I once put a DVD in a laptop running Vista and it simply refused to play. "No Protected Content Path" or something. That was a DVD, not a HDDVD or BluRay. Now how am I supposed to replace an integrated X200? Or a laptop's LCD?
The message appeared on WMP, and the other players (VLC and WinDVD) refused to display anything.
So I can't play a DVD on a factory install. Thank you for testing your products, Toshiba.
I'd imagine that's rather annoying, but also that if it were a general problem, Toshiba customers would be up in arms about it. Anecdotally, I've no problems playing DVDs under Vista.
There are a lot of new features, but many are 'plumbing' sorts of things. There are things like UAC, which make it easier to run as a normal user instead of an administrator, an I/O prioritisation scheme, a much better video driver model, with the possibility of giving the OS better control of the GPU (on new hardware designed to support this), address space layout randomisation to reduce the security risk of memory access bugs, etc. There are a lot of others, but these are a few I've read about and can recall.
My overall impression of Vista is that it really does perform better than XP if you have enough RAM, but quite a bit worse if you don't. The security enhancements also mean it ought to be much more secure, but I was always careful under XP, so never had any security issues with it either. One other thing is that a lot of people really do like the eye candy, so to them it's a big selling point. It's not a major one for me, but I've no complaints about a pretty UI, and Vista's is the prettiest I've seen so far.
It's not the same as the jump from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1, or from Windows 3.1/9x to Windows NT, but it's a much bigger step than NT 4.0 to Windows 2000, or Windows 2000 to XP.
I haven't had any problems with this supposedly intrusive DRM either, and I've even enabled the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the BIOS on my PC. I sometimes work with confidential data, so I'm looking forward to being able to use DRM to protect it. I don't much care for the idea of DRM for music, though, because I use it on too many different things, so it would be a hassle unless they all transparently supported it, transferred the licences, etc.
What I find interesting is the claim that 78% of the sales are for premium versions. With XP, most people I know use either Home Edition or a pirated copy of Professional, so I'd have expected most of the Vista sales to be the basic versions. On the other hand, this figure may be skewed by an 'early adopter' group.
The switch from the dual home/professional lines Microsoft have used since 1993 (when Windows NT was released) to a multi-level (and potentially more confusing) product line is quite a big change. It will be interesting to see if, over time, people just buy the cheapest one (i.e. they buy Windows because it's there), or if they continue to buy the premium ones, suggesting they're actually putting thought into their OS purchase choices.
It will also be interesting to see how Linux sales on Dell PCs progress, and whether it's chosen mostly with cheap systems, or if any significant number of buyers of more expensive systems also choose Linux. From an economics perspective, it's all very interesting.
I think the issue is that this can help malware to hide itself on a machine it's already infected, by using this BITS service to silently bypass policy settings. BITS itself runs with 'SYSTEM' privileges (the closest thing to 'root' there is on Windows), but I can't tell from the article if malware run by a normal user can hijack BITS, or if it has to be run by an administrator. In the first case, I'd consider it a security vulnerability, but not in the second.
The case I'm referring to was the market structure in 1992, when Microsoft's share of the personal computer operating systems market was approximately 58% (that's all Microsoft operating systems, and in 1990, the figure was just under 50%). PC-DOS, DR-DOS and OS/2 had another 14% of the market, and that was running on the same PC hardware. Then there were Apple (on different hardware), Unix, NEC, etc. How can you define 58% Microsoft market share as a monopoly, and say Microsoft was competing with itself? Microsoft was competing with IBM, Novell, Apple, NEC, et al.
As for the market structure, PC hardware was a commodity market by 1992, but this was not the case for individual components like the CPU or OS, and arguably still isn't. If you swap an HP for a Fujitsu-Siemens, they're about the same, so yes, you can say PCs are commodities, but that was also true in the early 1990s. If you swap Windows for Linux, the differences are enormous. There is simply no way you can say they are identical products, from the point of view of either PC vendors or PC users.
The key point is you're assuming Microsoft would face competition of equal quality, so a vendor unhappy with Windows could switch to, e.g., Linux without any loss. In other words, you're assuming a commodity market. If Windows actually offered more value than Linux, Microsoft would have bargaining leverage, just as it did in the early 1990s, when (1992) Windows had only about 35% market share and MS-DOS (including MS-DOS + Windows) had only about 58% market share. That's less than Google's market share today, and nobody can seriously claim 35% market share, or even 58% market share, was a monopoly. Nevertheless, vendors put up with Microsoft's behaviour because of the value added by MS-DOS and Windows.
