I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.
My senior year our Academic Decathlon team made it to the national conference in Chicago. I heard that we placed in the top 10 in each category, but I never did see a single thing about it in our local paper. And this was a small rural school.
Then you should be asking why the school isn't maintaining better contact with its local newspaper. The football game will draw big crowds in a rural town. The Academic Decathlon may be little known or understood by anyone but its participants.
There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot.
There are however plenty of other reasons:
The geek may enjoy spending endless hours maintaining multiple operating systems, hardware drivers, software libraries. and skill sets.
The customer at Best Buy not so much.
It can take a generation to develop a mature backlist of software titles for the general consumer market - a complex and demanding market and one the geek doesn't understand particularly well. The worst mistake a he can make is to simply count the number of apps in a Linux repository and think that the problem has been solved.
The dual or multi-boot PC will be assembled from hardware designed for the Windows OS - and often designed, as in the case of DirectX video cards, in close cooperation with Microsoft.
It would be altogether miraculous if the "alternative" OS delivered a significant real-world boost in performance, security or ease of use.
Dual-boot becomes hard to justify when everything of interest to the end-user is routinely ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
There were - and still are - vintage tractors in use, looking much like this 48 Ford Tractor
The "tricycle" design was common - two narrowly spaced front wheels that let you make impossibly tight turns.
But they were easy to roll and easy to flip.
Hand throttle. Manual transmission. Steering. Brakes. Exposed PTO.
Pretty much everything exposed.
With the hand throttle set, you stop - and can only stop a tractor like this - by working the brake and clutch together.
It takes muscle.
The throttle controls power to the PTO - which means you damn well better be in the right gear when you release the clutch - or you will be making the great lurch forward badly overbalanced with your front wheels clawing for air.
The death this spring of a four-year-old Oklahoma boy who fell off a tractor and into the blades of a trailing mower has rekindled frustration among safety experts regarding adults who allow children to ride tractors.
Barbara Lee, Ph.D., director of the National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC) at Marshfield Clinic, said a shared commitment to end this traditional but dangerous practice led NFMC and other farm safety organizations to form a network two years ago.
Together they launched "It's Easier to Bury a Tradition than a Child," a national campaign to keep children younger than 12 away from tractors.Tractor tragedy happened "in a second"
There could be "several" people on campus running CP/M. No more visible than you are.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go.
The repository loses some of its luster when you need Google to point the way.
How many of those programs are available for Windows - and are they really more difficult to find or harder to install?
Secondly, it's about trying to create artificial scarcity, which seems to me to be all the wrong strategy
The geek conflates production and distribution.
Wall-E took the Hugo this year for best long form drama. The Nebula. The Saturn. Wall-E is an enchanting - almost wordless - romantic comedy with a ferocious satiric bite. It's geek quotient is stratospheric and there only one studio on earth who could have made it.
Wall-E was four years in production and had a budget of $180 million.
Pixar, of course, doesn't have to produce anything for the geek.
It doesn't have to take a chance on a live action John Carter of Mars. The family market for undemanding movies likes Cars is theirs for the asking.
Life is short. Why take on the grief of servicing a non-paying audience who believes in its right to pirate?
Actually, every software is free to normal users! Either you download and crack it yourself, or you have a friend who does it for yo. That is the main point free software hasn't taken off, and everybody knows it.
Drink and the devil have done for the rest...
Not everyone is part of the geek's pirate culture - or has ever seen any compelling reason to join in the party.
Your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program. The disks are yours for the asking. You might have to pay for S&H.
The MS Office "Ultimate Steal" was available for $70 to anyone with student ID and 0.5 credit hours of part-time study.
Second point: Congress *regulates* interstate commerce; it does not participate. Else it would be able to kill-off Ford, Microsoft, and Panasonic, and build cars, computers, and TVs directly. The U.S. has not been granted that power to DO interstate commerce - only to regulate it.
But the federal government does participate - and - historically - has done so often quite openly:
Capt. Smith was at heart a bean counter and his profession, survival:
At one point, when Newport returned a second time with seventy settlers, among them a perfumer and six tailors, Smith, never one to keep his opinions to himself, penned a Rude Reply to his London superiors:
"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. For except we be able to lodge and feed them, the most will [be lost therough] want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."
Basically, they're moving it less in the direction of being a ridiculously cheap education appliance, and more in the direction of being just a sort of cheap netbook PC.
To get to the "ridiculously cheap" appliance you need to sell more than 1.4 millon units. One Laptop Per Child
OLPC began as take it or leave it bundle of hardware, software and a constructivist philosophy of education straight from the western media lab. The education minister was expected to sign the purchase order, not to question the underlying assumptions of the project - or impose conditions of his own, such as support for Windows.
These global stats are built from about 160 million hits per month to its clients' websites:
Additional estimates about the website population: 76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites. 43% are commerce sites 18% are corporate sites 10% are content sites 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..)About Our Market Share Statistics
Linux fares somewhat better in the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics. But the trend line is as flat as the Kansas prairie.
