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Motley Fool on Microsoft vs. Linux
Simon Janes writes "In a two part article series, Rob Landly (aka TMF_Oak) discusses Network Effects and how they make a product more valuable to users. Rob continues his series the next day with a discussion of Microsoft vs. Linux. This is excellent 'outside of the industry' press for Linux because 'Fools' are people like nurses, teachers, accountatnts and retirees who are not normally exposed to this."
- stupid
- commercial
- server
- business server
- goes wrong
I could ask similar questions about the part I didn't quote, too, as in "win", "apps", "win apps", and "non-commericial use". (Note that "win" as you used it is a nice example of a single-word oxymoron.)The fear of taking responsibility for one's own choices, and for solving one's own problems, has reached epidemic status in our litigious society. It's a wonder anything ever gets done at all with so many cowards and crybabies running to their licences and lawyers every day.
> 2. Most people who are not STUPID want their business servers to run an OS that is COMMERICAL so someone is liable if something ever goes wrong!
So, you think you can actually sue Microsoft, Sun, or ANY other software vendor when their software crashes and screws up your business? Have you ever bothered to read the licences for this software? They specifically state the manufacturer is NOT liable for any losses that might occur when the software fails. Have you ever heard of such a case? They simply do not happen, because of the licences. If I had someone working under me who proposed using any software because we could sue if something went wrong, I would consider firing them, because they would clearly be ignorant and incapable.
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
Check the stock price...MS is going where that stock is going so until it heads south they are not in trouble. MS is a corporation where general public opinion doesn't matter that much and technical opinion matters even less. What really effects their bottom line is corporate and financial market optinion. They don't seem to even see the cracks in the empire yet. Heck, I bet that all the pundits predicting their demise are buying stock right now.
All things do come to an end but I don't think that MS is going anywhere soon. There is still one tactic that they have not tried yet: making high quality, inexpensive software. MS could do it. They do have a lot of smart people working there. Their products lack quality often due to unreasonable deadlines and impossible requirements. I don't blame the programmers. I blame the managers and higher ups.
What if MS decided to give all those softies a chance to do things right?
-- soldack
Microsoft probably won't want to try to conquer Linux. Sure they have the money and the influence, but Linux, to the DoJ and friends, embodies anti-Microsoft-monoply, and if Microsoft starts messing with Linux, DoJ will jump on them. Microsoft knows this.
GNOME and KDE have made significant strides on making Linux a contender in the desktop environment. In some ways Linux has already overtaken Windows:
I'm sure I missed a few. Sure, Win has its advantages. But they are probably not going to stay for long.
Ken
"It's only a matter of time, and everybody (ie., people other than slashdotters, tech-junkies, and other members of their species ;-) ) will be aware of the defiencies of MS products and the availability of better, cheaper alternatives."
Interestingly this is exactly how the author of the article described FUD: just wait and everything will get better!
The way I see it is that OSS works for software commodities, that is software that has been around long enough to loose its initial attractiveness. Once this attractiveness is lost people are no longer willing to pay enormous amounts of money for it.
Categories of software that can be classified as such are operating systems, word-processors, spreadsheets and so on. Interestingly this also applies to serverside stuff: mail servers, ftp servers, webservers and even database servers.
Companies selling software in the above list all use the same tactic: they somehow add value to the default functionality of the product thus making it special: ms bundles all sorts of stuff with their OS (which is still dos), they also bundle all their office stuff in one integrated package which in its turn mixes very well with the before mentioned OS. IBM and Oracle add management tools to their databases. Webservers are made attractive by offering management tools and integrating it with other stuff. The same applies to mailservers and ftp servers.
OSS is moving into new territories. The desktop, ms greatest added value to their OS, is becoming a commodity. So OSS will take over that too. MS has long realized this and has started to integrate all sorts of stuff in their OS. So far this tactic is working very well since the most used argument not to migrate to linux (on the desktop) is that windows applications just integrate better and are more feature rich. In due time this tactic will no longer work since OSS can provide users with the same level of integration (KDE) and functionality (many companies are working on or pondering linux version of their products).
What I hope I showed with this is that OSS is not suitable for all software, only the commodity software. Luckily, increasingly more software falls in that category.
Jilles
I wish people would use scare quotes every time they used "desktop environment" with the restrictive and dedicated sense of that computing environment used by people who don't really know anything at all about computers and who don't want to, as opposed to the more intuitive and generic use in which it means "the set-up on people's personal computers", which obviously isn't what you meant even though it's what you said. It's as strange to many of us as using the term "personal computer" to mean "Intel-based IBM PC using whatever Microsoft wants you to use" rather than the more intuitive and generic "computer used by a particular person".
Sometimes it's really as though the Linux people were speaking Unix with a Microsoft accent. Be very afraid. That's how they want you to speak, and thus, to think. :-(
Not everyone derives their working vocabulary from the insidious Microsoft propaganda virus, you know--especially in this forum of all places. The whole idea of controlling the word-choice in order to control the implicit agenda and by entension, the entire world view is surely some Orwellian nightmare invented by somebody's marketing department trying to create tacit corporate branding on innocuous, general-purpose words. It's like the pro-life/pro-choice spin. Or the PC police (please take that in multiple senses) all over again trying to weed out choices that have a message they don't like.
Nothing you list there is inherent to the Linux kernel, nor even to any of the dizzying panoply of Linux-based operating systems that use some flavor of the same. I certainly don't see how any of these GUI toys really have anything to do with Linuces in particular rather than any of the myriad other Unix systems running X11.The only thing that seems to distinguish itself is the price-point criterion, but it's unclear how important that truly is. First off, the Linux-based family of operating systems are hardly the only free OSes around. But more important, really, is that the price for even costly OSes continues to go down. So I can't see that, even if it were one today, this would long remain that distinguishing a factor. For many situations, a two-digit dollar amount is hardly enough to notice compared to all the other factors. It just gets lost in the noise.