If Microsoft Windows faced a competitor of equal quality, then yes, it would be a very bad situation for Microsoft. However, if Windows can be differentiated enough to provide more value to computer sellers and users, it doesn't have to be a monopoly. That's how most economic sectors work, i.e. competition is not between identical goods, but between goods that are differentiated enough that the producers have some power to set prices, under what's called monopolistic competition.
Whenever an industry becomes commoditised, i.e. moves from monopolistic competition towards perfect competition, the ability to add value through differentation evaporates, and so does the ability to earn above-normal profit. If this were to happen in operating systems, it would be a disaster for Microsoft, but monopolistic competition, i.e. the middle ground between monopoly and perfect competition, could be highly profitable, as in many other industries, and as it was for Microsoft in the early 1990s.
The concept that's patented is a high-level one, which can last for decades, not a specific set of source code, which probably would be obsolete in 5-10 years. The question of whether or not it's patentable is mostly just a matter of means and ends, i.e. you can patent a way of doing something, but not the objective of doing it. For example, you can't patent something as broad as 'a bridge', but you can patent a certain type of bridge construction, e.g. http://www.mnhs.org/places/nationalregister/bridge s/nrblnb/sign.html.
Yes, it is well known to anyone who's looked into the workings of the SCO Group.
Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell in 1996, for $400 thousand, long after the alleged damage to the product had been done. The company settled with Microsoft over the DR-DOS lawsuit for an 'undisclosed sum' in January 2000, which Microsoft valued at $155 mn, but others speculated was actually 'much higher'.
In August 2000, Caldera agreed to acquire the Santa Cruz Operation's Unix products, including UnixWare and the SCO name. Caldera later changed its name to The SCO Group, but Caldera management remained in charge, i.e. the company was actually Caldera, not the old Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, and in 2005 was acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Caldera's financial statements (see www.sec.gov) show it lost more money in 1999 and 2000 than its total revenue for each year, and had negative cash flows from operations. How was such a company able to issue equity that investors actually bought, pay for its ongoing losses and come up with enough money to acquire and sustain UnixWare, another loss-making business, along with the SCO name, in a deal valued at $91 mn? The answer is that the entire operation was funded by the DR-DOS lawsuit.
Most of the people I associate with are pursuing, or have already earned, postgraduate degrees at university, so I don't think you've hit the right reason. As far as I know, we get much in the way of NASCAR or professional wresting on TV either, although I do enjoy watching the occasional football match.
The details of the conflict between Microsoft and Digital Research don't matter. The point is that DR-DOS was a product developed by Digital Research Inc. (DRI, not to be confused with DEC), and had nothing to do with Caldera. If DRI had sued Microsoft, or if Novell had sued after it acquried DRI, when DOS was still relevant in the marketplace, that would have been one thing, but that isn't what happened.
By 1996, when Caldera bought the rights to DR-DOS from the imploding Novell, the product was fully obsolete. The only significant value of DR-DOS to Caldera was in allowing it to launch a lawsuit against Microsoft. The DR-DOS lawsuit was settled before going to trial, with a large payment from Microsoft to Caldera. It was not only the prototype for Caldera's later Linux lawsuit, it also funded Caldera's acquisition of the UnixWare source code and SCO brand, making the Linux lawsuit possible.
Individual software releases, yes, but not the underlying concepts. The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was written in 1979, for example, and the spreadsheet concept is still important today. Many of the UI innovations from Xerox Parc were developed in the 1970s too, but are still essential parts of modern GUIs.
I agree that 20 years is too long for software patents, but software concepts can easily last much longer than that. Think of how old the command line concept is, for example, or basic architectural concepts like dividing a system into a 'kernel' and 'shell'.
Actually, the SCO Group was never a Unix vendor. It used to be called Caldera, and had a fairly extensive track record for lawsuits, including buying the rights to DR-DOS in the 1990s, so it could sue Microsoft over some alleged infringements in MS-DOS.
