There's a mighty big elephant in your living room that you're ignoring.
Yes: Microsoft could cheat, and I have little doubt they will try.
What's your point ? As I keep trying to point out, and you keep ignoring, to the vast majority of Microsoft's customers, *their software isn't expensive*.
What you refuse to understand is this: when a normal computer with all the software trimmings costs a hundred dollars, how much do you think Microsoft will make from it? And will that be enough to continue feeding a $50 billion/year monster? Of course not. Microsoft is due for a massive shrink.
This is a very, very different argument. You've gone from "people are paying Microsoft $1000 for Windows and Office" to "Microsoft are making lots of money" (with the clear implication that you think it's "too much").
No, you have missed the point. It is completely irrelevant whether people can or cannot get Windows and Office for list price. Microsoft cannot sustain a $50 billion/year business unless it is getting roughly $100 to $200 dollars a year per customer, on the average. (Business customers pay the bulk of this, of course.) Understand?
In a world where ultra cheap computers are normal, Microsoft will not be getting anywhere near $100 per customer per year, not when excellent, featureful, reliable software is available for free. Conclusion: while Microsoft may never completely disappear, the company is due for a massive shrink.
We've been told to "count on it" for nearly a decade now. I won't be holding my breath. The $100 PC running FOSS software isn't going to take over the business desktop any time soon and is only marginally more likely to be successful on the home computing desktop.
*amused* We will find out, won't we? The laws of economics are inexorable: reasonable quality + low price = winner. I will say to you what Toyota is saying to Detroit: Sayonara!
1. As previously noted, no-one who cares pays full price for Microsoft's software.
Irrelevant. Microsoft's revenues are $50 billion per year, which means that plenty of people are paying plenty. These revenues will shrink to nearly nothing in the world of $100 computers running very high quality free software. And this world is coming -- count on it.
School districts are full of politics and "resistance" and very little money. (as shown by the fact that this "project" took them 10 years to implement)
Ten years, yes, but the guy in Kamloops was a pioneer. Cloning the Kamloops system (hardware, software, and humanware) should take far, far less time.
Exactly. Reasonable quality + rock bottom price = winner. Rugged, reliable $100 machines of all kinds will take over, leaving little room for Microsoft's $800 software bundle.
"FOSS is free only if your time is worth nothing."
You haven't tried Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, the hottest Linux distro, have you? A hostile reviewer like yourself may find some flaws to carp about, but these flaws are shrinking year by year. Free software is growing up -- fast. At some point, Linux will be more than good enough for 99% of all computer users. When that happens, Microsoft will become largely irrelevant.
The actual answer, of course, is that no consumer is spending $1000 on Windows and Office _today_
That's why I said $500 - $1000. At retail prices, Windows Vista Ultimate plus Office 2007 can easily cost $800.
For the home market, Microsoft will happily sell Windows and Office for a dollar if that's what it takes. In the business market, up-front software cost (outside of specialised, niche programs) is an insignificantly small part of the TCO of a computer - and even there, Microsoft will be happy to drop the price significantly, more likely - move to the annual subscription model most commercialised OSS packages use.
So you admit that Microsoft's revenues are about to take a drastic dive, thanks to Linux. All three of your suggested countermoves by Microsoft imply a huge price cut -- and large savings by the consumer. If you are a consumer yourself, you should be gratefully thanking the free software movement for the lower prices! (And for keeping Microsoft from becoming too tyrannical.)
Besides, Linux's initial price of zero is not the only way a large business can save. By adopting Linux, a company gets off Microsoft's upgrade treadmill -- permanently. That in itself is a huge benefit.
In addition, viruses, trojans, and other malware are costing companies huge amounts of time, money, and frustration. They are sick of it, and are eager for an alternative. A more diverse software ecology is far more robust against malware than the Microsoft monoculture.
So yes, your worst nightmare will come to pass: there will be a massive migration away from Microsoft. It only takes a few to begin the change and start saving tons of money; the rest will have to follow lest they lose to their more efficient competitors.
Rubbish. Little portables like the OLPC will be too limited in functionality for most purposes.
When I wrote that OLPC is only leading the tidal wave of cheap machines, my point was that technology marches on. You can't stop it. At some point, very capable computers costing $100 or less will be standard. When that happens, Microsoft will become largely irrelevant.
What's the "disruptive innovation" coming out of "GNU Linux and FOSS" ?
"High quality software for free" is the disruptive innovation. It is cutting into Microsoft's oxygen supply. When $100 computers become common (the OLPC is just the leading edge of a huge tidal wave), can any consumer justify spending $500 to $1000 on Windows and Office? The answer, of course, is no.
