Here is another nice graphical display of the results, county by county. Takes a little wind out of the sails of those who claim the country is so divided. There is a lot of purple on this map!
The dilemma you are underlying is a very confusing one. Yes, better integration into the OS is better for consumers; No, companies going out of business because MS makes it's OS better is not better for consumers.
I think the problem with the way you position the problem is you assume several OSes is a bad scenario; I assume what is implied here is that developers will now have to develop 1 app for every OS... which clearly sucks. The core issue here is that you are being pushed into this reasoning because there IS no OS competition.
If you assume that we had 3 OSes with 33% of the market each - competition among them would be fierce. Indeed I believe they would strive to become the best platforms for the most valuable developers, and I don't believe they could do it without supporting some common platform. Every OS that would not support common interfaces would go under, and the other ones would be competing on performance, excecution, design and support - which is where we WANT them to compete.
where it gets difficult is when an operating system company also builds software. If the MS Word team were an independant company, they would have incredible leverage in forcing OS companies to adhere to (a) common standard(s).
If you take away the position of force MS is in, then the market starts dictacting what an OS should be, and it's no longer up to Bill.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is another nice graphical display of the results, county by county. Takes a little wind out of the sails of those who claim the country is so divided. There is a lot of purple on this map!
http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
The dilemma you are underlying is a very confusing one. Yes, better integration into the OS is better for consumers; No, companies going out of business because MS makes it's OS better is not better for consumers.
:)
I think the problem with the way you position the problem is you assume several OSes is a bad scenario; I assume what is implied here is that developers will now have to develop 1 app for every OS... which clearly sucks. The core issue here is that you are being pushed into this reasoning because there IS no OS competition.
If you assume that we had 3 OSes with 33% of the market each - competition among them would be fierce. Indeed I believe they would strive to become the best platforms for the most valuable developers, and I don't believe they could do it without supporting some common platform. Every OS that would not support common interfaces would go under, and the other ones would be competing on performance, excecution, design and support - which is where we WANT them to compete.
where it gets difficult is when an operating system company also builds software. If the MS Word team were an independant company, they would have incredible leverage in forcing OS companies to adhere to (a) common standard(s).
If you take away the position of force MS is in, then the market starts dictacting what an OS should be, and it's no longer up to Bill.
that's a good thing imho