Caldera bought the SCO name and UnixWare source code from the old Santa Cruz Operation, which was a somewhat respected Unix vendor, and thus became The SCO Group. However, after selling UnixWare and the SCO name to Caldera, the Santa Cruz Operation changed its name to Tarantella, and was eventually bought by Sun Microsystems.
Caldera's/SCO's tactic of buying old software in order to sue people didn't come from Microsoft, it's something Caldera/SCO management came up with on their own. I think the evidence suggests Microsoft played a role in SCO's Linux lawsuit, but if Microsoft came up with the idea rather than Caldera/SCO, it probably came from having been earlier sued by Caldera anyway.
I agree it won't be easy for Dell to please the Slashdot crowd. As for me, I'll be happy if Linux support from Dell and others means Linux hardware compatibility improves enough so I can install it alongside Windows. Right now, Linux runs too poorly on my hardware to be useful, so it's less painful to always run Windows, and use Win32 ports/equivalents of FOSS tools I miss.
As for Linux generally, I don't really hope Dell win over or don't win over more users to Linux. If it spurs competition, I think that's probably good, but I'm not much of a 'fan' of software, I just use whichever works best for me. I actually like FreeBSD more than Linux, even though it has a tiny user base, but the hardware support is even worse. A bigger user base would improve hardware support, which is good, but would it force FreeBSD to change in negative ways? I don't know.
The fines aren't important. The real costs of being treated as a monopoly are strategic, not financial. Without monopoly restrictions, Microsoft could require all firms selling Windows to bundle IE, exclude Java, Firefox and any Google software, set all the search defaults to MSN/Live, require bundling of free competitors to any threatening applications, e.g. a free XPS reader with degraded PDF support, etc. In other words, they could return to the way they behaved in the early 90s.
The key application for Windows is probably Office, which Microsoft also own, and could keep off of Linux. Most bespoke software tied to Windows is built with MS tools and uses.NET, ActiveX, etc., so that wouldn't be easy to port to Linux either. Two of the most important things tying users to Windows are thus owned by Microsoft, so won't be ported to Linux.
In any case, if 25% market share will allow Linux to kill Windows, then it's only a matter of time before it happens. However, I don't think it's so simple. I think Microsoft's own applications, development tools and vendor support add enough value to make Windows a competitive platform. As an example, none of the non-technical people I know who've tried Linux have stuck with it. Is it just the lack of applications, excluding the Microsoft ones, that drives them away from Linux? I doubt it.
Maybe it's all part of a plan by Microsoft to show Windows is no longer a monopoly, and that the restrictions on bundling, requirements to publish APIs and so on can now be ended. No, I don't really believe this, but if I were conspiracy-minded, I might.
From a business perspective, I think keeping the customers who pay for Windows and pushing the ones who don't over to Linux would actually be a good plan for Microsoft. More than 20% of software in North America is pirated, more than 25% in northern Europe and higher everywhere else.
Assuming the overall rates roughly apply to Windows, getting rid of the pirates would shrink 90-95% market share to 70-75% in the regions with the least piracy, and much less elsewhere: around 60% on average globally. With global market share levels of 45-75% (just a guess, around the average of 60% with the high of 75%), all paying, Microsoft would get the same amount of revenue, but would probably escape being treated as a monopoly.
I don't think it'll be bad for Ubuntu overall. Almost all PC vendors, not just Dell, put bloatware on their PCs, and that's one of the reasons they like Windows, i.e. the bloatware they want to distribute runs on it. That's why I always reinstall Windows after buying a new PC, and then install only the software I actually want.
I think you're confusing Linux with Unix. Unix is the operating system developed at Bell Labs in the 1960s-80s, by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie amongst others, which forked into various systems. Unix was the basis for BSD, developed by Bill Joy and the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, which turned Unix, especially Solaris, into the platform that powered the Internet revolution.
Linux is a copy of Unix, which was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, then an undergraduate student at the University of Helsinki. It was initially very primitive compared to Unix, but gradually caught up, and is now more than a match, in most ways, for Unix. It's also probably the leading Internet server platform, having displaced Unix for various reasons. However, it is an entirely different 'genetic line' to the Unix line, the most popular version of which is SunOS/Solaris.
I think you're right. At first I was very puzzled that Microsoft appeared to be launching a patent war, but now it doesn't look like that's what they're doing at all. In the 'MAD' terminology, I think it's closer to a nuclear test than to a nuclear strike.
