The war was over ten years ago.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| dinotrac Apr 19, 2011 4:38 AM EDT |
Since then, it's been like the Reconstruction years in the US -- the losers keep kicking, but losers they are. Microsoft failed in its plan, which was to own IT lock, stock, and barrel. It wanted the desktop and it wanted the server room and it wanted the internet. It has the desktop and will keep it for a long time, maybe forever. The sheer number of desktops make any simple tally look very impressive -- an unused netbook counts the same as a 16-way web server pumping out pages. But -- we all know better, and we can see it even on those Windows desktops, which might be running Firefox or Chrome instead of Internet Explorer, maybe even OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office (though that's still relatively rare in the US). Whether or not Linux has won, Microsoft has lost. You want a real measure of how far the Mighty have fallen? Listen around for conversations about cool new tech and see how often Microsoft's name comes up. When it does, how often is the topic something other than Kinect (which actually is truly cool, and seems like it should have come from Apply or Google or Nintendo). |
| jdixon Apr 19, 2011 9:11 AM EDT |
> It has the desktop and will keep it for a long time, maybe forever Possibly. Though Vista was a huge shock to that system. Fortunately for Microsoft, Windows 7 appears to have averted that crisis. But even on the desktop, Linux is available and a viable alternative for those willing to seek it out. And the combined market share of Apple and Linux is enough to keep intelligent vendors from limiting themselves to Windows only. So even on the desktop, the Microsoft's dream hasn't been fully achieved. |
| dinotrac Apr 19, 2011 10:58 AM EDT |
@JD: Nope. And -- I saw a presentation at WindyCityGo that talked about an expanded definition of mobile devices -- one that includes maybe not-so-mobile devices that use mobile platforms like stoves and refrigerators -- and those are android space. |
| skelband Apr 19, 2011 12:50 PM EDT |
@dinotrac: I actually agree 100% with this. MS still has a strangle hold on the desktop market, but the reality is that the market itself has changed SO unbelievably fast (to mobile computing) that Microsoft just didn't stand a chance. Early last year, anyone that had half a brain could see that the future was Android through sheer numbers and Microsoft weren't even in that area. |
| cfcrawford Apr 19, 2011 2:28 PM EDT |
I agree w/ dinotrac and skelband ... and I actually have never thought of the fact that they (Microsoft) haven't really released anything "cool" in a loooong time. Oh, and for what it's worth ... I think that Windows Phone is a flop too. |
| TxtEdMacs Apr 19, 2011 3:19 PM EDT |
It is the height of arrogance to declare victory prematurely, it leads to myopic, self satisfaction where the facts might rule otherwise. MS owns more than the desktop. At the so-called enterprise level that ownership leverages a portion of the server room for calendaring and appointment scheduling synchronization, albeit using an inferior technology. This lock in seems to be quite effective in many businesses. You can hope that the Windows phone will be a failure, however, that is NOT a certainty. Given that MS has effectively bought a handset vendor that will offer Windows phones exclusively (at least for a significant period) one should withhold judgment until the market has spoken. Moreover, where it seemed that MS labored under a set of restricted offerings seeming to be unable to run on many mobile devices, it has recently demonstrated a form of Windows running on the ARM chips. Perhaps, MS's ARM OS will be flawed, half baked or even a disaster. However, at this stage that cannot be foretold. MS might still become a worthy competitor where it now seems only marginal, at best, factor currently. They certainly have the needed incentive. To ignore these possibilities, invites being blind sided by developments that are now disparaged by those doing a victory dance just a bit too soon. YBT, being uncharacteristically serious. |
| dinotrac Apr 19, 2011 3:46 PM EDT |
@Txt: Prematurely? Are you kidding? This war was lost more than ten years ago in the transition from NT3.0 - NT4.0. It wasn't obvious at the time, but that's when Microsoft brought the graphics shell into the kernel and focused its pitch on cheap commodity hardware + cheap people, then began squeezing some of its best and biggest customers on software pricing. Many linux toehold was won with stealth Samba servers in organizations struggling to deliver the goods without busting the budget. It was obvious to anybody who could put two and two together -- which is my way of saying a relatively small number of people realized it at the time. Doesn't mean Microsoft is dead, but even if they get whatever mojo they ever had back, the world is a different place. They lost, and they lost big. |