The future is in the little portables like OLPC, and Linux will dominate that market. Microsoft knows it too, which is why it has been flailing about so desperately lately.
I never said all conflicts were religious. Just the worst ones.
By "worst" I mean deaths per capita. The examples you cite may have been large in absolute terms, but except for Pol Pot they were small relative to the total population.
Religious wars can be much worse. During their exodus from Egypt, the Jews wiped out 100% of the population of Jericho. The First Crusade nearly depopulated Jerusalem. The Thirty Years' War, which began purely as a religious conflict between the catholics and protestants, killed off a third of the population of Germany. Religious wars tend to be uncommonly grim. We don't need any more of them in a world full of nuclear bombs.
Bad things are done in the name of religion, but that just makes religion a scapegoat for the bad things that would've happened anyway.
Religion as scapegoat for atrocities that would have happened anyway? Explain the Crusades then. As I wrote in the section you carefully edited out, the Christian kingdoms prosecuting a Crusade could not possibly have profited from it, because the holy lands were much too far away. So why did the Crusades happen, if not for religious reasons?
Face it, a large church behaves a lot like a multinational business and competes in many of the same ways -- up to and including the incitement of warfare whenever that would be profitable.
But even if you were right about scapegoats, the world would still be better off without religion. Because a holy appeal is the first and probably still the best way to manipulate the emotions of a large crowd; and therefore any religion is a huge intensifier of conflict. The last thing a nuclear world needs is another reason to fight, which is why we would be far better off without the priests, mullahs, and rabbis.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." --- Diderot
I'll grant you that religion has been a smokescreen used many times to cover up human greed (whether it be for power, money, what have you)...
It is difficult to see the Crusades as anything other than a religious conflict: the holy lands were too far from home to be profitable. The Crusaders committed horrific atrocities in the name of "Christendom".
[At Jerusalem] Our men followed, killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles....
--- Anonymous, Gesta francorum et aliorum Hierosolymytanorum
... in the absence of religion "might makes right" has stepped up to the plate on more than one occasion throughout human history.
True, but religious conflicts are notorious for being especially bloody (e.g. the same Crusades I mentioned).
The world would be far better off without religion, because once you have it, conflict is pretty much inevitable. The explanation is simple: a priest has a huge incentive to impose his beliefs on as many people as possible: he collects more tithes this way, and therefore he gets richer. As a religion expands, it inevitably runs up against other similar scams. Nearly every time, the consequence is horrendous conflict. We don't need this, especially in a nuclear world.
I own a PC, and I run Linux on it. That is the entire extent of my relationship, direct or indirect, with any of Apple's competitors. Are you satisfied?
Steve Jobs stole from his own partner (Wozniak) when both were poor. So I am not speculating when I say that Jobs is greedy.
Cingular. Which has a contract that says no other company CAN buy (or, more importantly, sell) the iPhone.
My point precisely. Could Cingular have leveraged an exclusive deal (Jobs is a notoriously tough negotiator) if Apple had any other choice? Apple was begging for business -- any business -- for the iPhone.
If they could, you'd better believe that Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint would probably fall all over themselves to carry it.
False. Verizon was certainly not falling over itself to carry the iPhone -- they rejected it. Cingular was Apple's second choice (or perhaps third).
No, the iPhone is not selling well, so they are opening it up in hopes of expanding its market. The iPhone should have been open from the start, but Steve Jobs, as usual, has been too greedy.
It's called a modern Virtual Memory Manager. Linux and OS X behave in the same way.
I call bullshit, at least for Linux. I have 320 MB of RAM and a dozen applications open (including this web browser). I'm using only 72 kB of swap space (yes, kilobytes), which is basically zero. I could live quite comfortably with swap turned off.
The moon is a terrible place to build a space elevator.
Agreed. at least for a lunarsynchronous elevator. However, there is a proposal for an elevator that reaches from a fixed point on the lunar surface to the L-1 point located between the Earth and the Moon. Such an elevator wouldn't be lunarsynchronous, but because it would terminate at L-1, very little station-keeping fuel would be needed to keep it lunarstationary. Best of all, it could be built from off-the-shelf materials like Kevlar. Using M5 fiber, an elevator with a 200 kg payload would mass only 6800 kg, which is well within the capacity of a single Delta IV launch. All in all, a feasible solution. Now we just need a problem for it.:)
The main reason for building a space elevator in the first place is to avoid the irreversabilitys due to atmospheric drag. The moon has no atmosphere so this is not a problem.