The first version of Windows NT was actually released in 1993 (development started in 1988), whereas Linux didn't reach 1.0 until 1994 (development started in 1991). Even then, Linux was very limited in terms of features, and was highly x86-centric. In contrast, Windows NT was portable (developed on MIPS), with kernel threads, SMP, an asynchronous I/O model, a pre-emptable and partially pageable kernel, a journalled file system and the list goes on.
Today, Linux is a fine operating system with features and performance comparable to other leading operating systems. In 1994, it simply wasn't, and certainly not in the pre-1.0 era of 1991-94.
As for OS/2, it was not developed by IBM, but jointly by both Microsoft and IBM, until they split in the early 90s. OS/2 isn't really anything to be proud of, however. Windows NT, developed by a team who mostly came to Microsoft from DEC, was technically superior to OS/2 in virtually every way, and so were leading Unix systems like Solaris. Linux was quite primitive in the early days, but eventually overtook OS/2 too.
It's quite simple, really. Karl Benz is regarded by many as the inventor of the motor car, and applied for a patent on his motor car design in 1885, which was granted in 1886. However, this doesn't mean there have been no new ideas in car design since 1885! Indeed, a modern car is so different from a car of 1885 that they are barely the same thing. There has been a massive number of new ideas in car design since 1885, and these were not 'stolen' from Benz or anyone else. They were simply new ideas that built on the earlier work, just in fact as the work of Benz built on the earlier work of others.
The GUI was invented at Xerox Parc, but GUIs in their modern form did not come fully formed from Parc in the 1970s. Others who followed Xerox, e.g. Apple, Microsoft and may others, have added new ideas over the decades, and these new ideas were not stolen from Parc. It is probably these ideas that have been patented, and not the earlier ideas of Parc, unless Xerox for some reason neglected to patent them.
Strategically, though, the US is comitting seppuku if it allows a few fat cats to patent obvious things, stifle innovation, destroy productivity, and otherwise distract from useful work.
From an economics perspective, I think it would be fascinating if the EU and USA were to adopt different regimes on software patents. It would be a real-world experiment into the validity of the idea that allowing patents does more to spur innovation than to hinder it.
I'm assuming differing regimes would mean selling software in one market would require patent royalties, irrespective of where it was developed, whereas in the other it wouldn't, so that competition would still be on a level field in each market. I am, however, also assuming reform of patent regimes to eliminate obvious patents, and only allow software concepts to be patented that are broadly equivalent to patentable ideas in other sectors.
I have absolutely no idea which regime would produce the stronger software industry, although the USA starts with a fairly substantial advantage, so it's difficult to say how things would develop. I suppose the real test would be whether or not US firms began transferring software development work to the EU, vice-versa or neither. The first and last cases would support abolition of software patents, whereas the middle case would do the opposite.
I'm not certain what the current state of affairs on EU software patents is. I believe the MERIT report on whether or not software ought to be patentable, which was commissioned by the EC, isn't due until the second half of the year. However, noises last year from the EC suggested a decision against software patents had already been taken.
No, no, you're confusing Microsoft's market capitalisation with its cash pile. The size of Microsoft's cash pile is absolutely not affected by movements in the share price. It is not 'paper wealth', i.e. wealth derived from unrealised increases in the value of assets, but actual cash and eqiuvalents. In contrast to the cash pile, Microsoft's market capitalisation has everything to do with expectations of future business and the share price.
Microsoft's ca. $30 bn in cash will not change in value if Microsoft's share price changes, nor will its value change on the basis of future business or expectations. The cash pile can grow or shrink based on what Microsoft decide to do with their cash flows, but the $30 bn in cash that Microsoft hold is worth $30 bn, full stop.
$30 billion sounds like a lot of money until you consider their burn rate: "$29 billion on hand at last count was less than half the cash and short-term investments held by Microsoft about two years ago."
Microsoft have been deliberately drawing down their cash pile, by distributing it to shareholders through special dividends and share buybacks. This isn't at all the same thing as 'burning' cash, i.e. a negative cash flow from operations and/or investment.
If you look at the company's SEC filings, Microsoft's operations generated a cash flow of ca. $7.3 bn in the first three months of 2007. Why didn't this lead to large growth in the cash pile? Because they used ca. $6.8 bn to repurchase shares. In other words, they don't know what to do with all the cash they're generating, so they're giving it to shareholders, just as they ought to do.
