Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy

Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"

Comments

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[node 3]

Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.

It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot. Moore's Law is strongly correlated with price. For about the same price, you can double the number of transistors every 18-24 months, *or* you can keep the same amount of transistors for less cost, or some combination thereof.

In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...

Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs

[Selfbain]

If you have $3000 to blow on a laptop then you're not the target market for the Eee in the first place making your comment irrelevant.

I think they don't

[alx5000]

I don't think ordinary users notice. When I talk to my non-tech-savvy friends, they usually ask me if this or that price is right for a given computer, mostly without taking into cosideration its characteristics (Once a girl I know asked me if a 300 price tag for a laptop could be right, and when I asked for specs, she only replied "Acer"). Besides, we've got big PC stores here (like PC City) whose prices can be 50% more expensive than those you find in smaller, franchised, specialized shops, and they still sell the most.

So no, ordinary users will judge the price based on how awesome the salesman tells them it is (and, of course, if it doesn't come with Windows, don't bother calling it a PC, please, it just confuses them).

Re:Flexibility Not Price

[Cro Magnon]

And to be fair, it would be really hard to let people customize as deeply as they need to without letting them muck with the deep details of your OS.

Only because of how MS made its OS. Some OS's *cough*Linux*cough*BSD*cough* let you choose among dozens of different UI's without messing with the kernel.

Actually, Moores' law is what keeps MS afloat

[earthforce_1]

If it wasn't for Moore's law, Linux would have long since caught up with them. Imagine if hardware hit a wall, and technology couldn't advance beyond say what existed in 2000 or 2005. Then MS couldn't sell a more complex OS or office suite, and customers would be "stuck" with Win 2000 XP. There would be security patches or hard tuned optimizations to make it a bit faster, but that would be it. They couldn't justify the release an expensive major update for existing customers. Users would dead end at office 2000 or office 2003, since there would be no incentive to update. Office 2007 and/or Vista would not run at all, or would run impossibly slow on such machines.

Eventually, Open Office and Linux would catch and match them feature for feature, so new customers would have no incentive to go with the proprietary solution, since their protocols would eventually be reverse engineered bug for bug, feature for feature, driver for driver. The only way MS keeps Linux at bay is by releasing new feature laden stuff that takes advantage of new, updated hardware.

My prediction: The end of Moore's law will herald the end of Microsoft.

Re:Slashdot

[gQuigs]

100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.

The school district I grew up at pays MS $400,000 every year for the software assurance program (and then $75,000 to Symantec to secure it). The total budget is about 150 Million. This can not be sustained.

Windows can not compete with Linux. That's why they use lock-in, FUD, etc.

Familiarity isn't worth that much

[Dr. Manhattan]

Familiarity is worth $200 to a lot of people.

A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.

There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.

Re:Pertains to density at a given price

[Evanisincontrol]

Here's a choice quote from the page you gave: "Steven Moore was a well known ultra-Zionist that was known to make romantic passes at goats."

The text you describe appears nowhere in the article for Moore's Law. This should come as no surprise, since Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, not Steven Moore.

I figured that would have at least gone to the trouble to vandalize the article yourself and add in such garbage. However, a quick look at the page's history shows that you did not even go to the trouble to do that. (not that it matters; vandalism on Wikipedia is typically reverted in under a minute.)

Congratulations, you are not only a liar, but you are also lazy. Please take your poorly made strawman arguments elsewhere.

Re:If need be, they'll give windows away

[whoever57]

Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.

MS could afford to give away the OS, if they chose. The real profit comes from Office -- so what are those minicomputer users going to use? As you rightly point out, MS is not just going to give up. MS has lots of cash which can be used to oompete (and I am sure that Google wants the Yahoo deal to go through because this removes all of MS's cash, which will hinder MS's future freedom of action).

In the past, MS has effectively given away software -- in the form of licenses that could be used on two computers: so that a license bought for a work machine could be taken home and used on the home machine.

Microsoft has two advantages over Linux: familiarity and applications. Recent Linux distributions are as easy, if not easier to use than Windows, but many applications (such as iTunes) are simply not available on Linux. Both of these advantages can be swept away if Linux gains a significant foothold in the desktop market.

I just wish that Apple would see that helping Linux would also help Apple. Breaking MS's dominance is the most important goal and Linux can help that to happen.

Re:Yes? Is this a question?

[CastrTroy]

You shouldn't need 2GB to do those things though. That was the entire point of my post. You can do most things on Linux with 1/4 of the resources that Vista takes. If the next windows takes the same approach, and requires that you have 6 GB of RAM for a 3D desktop while playing mp3s, then Linux will just seem that much more attractive. My Linux laptop has 512 MB of RAM, and i've never felt like I needed more memory. Granted, I don't do video editing or editing of 80 MegaPixel images, but most people don't do that kind of thing anyway.

Yes and No

[istartedi]

This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".

At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".

In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?

100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".

Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".