| jdixon Apr 19, 2011 4:00 PM EDT |
> Many linux toehold was won with stealth Samba servers in organizations struggling to deliver the goods without busting the budget. Sometime back in the 90's, some Windows centric magazine actually did a comparison study of a Linux print server vs. an NT print server over a period of 3 months. They ran the servers in parallel for the entire time. They found no significant performance differences. Both servers handled the load with no problems. In fact, overall there was only one significant difference: The NT server had to be rebooted 3 or 4 times during the 3 month period. The Linux box didn't. It never went down. Their astonishment almost came through in the text. :) A quick Google search doesn't turn up the article, unfortunately. |
| skelband Apr 19, 2011 4:34 PM EDT |
@TxtEdMacs: You may be right but... I doubt it. Windows came along at a time when there was no real competition. There were no dominant players. The WIMP GUI paradigm was only just coming into the mainstream. They hit the market hard and fast and quickly built a familiarity and a feeling of ubiquity. They spent the most effort on making sure there was no credible competition rather than out-competing other products. Interestingly, apart from the iPhone as a brand, there is no single brand dominance in the phone/tablet market yet. The Linux desktop has always suffered from competition with the incumbent player with no obvious reason to most people why they should change. Windows is just that thing that makes a PC work. You can see Microsoft and Apple in their adverts trying to reinforce that idea that PC and Windows are somehow synonymous. ("Hello! I'm a Mac...and I'm a PC") Most people up until fairly recently didn't care (or know) what the OS of a phone was so there was room for a new player to set the tone for the market. You have to remember that most people don't choose Windows, it is the de facto default. In the emerging mobile market, customers actively choose their preferred environment and there is no compelling reason at the moment, for people to choose Microsoft. Where is the large sought-after software application infrastructure for the MS Phone? People are choosing iPhone and Android for the applications and bling factor. MS have never *really* been in that position of having to market their products to people as desirable devices. Yes, they do advertise on the TV when they feel that they have to, but it is only a brand reinforcement effort. People don't usually choose Windows where there are already incumbents that are more familiar. |
| hkwint Apr 20, 2011 11:14 AM EDT |
Well, if we shouldn't rule out Nokia and Windows, I guess we shouldn't rule out HP and RIM either. HP moves a bit away from Microsoft, and RIM doesn't move towards them. |
| dinotrac Apr 20, 2011 12:07 PM EDT |
@hans -- You hit on an extremely important difference in the world today and the world 12-15 years ago. 12-15 years ago, Microsoft absolutely OWNED the desktop space. Competitors like Apple, Amiga, Atari, Gem, etc were shriveling up and dying on the vine. IBM had been thoroughly bushwacked on the OS/2 joint venture -- even though OS/2 was much sounder technology than Windows. It's also easy to forget now that Apple was dying in the mid 90s with Steve Jobs kicked out and former Pepsi exec John Sculley doing his best to kill it off entirely. Only a pledge to keep producing Office for Mac + $150 million in cash allowed Steve Jobs to come back and rescue the company. Microsoft owned the desktop and the new Windows N/T -- a very solid OS (at first) put together by some of the best and the brightest mines from DEC was taking aim at the Server room-- and was multi-platform to boot. It's a very different world today. Microsoft is still a giant, but it just isn't giant enough. |
| gus3 Apr 20, 2011 12:50 PM EDT |
Microsoft may be a giant, but Linux is a shape-shifter. |
| tuxchick Apr 20, 2011 1:10 PM EDT |
The war is over? Then why don't we see Linux, Mac, and Winderz PCs side by side in the stores? Androids are mobile entertainment toys, they're not PCs. Did something change when I wasn't looking and we don't need to worry about legal assaults against Linux and FOSS anymore, the patent wars, subverting standards, DRM, subverting public policy, forcing trade "agreements" and terrible laws on other countries? |
| skelband Apr 20, 2011 1:51 PM EDT |