So I would suggest that you are right with one small edit: MS's cash "has absolutely" *everything* "to do with Microsoft's share price, or with future business."
No, no, the share price has nothing to do with it. Indeed, at the end of the.com boom in 2000, Microsoft's share price tumbled, but as you can see in the article you linked to, this had no impact on the company's cash pile, which continued to grow until Microsoft management decided, in 2004 or so, to start distributing it to shareholders through share buybacks and special dividends.
Returning to the point of the discussion, Microsoft's cash pile is easily sufficient to wage legal warfare over patents, if that's what Microsoft's management decide to do, although I can't imagine they are really that stupid. The claim that it consists of Microsoft shares, and is thus vulnerable to fluctuations in the share price, is simply wrong. Moreover, if Microsoft decided to stop using their enormous cash flows to buy back shares, they'd have billions more in cash each quarter, which they could spend on lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
My overall impression of Vista is that it really does perform better than XP if you have enough RAM, but quite a bit worse if you don't. The security enhancements also mean it ought to be much more secure, but I was always careful under XP, so never had any security issues with it either. One other thing is that a lot of people really do like the eye candy, so to them it's a big selling point. It's not a major one for me, but I've no complaints about a pretty UI, and Vista's is the prettiest I've seen so far.
It's not the same as the jump from MS-DOS to Windows 3.1, or from Windows 3.1/9x to Windows NT, but it's a much bigger step than NT 4.0 to Windows 2000, or Windows 2000 to XP.
I haven't had any problems with this supposedly intrusive DRM either, and I've even enabled the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the BIOS on my PC. I sometimes work with confidential data, so I'm looking forward to being able to use DRM to protect it. I don't much care for the idea of DRM for music, though, because I use it on too many different things, so it would be a hassle unless they all transparently supported it, transferred the licences, etc.
The switch from the dual home/professional lines Microsoft have used since 1993 (when Windows NT was released) to a multi-level (and potentially more confusing) product line is quite a big change. It will be interesting to see if, over time, people just buy the cheapest one (i.e. they buy Windows because it's there), or if they continue to buy the premium ones, suggesting they're actually putting thought into their OS purchase choices.
It will also be interesting to see how Linux sales on Dell PCs progress, and whether it's chosen mostly with cheap systems, or if any significant number of buyers of more expensive systems also choose Linux. From an economics perspective, it's all very interesting.
I think the issue is that this can help malware to hide itself on a machine it's already infected, by using this BITS service to silently bypass policy settings. BITS itself runs with 'SYSTEM' privileges (the closest thing to 'root' there is on Windows), but I can't tell from the article if malware run by a normal user can hijack BITS, or if it has to be run by an administrator. In the first case, I'd consider it a security vulnerability, but not in the second.
As for the market structure, PC hardware was a commodity market by 1992, but this was not the case for individual components like the CPU or OS, and arguably still isn't. If you swap an HP for a Fujitsu-Siemens, they're about the same, so yes, you can say PCs are commodities, but that was also true in the early 1990s. If you swap Windows for Linux, the differences are enormous. There is simply no way you can say they are identical products, from the point of view of either PC vendors or PC users.
If Microsoft Windows faced a competitor of equal quality, then yes, it would be a very bad situation for Microsoft. However, if Windows can be differentiated enough to provide more value to computer sellers and users, it doesn't have to be a monopoly. That's how most economic sectors work, i.e. competition is not between identical goods, but between goods that are differentiated enough that the producers have some power to set prices, under what's called monopolistic competition.
Whenever an industry becomes commoditised, i.e. moves from monopolistic competition towards perfect competition, the ability to add value through differentation evaporates, and so does the ability to earn above-normal profit. If this were to happen in operating systems, it would be a disaster for Microsoft, but monopolistic competition, i.e. the middle ground between monopoly and perfect competition, could be highly profitable, as in many other industries, and as it was for Microsoft in the early 1990s.
The concept that's patented is a high-level one, which can last for decades, not a specific set of source code, which probably would be obsolete in 5-10 years. The question of whether or not it's patentable is mostly just a matter of means and ends, i.e. you can patent a way of doing something, but not the objective of doing it. For example, you can't patent something as broad as 'a bridge', but you can patent a certain type of bridge construction, e.g. http://www.mnhs.org/places/nationalregister/bridge s/nrblnb/sign.html.
Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell in 1996, for $400 thousand, long after the alleged damage to the product had been done. The company settled with Microsoft over the DR-DOS lawsuit for an 'undisclosed sum' in January 2000, which Microsoft valued at $155 mn, but others speculated was actually 'much higher'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/600488.stm
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/804 5/8045.html?Ad=1
In August 2000, Caldera agreed to acquire the Santa Cruz Operation's Unix products, including UnixWare and the SCO name. Caldera later changed its name to The SCO Group, but Caldera management remained in charge, i.e. the company was actually Caldera, not the old Santa Cruz Operation, which became Tarantella, and in 2005 was acquired by Sun Microsystems.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/08/02/ 000802hncaldera.html
http://www.sun.com/software/tarantella/index.xml
Caldera's financial statements (see www.sec.gov) show it lost more money in 1999 and 2000 than its total revenue for each year, and had negative cash flows from operations. How was such a company able to issue equity that investors actually bought, pay for its ongoing losses and come up with enough money to acquire and sustain UnixWare, another loss-making business, along with the SCO name, in a deal valued at $91 mn? The answer is that the entire operation was funded by the DR-DOS lawsuit.
http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/linux/c aldera-buys-sco-unix-professional-services/
http://www.newsforge.com/os/04/03/30/0047220.shtml
Oops, I mean we don't get much in the way of NASCAR or professional wrestling on TV.
Most of the people I associate with are pursuing, or have already earned, postgraduate degrees at university, so I don't think you've hit the right reason. As far as I know, we get much in the way of NASCAR or professional wresting on TV either, although I do enjoy watching the occasional football match.
By 1996, when Caldera bought the rights to DR-DOS from the imploding Novell, the product was fully obsolete. The only significant value of DR-DOS to Caldera was in allowing it to launch a lawsuit against Microsoft. The DR-DOS lawsuit was settled before going to trial, with a large payment from Microsoft to Caldera. It was not only the prototype for Caldera's later Linux lawsuit, it also funded Caldera's acquisition of the UnixWare source code and SCO brand, making the Linux lawsuit possible.
I agree that 20 years is too long for software patents, but software concepts can easily last much longer than that. Think of how old the command line concept is, for example, or basic architectural concepts like dividing a system into a 'kernel' and 'shell'.
Caldera bought the SCO name and UnixWare source code from the old Santa Cruz Operation, which was a somewhat respected Unix vendor, and thus became The SCO Group. However, after selling UnixWare and the SCO name to Caldera, the Santa Cruz Operation changed its name to Tarantella, and was eventually bought by Sun Microsystems.
Caldera's/SCO's tactic of buying old software in order to sue people didn't come from Microsoft, it's something Caldera/SCO management came up with on their own. I think the evidence suggests Microsoft played a role in SCO's Linux lawsuit, but if Microsoft came up with the idea rather than Caldera/SCO, it probably came from having been earlier sued by Caldera anyway.
As for Linux generally, I don't really hope Dell win over or don't win over more users to Linux. If it spurs competition, I think that's probably good, but I'm not much of a 'fan' of software, I just use whichever works best for me. I actually like FreeBSD more than Linux, even though it has a tiny user base, but the hardware support is even worse. A bigger user base would improve hardware support, which is good, but would it force FreeBSD to change in negative ways? I don't know.
The key application for Windows is probably Office, which Microsoft also own, and could keep off of Linux. Most bespoke software tied to Windows is built with MS tools and uses .NET, ActiveX, etc., so that wouldn't be easy to port to Linux either. Two of the most important things tying users to Windows are thus owned by Microsoft, so won't be ported to Linux.
In any case, if 25% market share will allow Linux to kill Windows, then it's only a matter of time before it happens. However, I don't think it's so simple. I think Microsoft's own applications, development tools and vendor support add enough value to make Windows a competitive platform. As an example, none of the non-technical people I know who've tried Linux have stuck with it. Is it just the lack of applications, excluding the Microsoft ones, that drives them away from Linux? I doubt it.
