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Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source
Attila Dimedici writes "Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows open source if they want to stay in business. He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams."
Maybe this guy has different stats, but last I heard, Microsoft made something like 1/3 of their revenue from Windows and 1/3 from Office. It's not like they don't make any money from Windows.
Windows Market Share Climbing
Windows 7 market share is climbing. From your linked article:
Although the beta of Windows 7 quickly grabbed one-tenth of 1% of the operating system market share last month, Microsoft Corp.'s operating system continued its downward trend...
You can't have a period of substantial increase for alternative OSs without that being indicative of something critical: true choice. If the alternatives are indeed practically viable, then the OS market has reached a tipping point. Expect all hell to break loose.
"Windows market share as of Dec. 1 is 89.6 percent."
"Meanwhile, Mac OS X posted its largest gain in two years, with 8.9 percent market share at the end of November."
"On the browser side, Internet Explorer's market share dropped below 70 percent to 69.8 percent for the first time in more than a decade. IE slid 1.5 percentage points in November, totaling a 5.8 percent market share loss for 2008, according to Net Applications."
From: http://www.cio.com/article/467916/Microsoft_Market_Share_Slips_Pressure_s_On_for_Windows_and_IE_
The year of the telephone is 1884.
You got the first long distance call, and you got the biggest change in momentum in uptake as AT&T was gobbled up by American Bell.
The year of the light bulb is 1918.
World War I ended. All those factories that had been set up were then used to deliver electricity to surrounding neighborhoods. It was the clear turning point in the availability of electricity for the masses.
The year of the internet is, sadly, 1993.
Sparc is dieing.
Hmmm, I thought they made chips on wafers, not dies.
Of course, it doesn't matter since Sparc is dying.
Advice: on VPS providers
As another poster already pointed out, this isnt really true. Windows NT booted on other architectures, but never really provided working systems on them for most purposes. This was a consequence of the unfree characteristics of the Windows ecosystem - the vast majority of the assortment of third party tools that need to be added to Windows to actually do most things never ported over to NT on other archs. The companies that made them had no motivation to allocate resources to port them, because the markets were not large enough, and the markets never grew because the apps werent ported. If you were lucky enough to have an Alpha machine at the time, for instance, you could boot NT on it and run a mean game of solitaire, but precious little more. MS tried to solve this with an emulator, but this worsened the problem - now you could boot NT and run an app, but once you started the app the emulated performance was comparable to an x86 machine you could have gotten at a fraction of the price, while the app makers were even less motivated to make a proper port because they could just tell you to use the emulator.
THIS is one huge advantage a Free OS with Free ecosystem has - the manufacturer doesnt have to allocate resources to port to new and promising architectures. Enthusiasts who use the apps can pitch in unbidden and do it themselves. This allows a promising new arch a chance to grow to critical mass without getting caught in an unsolvable chicken and egg problem.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.