I seem to recall reading that a large part of the population in India donates their hair to temples/charity once a year; the hair being sold to make expensive wigs for westerners
Then you need to be asking how much these donations are worth to the charities. I'd be surprised as well if the west was the only market.
The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design.
There were also grotesquely out-sized investments in nuclear mega-projects by companies that clearly had no business building on such a scale.
Slashdot Mirror
You're joking.
But that doesn't make it any easier to build a solid base of users for your new platform.
The mega corp can use its mega bucks to build brand recognition. The geek goes out of his way to achieve obscurity.
I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.
Luck had very little to do with it.
The Apple III was first out of the gate.
But the Apple III was an eight-bit strictly-for-business upgrade of the Apple II and that was not going be good enough.
PC-DOS cost $40. CP/M-86 $240.
Microsoft negotiated a flat fee and a non-exclusive deal.
It promised to deliver a serviceable OS in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC - and that was something IBM needed to hear.
The MS-DOS PC was a significant entry into the market before the cloning of the PC BIOS.
My senior year our Academic Decathlon team made it to the national conference in Chicago. I heard that we placed in the top 10 in each category, but I never did see a single thing about it in our local paper. And this was a small rural school.
Then you should be asking why the school isn't maintaining better contact with its local newspaper. The football game will draw big crowds in a rural town. The Academic Decathlon may be little known or understood by anyone but its participants.
There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot.
There are however plenty of other reasons:
The geek may enjoy spending endless hours maintaining multiple operating systems, hardware drivers, software libraries. and skill sets.
The customer at Best Buy not so much.
It can take a generation to develop a mature backlist of software titles for the general consumer market - a complex and demanding market and one the geek doesn't understand particularly well. The worst mistake a he can make is to simply count the number of apps in a Linux repository and think that the problem has been solved.
The dual or multi-boot PC will be assembled from hardware designed for the Windows OS - and often designed, as in the case of DirectX video cards, in close cooperation with Microsoft.
It would be altogether miraculous if the "alternative" OS delivered a significant real-world boost in performance, security or ease of use.
Dual-boot becomes hard to justify when everything of interest to the end-user is routinely ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
If you have your own wi-fi and spare bandwidth, open it for free use and let others piggyback on your connection.
When you are the owner of record of the account, problems land on your doorstep.
That can you take you places you don't really want to go.
It probably isn't going to be enough to simply "open" a connection.
To be of any real service you may have to make a significant investment in an external antenna and other hardware.
So are you agreeing or disagreeing with him?
I was raised on a fruit farm.
There were - and still are - vintage tractors in use, looking much like this 48 Ford Tractor
The "tricycle" design was common - two narrowly spaced front wheels that let you make impossibly tight turns.
But they were easy to roll and easy to flip.
Hand throttle. Manual transmission. Steering. Brakes. Exposed PTO.
Pretty much everything exposed.
With the hand throttle set, you stop - and can only stop a tractor like this - by working the brake and clutch together.
It takes muscle.
The throttle controls power to the PTO - which means you damn well better be in the right gear when you release the clutch - or you will be making the great lurch forward badly overbalanced with your front wheels clawing for air.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
oratory is not law.
and the argument of necessity may still hold up in court.
If you can't drive a tractor, and fit, maintain and operate all the implements for it by the time you're 11, then it's special school time...
Spoken by someone who hasn't the least idea of how dangerous working around a tractor can be:
Tractors are the leading cause of fatal farm accidents involving children. Farm Safety Coalition Aims to Keep Children off Tractors "
The death this spring of a four-year-old Oklahoma boy who fell off a tractor and into the blades of a trailing mower has rekindled frustration among safety experts regarding adults who allow children to ride tractors.
Barbara Lee, Ph.D., director of the National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC) at Marshfield Clinic, said a shared commitment to end this traditional but dangerous practice led NFMC and other farm safety organizations to form a network two years ago.
Together they launched "It's Easier to Bury a Tradition than a Child," a national campaign to keep children younger than 12 away from tractors. Tractor tragedy happened "in a second"
There could be "several" people on campus running CP/M. No more visible than you are.
The other massive advantage is software repositories. When something comes up and I need some new program to solve that problem, I google to find out what can do the job, download, install, and some five minutes to half hour later, I'm ready to go.
The repository loses some of its luster when you need Google to point the way.
How many of those programs are available for Windows - and are they really more difficult to find or harder to install?
Secondly, it's about trying to create artificial scarcity, which seems to me to be all the wrong strategy
The geek conflates production and distribution.
Wall-E took the Hugo this year for best long form drama. The Nebula. The Saturn. Wall-E is an enchanting - almost wordless - romantic comedy with a ferocious satiric bite. It's geek quotient is stratospheric and there only one studio on earth who could have made it.
Wall-E was four years in production and had a budget of $180 million.
Pixar, of course, doesn't have to produce anything for the geek.
It doesn't have to take a chance on a live action John Carter of Mars. The family market for undemanding movies likes Cars is theirs for the asking.
