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Linux's Role In Microsoft's Decline
nerdyH writes "As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Recently, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux's role in Microsoft's misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: 'Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.'"
Also, if you look at the trend in Microsoft Windows "market share" estimated by people like Net Applications, you can see that the decline of Windows started long before the housing bubble deflated. They were still being rated at 96% of the market in 2004 and 2005 and have been in what looks like continuous decline ever since. Granted, it's not much of a decline yet, only 7% or so according to Net Applications, but it does serve as evidence that Microsoft's troubles did not start with the economic crisis, the economic crisis may have compounded their existing troubles though.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Well, I run Linux exclusively, on my desktop at home and my laptop for work. This is probably not the best forum to declare that nobody is using Linux on the desktop.
Also, installing applications and dealing with dependencies are absolutely among Linux's strongest features over Windows, and always have been.
Yes, Linux marketed as a distro can do better. The good thing is that very soon, we'll have KDE with a business friendly license. What I would like Linux programmers to do is to get their act together and solve problems that continue to plague the Linux ecosystem.
These come to mind:
1: Multimedia. There are so many back-ends to choose from, each with problems of their own. The associated front-ends are even worse both in functionality and bloat.
2: Polish. It seams that by default, Linux distros are less polished by default. In fact, I can say they are ugly by default. This does not help.
3: Bloat. KDE is wonderful but suffers from bloat. GNOME is kind of OK, but it's interface looks ancient and lacks the functionality of modern systems.
My 2 cents.
Microsoft Revenue/Growth
Year Revenue %Growth
2005 39,788 -
2006 44,282 11%
2007 51,122 15%
2008 60,420 18%
Red Hat Revenue/Growth
Year Revenue %Growth
2005 196 -
2006 278 41%
2007 400 43%
2008 523 30%
Red Hat is growing much faster than Microsoft, but Microsoft has 115x more sales.
Windows 95 was not MS's first "serious entry into the OS market".
MS-DOS was a very "serious entry" into the OS market, as was windows 3.0, 3.1, and NT. In fact, I still support an old NT 4 server that predates the release of Windows 95.
Please don't let your inexperience confuse you. Millions of offices ran on Novell, DOS, Lotus, and Wordperfect long before Windows 95 came along.
Sure those early operating systems weren't anything compared to the UNIX workstations of the day, but neither were the computers they were running on.
Also, you don't seem to realize that there is nothing that says that an OS has to have certain features to be a good OS.
MS-DOS was a very good OS for standalone workstations where only one user was going to be interacting with the system and only running one application. The early PC's were not really capable of much more anyway, so DOS did what it was intended to do, and did it well enough at the time.
Even though I hate to admit it, Microsoft has brought far more to the industry than you give it credit for. I wish that someone had provided some viable competition all these years to force Microsoft to innovate a bit more, but they pushed the industry fairly well for a monopoly. They didn't really have to, they could have stretched their releases apart by years more than they did and made even more money. Upgrades have never been a big money maker for MS, it's bundling with new pc's they depend upon anyway when people are replacing their computers every couple of years.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
You do realize that the iPod and iPhone are embedded devices, right?