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Microsoft May Be Targeting the Ubuntu Desktop
mjasay writes "Microsoft is advertising for a new director of open source strategy, but this one has a specific purpose: fight the Linux desktop. 'The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.' For a variety of reasons, this move is almost certainly targeted at Ubuntu Linux's desktop success. With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
Reader christian.einfeldt notes Microsoft's acknowledgment of the FOSS threat to their business model within SEC filings, and suggests that this job posting could instead be about maintaining Internet Explorer's market share lead against Firefox.
Yeah but if the growth goes exponential, it could be bad news for Redmond in a short amount of time. With other big vendors starting to use Ubuntu on their equipment (see HP and Dell), Microsoft had better be careful.
Personally, I think in the next 5-10 years, the market is going to go through a big equalization. Microsoft will still be important but not the huge Monopoly like they are now. The current recession is a good way to get the ball rolling on that. A lot of places are interested in switching to Linux-based OSes, but they don't want to deal with the costs associated and their current Windows stuff works.
But with Vista and Windows 7 being lackluster, it makes good business sense to start looking at migrating to other solutions. Linux is really the only other game in town. You can't "upgrade" to Mac OS X like you can upgrade any machine to Ubuntu and have it just work. And Ubuntu has made the GNU and Linux systems easy to use for anyone from Grandma to business drones.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
Mac OS X doesn't run natively on all PCs, so Microsoft doesn't have anything to be afraid of. Plus Microsoft has software already developed for the Mac, so they could still make money even if Macs dominate PC sales.
Microsoft doesn't have that with Ubuntu, not only does it run on the same hardware as Windows, but it's being offered as an alternative to Windows by a major player in the PC market.
That Ubuntu is not only well supported, but secure...something they themselves have not been able to manage.
A friend is bringing his system over today for me to install Ubuntu on. Why? Because he is just sick to death of the malware.
You know what? Sick to death is one thing, but sick to death with a good alternative...Microsoft can't have that now, can they?
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
If Microsoft would put half the effort into R&D that they put into "owning" the market they would crush everyone. I cannot believe that a company with their resources cannot come up with great new ideas in computing. They are being threatened by a bunch of "kids in their moms basements?" (I know that is BS) Really? If that is true then it is time for them to move aside.
All points of time and space are connected.
:)
But seriously, I installed Ubuntu last night. I've been a diehard RHEL/CentOS user for years. It just plain worked out of the box for me on a relatively new laptop. It found the Wifi,sound, my bluetooth mouse, asked me if I wanted the "non free" binary accelerated Radeon X1600 video driver, etc. Pretty slick.
I realize that I'm not a typical clueless windows user, but I think this is downright easy to migrate to for a Windows user, especially when Firefox 3.x and Openoffice are bundled along with it. That's enough to satisfy a huge swath of userbase and it's completely free. The entire install only took about 10 minutes too.
Kudos to the Ubuntu team.
Microsoft views Ubuntu migration as one way. Once someone starts using Ubuntu, chances are they'll never buy Windows again.
This is because Linux can only get better. The idea behind open source is that quality never digresses, because if something sucks, it just gets changed or forked. So, the evolution of Linux is one way. It will always be better and better. This means it's users will always be more and more. It may be slow at times, but it's inevitable. Microsoft is beginning to realize that Linux's market share will always be increasing, and eventually that share will be larger than theirs.
I think they can fight all they want, but unless they can figure out a way to nullify the GPL, the progress will continue.
I think you're partially correct in your statement. They *do* put a LOT of money into research, and do actually grind out some interesting ideas, prototypes, etc. Where they seem to be dropping the ball is turning those ideas into marketable, usable commercial products.
Microsoft has been actively fighting FLOSS since at least 1998. Just read Halloween documents or internal documents regarding EDGI group from Iowa case (dated 2002 IIRC) with ist infamous "under NO circumstances lose to Linux" quote.
You may also read Bill Gates' concernes about how they can cripple ACPI so Linux won't be able to use it (they have made their own DSDT compiler which allows for much more errors than industry-standard intel compiler Linux uses).
They were afraid back then and fought tooth and nails, they continue to do it now. And if you read the documents I mention, you'll see that they have understood that the relative success of Linux on servers was due to open standards. What we have now is that main reasons which hinder Linux' adoption has nothing to do with Linux itself. Office formats, Exchange, DirectX, ActiveX -- all of the above are closed standards and technologies not to mention crippled HTML. Combine that with iron grip on OEM's and you'll get some more reasons for relatively slow growth.