Actually, the main reason for a space elevator is to avoid the need for fuel. To lift a payload with an elevator, just input energy. To lift the same payload with a rocket, you need to burn some fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift the fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift the fuel that lifts the fuel, et cetera. The amount of fuel required scales exponentially with the mass of the payload.
Worse, while oxygen is abundant on the Moon, hydrogen is almost nonexistent. So it will be difficult to make fuel on the moon. Lifting the fuel from Earth would be prohibitively costly.
So the payback period for an elevator, even on the Moon, should be pretty short -- assuming, of course, that the Moon has something we want to export.
It would waste several libraries of congress worth of electricity!
But it would waste the energy where we can afford to waste it -- at a nuclear power plant out in the boondocks.
The energy crisis is acute for cars because until now there has been no easy way to transport the energy from where it is generated (in a power plant) to where it is used (in a nonstationary engine, such as a car). The aluminum cycle, if it works, would essentially be the required energy transportation system, at last.
Refining aluminum from the raw ore is definitely energy intensive.
But simply recycling alumina (which is oxygen reacted with already refined aluminum) is far cheaper. The Physorg article alludes to the use of "fused salt electrolysis", which is roughly 90 percent efficient.
I don't think we're doing Microsoft's publicity work. Their claims are clearly BS, and it is our duty to expose them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I doubt the FUD will stick. The Fortune 500, at whom the FUD is mainly aimed, are very well informed about the balance of forces. And they can instantly see that Microsoft is far less powerful than the combination of IBM + Sony + NEC + Google + dozens of others of the Fortune 500 who are heavily invested into Linux. If push came to shove and Microsoft actually carried out its patent threats, it would be clobbered. And the realists of the Fortune 500 know that. Microsoft's FUD will not stick, not even briefly.
Wal-Mart and others may choose to pay a nominal "licensing" fee to get the Microsoft annoyance to go away -- but that just means Linux usage will continue to exponentiate at those places, and Linux will continue to be ever more firmly entrenched at the topmost levels of industry. It's a losing battle for Microsoft.
Sure, Microsoft could try the patent extortion racket on the little guys. But there is nothing to stop IBM or Google from helping out Microsoft's proposed victim, is there? If Ballmer tries to strongarm enough little guys, eventually (in days or weeks, not months), IBM will step in. And then Microsoft will have a titanic legal battle on their hands.
And they have to know it, or they would have started the shakedown already. The fact that Ballmer is merely threatening and not doing is a pretty strong indication that he knows he's holding a losing hand.
Sorry, I think you are wrong. Too many companies are now dependent on Linux, and this number has been growing exponentially over the last few years. These companies will make life miserable for Microsoft if Ballmer is ever dumb enough to actually carry out his threats. Google, for example, is totally dependent on Linux for their vast computing infrastructure, and they are rich and will fight hard. The intimidation effect of ongoing legal action will not slow down Linux any more than the very similar SCO case did. In the end, Microsoft will lose.
Oddly enough, the confirmation of Linux's success comes from Microsoft itself. You know they have to be desperately afraid of Torvald's creation for them to make this last ditch effort to gain from the courts what they could not honestly win in the marketplace.
Microsoft may try to enforce their probably bogus patents, but if they do so they will be clobbered by Linux's allies.
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Yes: Microsoft could cheat, and I have little doubt they will try.
What's your point ? As I keep trying to point out, and you keep ignoring, to the vast majority of Microsoft's customers, *their software isn't expensive*.
What you refuse to understand is this: when a normal computer with all the software trimmings costs a hundred dollars, how much do you think Microsoft will make from it? And will that be enough to continue feeding a $50 billion/year monster? Of course not. Microsoft is due for a massive shrink.
No, you have missed the point. It is completely irrelevant whether people can or cannot get Windows and Office for list price. Microsoft cannot sustain a $50 billion/year business unless it is getting roughly $100 to $200 dollars a year per customer, on the average. (Business customers pay the bulk of this, of course.) Understand?
In a world where ultra cheap computers are normal, Microsoft will not be getting anywhere near $100 per customer per year, not when excellent, featureful, reliable software is available for free. Conclusion: while Microsoft may never completely disappear, the company is due for a massive shrink.
We've been told to "count on it" for nearly a decade now. I won't be holding my breath. The $100 PC running FOSS software isn't going to take over the business desktop any time soon and is only marginally more likely to be successful on the home computing desktop.
*amused* We will find out, won't we? The laws of economics are inexorable: reasonable quality + low price = winner. I will say to you what Toyota is saying to Detroit: Sayonara!
