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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?"
Namely, that with a closed source OS, vendors are being paid by software companies to install reams and reams of crapware on your system. When (eg) Dell installs Linux, they lose that revenue, which on a $200 unit, is a significant portion.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
you're being too pedantic, the styling of Moore's law can be applied to progress of most anything, (from the Ford model A to the Ford Mustang for example, not just transisters)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's not price that cripples Microsoft in the mobile market, it's flexibility. As anyone who's used a Pocket PC or Windows CE device knows, it's the chained to the desktop mentality that's killing them.
The inability (well, ok, extreme difficulty in) to skin/specialize the user interface is going to hurt them. Microsoft appears to be mentally permanently stuck in one-size-fits-all land. 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.
The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.
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.
There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.
Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
For a portable email, quick document, travel internet browser this $400 "piece of crap" is the perfect solution in a hostile environment. I won't let my 11 year old touch the Vaio with my business on it, but when traveling in the car and checking hotels, he can do this easily with this little gadget. When dropped (it is actually more durable than the Vaio) and broken, I am only out a few hundrend and am not stuck with a multi thousand dollar pile of junk. I have no problem sending this "piece of crap" with my kid to school for a project. Would you send a $3000 Vaio with your 11 year old son?
Everex has now come out with the Cloudbook (Linux) at WalMart so, now it is being exposed to the masses. The revolution is starting!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
MS is using all its weight in anticipation of the problem. The new and upcoming Eee 900 for example, has been announced by Asus France as a Windows only version.
http://www.blogeee.net/2008/03/06/le-eeepc-900-uniquement-avec-windows-xp-dapres-asus-france/
The good news is that the French customer is very well protected and forcing a software with a PC down their throat is illegal. So essentially, what will happen is thousands of geeks demanding reimbursement of the XP licenses. That oughta hit Asus really hard, and teach them a good lesson.
I read that Asus Germany announced a similar "forced sale", but can't seem to find the article.
Res publica non dominetur
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.
A-Bomb
You're impugning the credibility of Wikipedia as a way of dismissing anything that contradicts your argument, rather than dealing with the matter head on. That's intellectually dishonest, and a lazy, stupid way to argue.
Also, if you'd bothered to look at the article, you'd find that the quote provides a citation, and that citation points to a PDF file of the article in which Moore made the statement in question:
ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf
In short, you lose on both style and substance.
Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated
I think you meant "perceived" wisdom. But in fact, I've installed Linux on several friend's PCs who had never used a computer before (Mandriva 8 IIRC). None of them have had any trouble whatever using it. In fact, I get fewer "how do I" phone calls from them with Linux/KDE than I did when their new machines were running Windows.
Gnu/Linux/KDE (and most likely Gnome as well, although since I haven't used it I can't say) is easier to use than Windows for a variety of reasons, the first being that stuff is put in logical places (at least with Suse and Mandriva) as opposed to Microsoft's way of putting stuff any old place. At least that's what it seems like; I can't see the logic of where Windows' stuff goes at all.
So please stop spreading this this FUD. It's simply not true. Windows is NOT easier to use than Linux.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
As long as Microsoft Office runs on Windows and doesn't run on Linux, Microsoft will be able to compete.
Maybe in ten years that won't be true. After all, I didn't really expect Word to overtake WordPerfect and other alternatives in the market the way it did back in the 90's... but even in that case, it's because something has happened to Office, not because of Moore's Law.
But it's starting to become more than $200. With the hardware requirements of Vista, you have to buy a much more expensive computer, just to get the same usability. I bought a laptop that runs Linux. It cost me $500. To get a machine that runs Vista just as well, I'm looking at spending $1000, at least.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.
The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.
With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.
That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.
Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.
I still don't know why you make such a big deal about Open Source. Having Free and Open Standards are far more important then having the source code available. I don't care if the Source for MS. Word is released I much rather have Free and Open specification on how the .DOC format works and what changes are in it over each version. So if I felt like it I could write my Own 100% compatable version. Vs having source code without a nice open spec. Where I need to trace threw millions of lines of funky code which has many different thought processes of each developer. Altering someone elses code is expensive, for many cases it may be better to write your own version, to meet the specification.