From a business perspective, I think keeping the customers who pay for Windows and pushing the ones who don't over to Linux would actually be a good plan for Microsoft. More than 20% of software in North America is pirated, more than 25% in northern Europe and higher everywhere else.
Assuming the overall rates roughly apply to Windows, getting rid of the pirates would shrink 90-95% market share to 70-75% in the regions with the least piracy, and much less elsewhere: around 60% on average globally. With global market share levels of 45-75% (just a guess, around the average of 60% with the high of 75%), all paying, Microsoft would get the same amount of revenue, but would probably escape being treated as a monopoly.
I don't think it'll be bad for Ubuntu overall. Almost all PC vendors, not just Dell, put bloatware on their PCs, and that's one of the reasons they like Windows, i.e. the bloatware they want to distribute runs on it. That's why I always reinstall Windows after buying a new PC, and then install only the software I actually want.
Linux is a copy of Unix, which was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, then an undergraduate student at the University of Helsinki. It was initially very primitive compared to Unix, but gradually caught up, and is now more than a match, in most ways, for Unix. It's also probably the leading Internet server platform, having displaced Unix for various reasons. However, it is an entirely different 'genetic line' to the Unix line, the most popular version of which is SunOS/Solaris.
I think you're right. At first I was very puzzled that Microsoft appeared to be launching a patent war, but now it doesn't look like that's what they're doing at all. In the 'MAD' terminology, I think it's closer to a nuclear test than to a nuclear strike.
Today, Linux is a fine operating system with features and performance comparable to other leading operating systems. In 1994, it simply wasn't, and certainly not in the pre-1.0 era of 1991-94.
As for OS/2, it was not developed by IBM, but jointly by both Microsoft and IBM, until they split in the early 90s. OS/2 isn't really anything to be proud of, however. Windows NT, developed by a team who mostly came to Microsoft from DEC, was technically superior to OS/2 in virtually every way, and so were leading Unix systems like Solaris. Linux was quite primitive in the early days, but eventually overtook OS/2 too.
The GUI was invented at Xerox Parc, but GUIs in their modern form did not come fully formed from Parc in the 1970s. Others who followed Xerox, e.g. Apple, Microsoft and may others, have added new ideas over the decades, and these new ideas were not stolen from Parc. It is probably these ideas that have been patented, and not the earlier ideas of Parc, unless Xerox for some reason neglected to patent them.
I'm assuming differing regimes would mean selling software in one market would require patent royalties, irrespective of where it was developed, whereas in the other it wouldn't, so that competition would still be on a level field in each market. I am, however, also assuming reform of patent regimes to eliminate obvious patents, and only allow software concepts to be patented that are broadly equivalent to patentable ideas in other sectors.
I have absolutely no idea which regime would produce the stronger software industry, although the USA starts with a fairly substantial advantage, so it's difficult to say how things would develop. I suppose the real test would be whether or not US firms began transferring software development work to the EU, vice-versa or neither. The first and last cases would support abolition of software patents, whereas the middle case would do the opposite.
I'm not certain what the current state of affairs on EU software patents is. I believe the MERIT report on whether or not software ought to be patentable, which was commissioned by the EC, isn't due until the second half of the year. However, noises last year from the EC suggested a decision against software patents had already been taken.
Microsoft's ca. $30 bn in cash will not change in value if Microsoft's share price changes, nor will its value change on the basis of future business or expectations. The cash pile can grow or shrink based on what Microsoft decide to do with their cash flows, but the $30 bn in cash that Microsoft hold is worth $30 bn, full stop.
If you look at the company's SEC filings, Microsoft's operations generated a cash flow of ca. $7.3 bn in the first three months of 2007. Why didn't this lead to large growth in the cash pile? Because they used ca. $6.8 bn to repurchase shares. In other words, they don't know what to do with all the cash they're generating, so they're giving it to shareholders, just as they ought to do.
No, no, the share price has nothing to do with it. Indeed, at the end of theReturning to the point of the discussion, Microsoft's cash pile is easily sufficient to wage legal warfare over patents, if that's what Microsoft's management decide to do, although I can't imagine they are really that stupid. The claim that it consists of Microsoft shares, and is thus vulnerable to fluctuations in the share price, is simply wrong. Moreover, if Microsoft decided to stop using their enormous cash flows to buy back shares, they'd have billions more in cash each quarter, which they could spend on lawyers.