Ultra-cheap netbooks and falling hardware prices have changed the landscape though. Now MS isn't able to threat OEM's with raising per-CPU lincense costs if they sell something else pre-installed. They have prolonged XP's live and give it away for a bargain price instead. They will be able to maintain their grip for some time but this time they'll have to lower the prices. Sure, they remain profitable as all they sell is hot air, but they'll raise much less money than expected.
Face it, most (by far) Americans are not going to fiddle with Linux, even if they're told it's free and superior, merely because they don't want to relearn anything that was hard enough to learn the first time, and they just want to use whatever is on their computer (Windows).
Microsoft's problems start when
- Windows is not what is on people's computer by default
- People click on the firefox icon, notice that it firefox works just like on windows, and their wlan works. And there is nothing else they need to care about.
Basic consumer desktop is a commodity and the "added value" microsoft is providing is meaningless.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I cannot believe that a company with [Microsoft's] resources cannot come up with great new ideas in computing.
Microsoft employees come up with all sorts of new ideas, but the company they work for consistently fails to execute.
I sometimes wonder if it's because the smartest people (those who have the luxury of ethics) usually choose to work elsewhere, and if they don't, their brilliance is stifled by the fools around (and especially above) them.
I think Microsoft will make an intriguing case study for years to come.
http://outcampaign.org/
Why is everyone assuming that Microsoft can do only one thing at a time? Microsoft is a damned big company and, you know what? They can do multiple things at once.
Right now, Microsoft's operating system units are focusing their energies on overcoming the bad press from Vista (Mojave Experiment), shunting the effectiveness of the Mac v. PC ads, and putting oil in the hype machine for the release Windows 6.1 --- err 7. The fact that Microsoft is hiring a single guy -- ONE GUY -- to look the open source competition stuff, is hardly "ditching what is most likely one of the biggest competitors".
Fact is, Microsoft is looking at ALL their competitors, which is *exactly* what they should be doing. Linux might not be a Desktop threat today. What about in 5 years? What about 10? Microsoft is smart enough to think that far ahead.
The
Sorry, your analogy falls down. When you install an operating system ON YOUR COMPUTER, your friends are still allowed to borrow it and check their e-mail. You can even make user accounts for them if you so desire.
Hmmm ... If you were around in the 1980s, you might know that there were a lot of systems that were sold with builtin limits to the number of accounts and/or simultaneous logins allowed. This was true of the Sys/V unix systems, for example. The OEMs would charge you a significant fee for an "unlimited logins" version of the system, and one of the things that got a lot of us really annoyed was that what you got for this extra charge was a change in a single byte somewhere in some system file. In a few releases, the position and value of this byte was published, so one could write a program to change its value. It was sorta like the reports from the 70s about features in IBM hardware that were enabled by cutting a jumper on a circuit board, but it could cost you a lot of money to hire a CS guy to come in and cut that jumper.
Anyway, this sort of silly programmed-in "Pay us to change the byte that enables this feature" limitation was likely one of the things that killed off Sys/V and several other systems. The *BSD and linux systems never did this to you.
It's possible that I may have contributed in a minor way to ending this practice in the unix/linux world. Due to problems with diagnosing login problems (typically caused by the insanity of modems and other comm hardware), I wrote a program that functioned like the getty(1) program, but it had lots and lots of debug features. Its purpose was to document in detail what happened during a login attempt, so that I could diagnose and (usually) fix the problems. It was a drop-in replacement for getty, and I got lots of nice email from people who downloaded it. In several mailing-list discussions of the topic, I explained that I hadn't implemented the usual login limits for the simple reason that I didn't know where the limit was stored. I commented that if the folks at AT&T and various OEMs didn't like the fact that my getty clone defeated their login limit, they should just reply to this message and tell me where the limit was stored. I'd then add it to a feature to my program.
For some reason, they never replied to my invitation. Perhaps they figured out that if they did that, then everyone (on the list at least) would know how to defeat the login limit. And, of course, I'd implement it as I did other features, via an explicit command-line or config-file option, which users could change as they liked.
Anyway, eventually this "feature" was dropped from Sys/V, and it seems to have also disappeared from MS Windows (or maybe I just haven't heard about it biting anyone lately). Something convinced the proprietary guys that this was a bad idea.
But back then, it was entirely likely that you couldn't give your friends logins to your system, or if you did, they might not be able to log in until you first logged out. I had this problem in a lot of situtations, where I was trying to diagnose a remote system's problems, but I couldn't log in because the system had hit its login limit. So we had to have someone at the remote site walk over and try to log someone out, or if that didn't work, they could reboot it. But if they did a reboot, the problem would go away, killing our attempts to diagnose it and fix it.
There's a long history of vendors doing things that make life difficult for their customers, all in an attempt to get customers to pay more for permission to use the computer for what they'd bought it for. Blocking multi-user access is just one of the more annoying such things.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.