I use to be be a diehard Free Software avocate... Over time Free software has disapointed me, with dealling with with people who have many different motives Bragging rights, Software Purity, Freedome, etc... vs. dealing with a company who has one motive... To make money.
In a hundred years from now do you think any software stands a chance in hell? Computers and software as you know it today will be so antiquated You Newest and Fanciest Computer Today in a hundred years will be like those Machanical Adding Machienes 100 years ago. If not true AI at least good enough to get and alter data when you need it will probably just a thought away, stored in a spec imbedded in your earwax.
All this fuss about priority and open source software may be just a bit footnote in some history book
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
a movement. Revolution implies you end up where you started.
I am running a 289 dollar "piece of crap" desktop. I have been 4 four years. It plays WoW and does general work just fine... stupid computer, I promised i wouldn't by another one until it broke. I gave it a year.grrr.
Maybe I should install Vista, that would break it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell?
Sure. Why would you think proprietary software would "go away"?
It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.
Agreed. But these two points within your paragraph are non-sequitur. ("Proprietary Sotware" != "Operating System)
What's happening in software is the same thing that happens to any marketplace that gets commoditized... the base price of the commodity (EG: Operating System) drops to a very low level based on the cost of production and distribution. But value added can increase that price sharply.
A tomato is quite cheap. Tomatoes made into salads and served on attractive plates by sexy waitresses in fancy restaurants are not cheap. The value added is in the air of the restaurant, the clean plate, the sexy waitress, and the tasty salad.
Grocery store tomato is analogous to OSS software.
Restaurant is analogous to proprietary software.
It's been happening in marketplaces for a long, long, LONG time.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I do not believe there is anything malicious that has caused this inefficiency to rise. The cost of developing software means that slow and bloaty is what we end up producing as software engineers. It just makes more sense economically.
I hope that in the future, with capped per-core CPU speeds, we will see a renaissance in tight programming. Perhaps new languages will spring up that offer the efficiency of C++, but with the coding efficiency of ECMAScript4 or even C#. D is one such language, and there may be many more to come.
We may also see much smarter compilers built on ideas like LLVM that will offer statically compiled languages some of the benefits of dynamically compiled VM code, just as taking advantage of specific architectures, and extensive inter-process analysis of code.
With many software problems becoming better understood, we could see much more extensive system libraries that offer the same features as say the .net environment. Cocoa and QT4 are already heading in this direction, with a really feature rich set of libraries, but also with the eye on cutting down memory usage and CPU cycles. In the future, we may see much more optimized shared library usage for system-level applications. This will lead to a snappier user experience. We won't need to have 100s of megs of shared libraries duplicating so much across so many apps.
I think massive parallelism in user applications will never happen without a complete rethink from the OS up, or a new application development paradigm. Furthermore, most developers simply aren't up to writing thread-safe code - it's very hard to get right, and often you don't gain that much for standard applications. That's because of the types of problems being solved in typical applications. We're having a hard enough time writing single threaded apps regardless.
I admire the managed code empire that M$ has built into vista, but ultimately we may want better performance than this heavy-weight approach can offer. Both OS X and KDE are staying away from the managed code "heaven" for the time being. I believe that apple will find a way to make future versions of Objective-C have most of the benefits that managed code can offer, but also with extremely tight machine code.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's excellent for a business environment too- which is how I use mine. It has entirely replaced a "conventional" laptop. It handles doing briefings and the usual business crap with ease and aplomb. There's nothing better for working on tight airline seats or airline terminal couches and tables. It's ultra-quick boot time is fantastic for taking quick notes in meetings or showing documents to others. It's so small it can be easily passed around a table in one hand or alternately it easily hooks up to projectors so lots of people can view at the same time. As a daily user of an eeepc I really don't think this distinction of the eeepc not being "real" is just a red herring created by other laptop makers.
I don't know where you live, but my local school district is hard-pressed enough for money that 0.003% (if it's even that low) is unacceptable to give up. That same money is *needed* elsewhere.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Microsoft can of course alter it's prices for any of these devices if it loses enough market share...
There is also the issue of people who have licenced windows in the past and thrown away those machines. I expect to see consumer issues if consumers can't transfer those lic. Esp., in Europe with the regulators having MSFT in their sights.
With only 1 Billion PCS in a world of nearly 6 Billion, I still feel the world needs a $25 computer.
http://www.hawknest.com/