Irrelevant. Microsoft's revenues are $50 billion per year, which means that plenty of people are paying plenty. These revenues will shrink to nearly nothing in the world of $100 computers running very high quality free software. And this world is coming -- count on it.
Your second point is even more of a non sequitur.
Ten years, yes, but the guy in Kamloops was a pioneer. Cloning the Kamloops system (hardware, software, and humanware) should take far, far less time.
Exactly. Reasonable quality + rock bottom price = winner. Rugged, reliable $100 machines of all kinds will take over, leaving little room for Microsoft's $800 software bundle.
You haven't tried Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, the hottest Linux distro, have you? A hostile reviewer like yourself may find some flaws to carp about, but these flaws are shrinking year by year. Free software is growing up -- fast. At some point, Linux will be more than good enough for 99% of all computer users. When that happens, Microsoft will become largely irrelevant.
The actual answer, of course, is that no consumer is spending $1000 on Windows and Office _today_
That's why I said $500 - $1000. At retail prices, Windows Vista Ultimate plus Office 2007 can easily cost $800.
For the home market, Microsoft will happily sell Windows and Office for a dollar if that's what it takes. In the business market, up-front software cost (outside of specialised, niche programs) is an insignificantly small part of the TCO of a computer - and even there, Microsoft will be happy to drop the price significantly, more likely - move to the annual subscription model most commercialised OSS packages use.
So you admit that Microsoft's revenues are about to take a drastic dive, thanks to Linux. All three of your suggested countermoves by Microsoft imply a huge price cut -- and large savings by the consumer. If you are a consumer yourself, you should be gratefully thanking the free software movement for the lower prices! (And for keeping Microsoft from becoming too tyrannical.)
Besides, Linux's initial price of zero is not the only way a large business can save. By adopting Linux, a company gets off Microsoft's upgrade treadmill -- permanently. That in itself is a huge benefit.
In addition, viruses, trojans, and other malware are costing companies huge amounts of time, money, and frustration. They are sick of it, and are eager for an alternative. A more diverse software ecology is far more robust against malware than the Microsoft monoculture.
So yes, your worst nightmare will come to pass: there will be a massive migration away from Microsoft. It only takes a few to begin the change and start saving tons of money; the rest will have to follow lest they lose to their more efficient competitors.
Rubbish. Little portables like the OLPC will be too limited in functionality for most purposes.
When I wrote that OLPC is only leading the tidal wave of cheap machines, my point was that technology marches on. You can't stop it. At some point, very capable computers costing $100 or less will be standard. When that happens, Microsoft will become largely irrelevant.
"High quality software for free" is the disruptive innovation. It is cutting into Microsoft's oxygen supply. When $100 computers become common (the OLPC is just the leading edge of a huge tidal wave), can any consumer justify spending $500 to $1000 on Windows and Office? The answer, of course, is no.
The future is in the little portables like OLPC, and Linux will dominate that market. Microsoft knows it too, which is why it has been flailing about so desperately lately.
By "worst" I mean deaths per capita. The examples you cite may have been large in absolute terms, but except for Pol Pot they were small relative to the total population.
Religious wars can be much worse. During their exodus from Egypt, the Jews wiped out 100% of the population of Jericho. The First Crusade nearly depopulated Jerusalem. The Thirty Years' War, which began purely as a religious conflict between the catholics and protestants, killed off a third of the population of Germany. Religious wars tend to be uncommonly grim. We don't need any more of them in a world full of nuclear bombs.
Religion as scapegoat for atrocities that would have happened anyway? Explain the Crusades then. As I wrote in the section you carefully edited out, the Christian kingdoms prosecuting a Crusade could not possibly have profited from it, because the holy lands were much too far away. So why did the Crusades happen, if not for religious reasons?
Face it, a large church behaves a lot like a multinational business and competes in many of the same ways -- up to and including the incitement of warfare whenever that would be profitable.
But even if you were right about scapegoats, the world would still be better off without religion. Because a holy appeal is the first and probably still the best way to manipulate the emotions of a large crowd; and therefore any religion is a huge intensifier of conflict. The last thing a nuclear world needs is another reason to fight, which is why we would be far better off without the priests, mullahs, and rabbis.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." --- Diderot
It is difficult to see the Crusades as anything other than a religious conflict: the holy lands were too far from home to be profitable. The Crusaders committed horrific atrocities in the name of "Christendom".
True, but religious conflicts are notorious for being especially bloody (e.g. the same Crusades I mentioned).