Life is short. Why take on the grief of servicing a non-paying audience who believes in its right to pirate?
Contracts are not allowed to override basic legal rights.
Now all I need to know is what you mean by "basic legal rights" - and whether the courts are in agreement.
Imagine a fork of Open Office
The problem is much bigger than that.
Microsoft sells Office as part of an office system.
Solutions for the Client, the Server, and the Web.
Exchange. Sharepoint and so on.
There is a Microsoft app for the loading dock. The point of sale.
Integrated accounting for $200. Accounting Professional Home Page
Actually, every software is free to normal users!
Either you download and crack it yourself, or you have a friend who does it for yo.
That is the main point free software hasn't taken off, and everybody knows it.
Drink and the devil have done for the rest...
Not everyone is part of the geek's pirate culture - or has ever seen any compelling reason to join in the party.
Your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program. The disks are yours for the asking. You might have to pay for S&H.
The MS Office "Ultimate Steal" was available for $70 to anyone with student ID and 0.5 credit hours of part-time study.
Why aren't there any decent open source fonts?
Times New Roman was commissioned by the London TImes in 1931. Times Roman
Helvetica dates from 1957.
It's an extraordinary craft, and the expert practitioners are rare:
Bruce Roger's Centaur [From Typographic specimens: the great type faces
MS spent as much effort on the UI as they did on the actual product. This is very different than FOSS.
I can't think of anything more revealing - and more damning - than this.
The UI is essential part of your product - to treat it as an afterthought defines you as an amateur.
How can you possibly know that?
Free software is free as in there are four freedoms that it is guaranteed to provide.
it makes vendor lock-in effectively impossible
the federal minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 an hour.
only a tiny minority of end users will ever read or write a line of code - or have easy, immediate and affordable access to anyone who does.
vendor lock-in is perfectly possible in FOSS - it only requires a sufficiently resource-intensive project.
a project that demands a continuing investment in money and manpower only the mega-corporate backer like Google can provide.
Second point: Congress *regulates* interstate commerce; it does not participate. Else it would be able to kill-off Ford, Microsoft, and Panasonic, and build cars, computers, and TVs directly. The U.S. has not been granted that power to DO interstate commerce - only to regulate it.
But the federal government does participate - and - historically - has done so often quite openly:
Passenger Ships Owned by the United States Government, U.S. Shipping Board
The most familiar example would be the Tennessee Valley Authority
Even if they made a "one way" trip to Mars you'd have people queuing around the block to sign up.
I'd go.
The guy who volunteers for the one-way ride is almost never the one you want to make the trip.
The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not
It was the disinherited - the landless - the second and third sons of the nobility - who ventured out.
The eldest son would have been nailed to the floor if he tried.
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea intended to set up shop somewhere off the Chinese coast and become the funnel for all trade with the West.
The conquisitor was going for the gold.
In 1624 Captain John Smith published a bill of particulars - a shopping list for the prospective colonist. It makes interesting reading:
John Smith's Bill: Then & Now
Capt. Smith was at heart a bean counter and his profession, survival:
At one point, when Newport returned a second time with seventy settlers, among them a perfumer and six tailors, Smith, never one to keep his opinions to himself, penned a Rude Reply to his London superiors:
"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. For except we be able to lodge and feed them, the most will [be lost therough] want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."
Was John Smith a Liar?
Basically, they're moving it less in the direction of being a ridiculously cheap education appliance, and more in the direction of being just a sort of cheap netbook PC.
To get to the "ridiculously cheap" appliance you need to sell more than 1.4 millon units. One Laptop Per Child
OLPC began as take it or leave it bundle of hardware, software and a constructivist philosophy of education straight from the western media lab. The education minister was expected to sign the purchase order, not to question the underlying assumptions of the project - or impose conditions of his own, such as support for Windows.
I use mostly Firefox but when I want to watch a movie on Netflix I have to use IE. The same with Netlibrary.
The latest firmware upgrade to my Samsung Blu-Ray player added support for Blockbuster and YouTube to Netflix and Pandora.
The only thing missing really is the ability to browse the Netflix catalog through the player.
I have to ask why I am using a PC for media play when a set up like this is so easy to live with.
The Net Applications stats for August:
XP 71.8%
Vista 18.8%
OSX 10.5 3.5%
Win 7 1.2%
OSX 10.4 1%
Linux 0.9%
W2K 0.9%
Operating System Market Share
These global stats are built from about 160 million hits per month to its clients' websites:
Additional estimates about the website population:
76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites.
43% are commerce sites
18% are corporate sites
10% are content sites
29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About Our Market Share Statistics
Linux fares somewhat better in the W3Schools OS Platform Statistics. But the trend line is as flat as the Kansas prairie.
I seem to recall reading that a large part of the population in India donates their hair to temples/charity once a year; the hair being sold to make expensive wigs for westerners
Then you need to be asking how much these donations are worth to the charities. I'd be surprised as well if the west was the only market.
The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design.
There were also grotesquely out-sized investments in nuclear mega-projects by companies that clearly had no business building on such a scale.