's actually a huge demand for Linux in China, but the technical hurdles are probably too great, and the awareness too small, for it to be more than a niche technology right now. This is coupled with the very poor state of technical education in China. While it does have first-class technical universities, many, many more schools offering computer-science degrees are simply cookbook factories, teaching students how to operate specific pieces of MS software. If desktop Linux isn't catching on in the US, it's not catching on in China for the same reasons.
The breakthrough will be a secure Ubuntu-like OS with excellent/perfect Chinese character support in the style of ABC, that's "underground" enough to convince the average guy that it's not somehow corrupted by the government. (In Beijing, many people prefer wonky-looking newspapers over slick ones, because it's a sign that they aren't controlled/funded/corrupted by the government, rightly or wrongly.)
Who knows if this combination is even possible? If it is, it will need an excellent team of designers to tune the user experience, and some serious guerrilla marketing.
it's interesting to see their old policies coming back to bite them on this one.
microsoft leveraged their monopoly to make it impossible for customers for 6 years to get anything other than windows xp on a new computer. the result? customers think that a new computer means windows xp, and are deeply suspicious of change. now there's suddenly a new operating system none of their friends have. windows xp's main advantage was always its ubiquity. vista, due to being new, does not have this.
microsoft has told the customer for years that different=difficult. now they are reaping what they have sowed.
Read the article, it's true - no point in arguing. Ninety-percent I'd say run IE etc, so much so that hardly any webbies check on other browsers. Probably about the same percentage. They teach .net and java in schools. So OS on server shizzle is still there. Server wise, yeah hosting companies run 2003, but always offer a linux alternative through a CPanel/plesk interface.
:)
Chinese language and translation tools run on windows and IE better than they do on the mac and linux, so they use it for study along side their normal courses.
My office is all mac with the exception of ubuntu server. The reaction is sometimes negative. Popular IM clients like QQ only run on PC's, unless you get the port (not as accessible). Then you get other IM's like off taobao (big online sales), thats windows only.
Users don't know what Ubuntu is unless they're in their 30's and have worked in a senior role or admin role in languages outside of ASP. Oddly enough, the north is predominantly more windows-esque than the south. Perhaps the influence of the tech savvy of Hong Kong pushing north.
Anyway as much as I hate it, having the edge or difference knowing all about OS-OS and carrying a Macbook Pro makes you unique
Also, I have to take issue with this:
So what? Why should I care what his motives are. And don't tell me that it's because the survival of Ubuntu is subject to his whims. It's open source.
I don't really care about OSS "beating" Microsoft in any financial sense. I do prefer Linux over Windows at home (for practical reasons too numerous to bother listing) and it annoys me that I have to maintain a dual-boot system, primarily as a result of the dominance of the MS Office file format. So in that sense I suppose I would like Microsoft to lose out, but only because their dominance currently prevents me from using the software I want to use, which otherwise provides all the features I need. However, there's no particular need for OSS to "beat Microsoft on the desktop" for this problem to be solved, or even for Microsoft to suffer any significant financial loss.
I will consider OSS to have succeeded on the desktop (note succeeded, not won), when I no longer feel the need to install a proprietary operating system on my home computer. That point has been getting steadily, inexorably closer throughout the decade that has passed since I discovered OSS, and the march towards it shows no sign of slowing. I therefore find your use of the past tense when discussing the "open-source era" rather perplexing.
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
"If you've done your homework and you know something fund managers don't..."
This is a joke, right? Every time there has been a stock market crash, there have been a ton of *professional* fund managers who are exposed as not knowing crap. Is it in there oh-so-brilliant plan to let the value of their fund fall by 10 or 20% (or more)? Please, just think a little about it.
sorry, but that's capitalism for you. It promotes innovation by rewarding the first ones to market, and then as manufacturing processes become more efficient and economies of scale kick in, commoditize the technology so that others may be able to innovate upon them and the cycle starts again.
Linux is simply the natural succesor of MS-DOS, which got so popular because it was a cheap OS to put into cheap PCs at a time where licensing UNIX would've costed you more than the hardware itself. And just like we went from UNIX to MS-DOS and Windows, we shall go from them to Linux, for precisely the same reasons. Sure, some companies may die along the way, but others are already profiting from the new, service-oriented market that's growing with the commodization of the Operating System.
don't like it? tough luck. It began, in fact, with the worldwide, widespread piracy of Windows (and Office, Photoshop et al), it's just that now it's being replaced by a legal alternative, and I doubt that there have been more Linux companies dying due to "cheapskates" than Windows-related ones dying due to piracy of their products. Even better, since the source is completely open, people who can't afford it are free, even encouraged, to help in other ways such as coding new features or making translations, whereas in the Windows world, if you don't have a wallet you're practically useless to the ecosystem at large.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.