The world would be far better off without religion, because once you have it, conflict is pretty much inevitable. The explanation is simple: a priest has a huge incentive to impose his beliefs on as many people as possible: he collects more tithes this way, and therefore he gets richer. As a religion expands, it inevitably runs up against other similar scams. Nearly every time, the consequence is horrendous conflict. We don't need this, especially in a nuclear world.
Steve Jobs stole from his own partner (Wozniak) when both were poor. So I am not speculating when I say that Jobs is greedy.
My point precisely. Could Cingular have leveraged an exclusive deal (Jobs is a notoriously tough negotiator) if Apple had any other choice? Apple was begging for business -- any business -- for the iPhone.
If they could, you'd better believe that Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint would probably fall all over themselves to carry it.
False. Verizon was certainly not falling over itself to carry the iPhone -- they rejected it. Cingular was Apple's second choice (or perhaps third).
How many cellular companies have signed up for the iPhone? Damned few. So I stand by my assertion: the iPhone is not selling.
No, the iPhone is not selling well, so they are opening it up in hopes of expanding its market. The iPhone should have been open from the start, but Steve Jobs, as usual, has been too greedy.
A very good answer.
I call bullshit, at least for Linux. I have 320 MB of RAM and a dozen applications open (including this web browser). I'm using only 72 kB of swap space (yes, kilobytes), which is basically zero. I could live quite comfortably with swap turned off.
Good point. Yes, a lunar elevator would be invaluable as a pilot project.
Agreed. at least for a lunarsynchronous elevator. However, there is a proposal for an elevator that reaches from a fixed point on the lunar surface to the L-1 point located between the Earth and the Moon. Such an elevator wouldn't be lunarsynchronous, but because it would terminate at L-1, very little station-keeping fuel would be needed to keep it lunarstationary. Best of all, it could be built from off-the-shelf materials like Kevlar. Using M5 fiber, an elevator with a 200 kg payload would mass only 6800 kg, which is well within the capacity of a single Delta IV launch. All in all, a feasible solution. Now we just need a problem for it. :)
The main reason for building a space elevator in the first place is to avoid the irreversabilitys due to atmospheric drag. The moon has no atmosphere so this is not a problem.
Actually, the main reason for a space elevator is to avoid the need for fuel. To lift a payload with an elevator, just input energy. To lift the same payload with a rocket, you need to burn some fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift the fuel, plus the fuel needed to lift the fuel that lifts the fuel, et cetera. The amount of fuel required scales exponentially with the mass of the payload.
Worse, while oxygen is abundant on the Moon, hydrogen is almost nonexistent. So it will be difficult to make fuel on the moon. Lifting the fuel from Earth would be prohibitively costly.
So the payback period for an elevator, even on the Moon, should be pretty short -- assuming, of course, that the Moon has something we want to export.
No way do we want to do this. A buyout is exactly what Darl & Co. have been hoping for from Day One.
But it would waste the energy where we can afford to waste it -- at a nuclear power plant out in the boondocks.
The energy crisis is acute for cars because until now there has been no easy way to transport the energy from where it is generated (in a power plant) to where it is used (in a nonstationary engine, such as a car). The aluminum cycle, if it works, would essentially be the required energy transportation system, at last.
Refining aluminum from the raw ore is definitely energy intensive.
But simply recycling alumina (which is oxygen reacted with already refined aluminum) is far cheaper. The Physorg article alludes to the use of "fused salt electrolysis", which is roughly 90 percent efficient.
I don't think we're doing Microsoft's publicity work. Their claims are clearly BS, and it is our duty to expose them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Wal-Mart and others may choose to pay a nominal "licensing" fee to get the Microsoft annoyance to go away -- but that just means Linux usage will continue to exponentiate at those places, and Linux will continue to be ever more firmly entrenched at the topmost levels of industry. It's a losing battle for Microsoft.
Sure, Microsoft could try the patent extortion racket on the little guys. But there is nothing to stop IBM or Google from helping out Microsoft's proposed victim, is there? If Ballmer tries to strongarm enough little guys, eventually (in days or weeks, not months), IBM will step in. And then Microsoft will have a titanic legal battle on their hands.
And they have to know it, or they would have started the shakedown already. The fact that Ballmer is merely threatening and not doing is a pretty strong indication that he knows he's holding a losing hand.
Oddly enough, the confirmation of Linux's success comes from Microsoft itself. You know they have to be desperately afraid of Torvald's creation for them to make this last ditch effort to gain from the courts what they could not honestly win in the marketplace.
Microsoft may try to enforce their probably bogus patents, but if they do so they will be clobbered by Linux's allies.