@tuxchick: The war is over Yep. It is easy to get obsessed with the traditional desktop. Linux will never win that one. But for a large portion of mainstream computing tasks, the desktop itself is becoming irrelevant. People are doing their computing (reading email, editing documents, IRC, video...) on mobile devices and Microsoft are just not there or at least not in a big enough way that matters. They did have a little go and totally fumbled the ball. It's not a question of MS losing desktop share to Linux: the desktop, although still crucial for many things (like development) is becoming a lot less relevant to most people. If you think about it, most users at home use their desktop principally for the things that they are now using their mobile phone for. There are other parallels where we see this happening as well. How many people now don't have a land-line phone because they do all of their call-making on a mobile? The land-line just became irrelevant for them. I know a large number of these people. |
| cfcrawford Apr 20, 2011 2:38 PM EDT |
I can't recall the product name or the company ... but it really doesn't matter. There is a commercial out there about a phone that comes with a docking station. Something like: "it's a computer and a phone". I believe that it is Android based too. That is a major departure IMO from the "traditional desktop". Is that where we are headed? EDIT: It's the Motorola ATRIX and it does run on Android. |
| helios Apr 20, 2011 3:11 PM EDT |
It's the Motorola ATRIX and it does run on Android. Yeah, and the idiot that cleared that commercial for air time should be fired. That commercial claims that the device "comes with 48 gigs of Memory" 10 years of teaching people the difference between hard drive space and memory has just been undone.... That is, for the Dancing With the Stars and Jersey Shore pop culture crowd anyway. I've written them off as brain-dead and dead-weight for any significant contributions to society. |
| dinotrac Apr 20, 2011 3:31 PM EDT |
@TC: Yup, the war is over. Doesn't mean all the traces are gone any more than the fact that Little Rock schools didn't get desgregated until 1954 meant the Confederacy won the Civil War. Neither did all of those Japanese soldiers holed up on islands mean that WWII wasn't over after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wars are often decided long before the fighting stops, and long before the loser scores its last victory. The great Japanese general Yamomoto -- the one who planned Pearl Harbor -- believed that the attack was a grave mistake, and that Japan lost the war the day it woke a sleeping giant. |
| gus3 Apr 20, 2011 3:35 PM EDT |
@helios: It may be non-volatile storage like a hard drive, but there's no "drive" in flash memory. Calling it a "flash drive" is a misnomer. Time was, the spinning drum was the memory. The Story of Mel contains one such example. |
| helios Apr 20, 2011 3:45 PM EDT |
@ gus Yeah, that got by me....point taken. |
| gus3 Apr 20, 2011 4:50 PM EDT |
One more point: The non-volatile storage and the memory may be one and the same. That's what the ext2 filesystem's Execute-In-Place (XIP) feature for embedded systems is all about: being able to run the code directly from storage, rather than incurring page faults and storage I/O. Everything old is new again. Okay, enough harping. |
| tuxchick Apr 20, 2011 4:54 PM EDT |
Desktop PCs are still vitally important to hundreds of millions of users. Any real productivity requires a PC-- audio production, accounting, publishing and writing, graphics, gaming, CAD, and so on and on. Smartphones are not desktop replacements. They're not even good email and Web surfing replacements. They're great little tools and they're not PCs. |
| helios Apr 20, 2011 5:03 PM EDT |
+1 TC |
| tuxchick Apr 20, 2011 5:30 PM EDT |
I suppose you're right, Dino, and my desire to see heads on pikes will never be realized. |
| gus3 Apr 20, 2011 5:38 PM EDT |
What does Rob Pike have to do with it? |
| skelband Apr 20, 2011 5:44 PM EDT |
@tuxchick: I agree with you entirely, but that's not my point. "Number of Smartphones Worldwide Exceeded 180 Million Units in 2009" http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1421013 "International Data Corp is showing that in the final quarter of 2010, smartphones passed global PC shipments for the first time in history." http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/07/idc-smartphone-shipme... Consumer computing is expanding at an exponential rate and it's *not* on the desktop. To the likes of you and me, "computing" means using a desktop to do publishing, coding, browsing the web and stuff. The the ordinary punter on the street, it means watching YouTube videos, reading email, sending messages, reading the web, reading e-books (more often newspapers and magazines delivered in electronic form), playing games, using GPS mapping, ... And more and more, they are not doing this on their PC at home. They are doing it on mobile phones and (to a lesser extent at the moment, but more in the future) on pads/tablets. We here on LXer have a very narrow view of what is typical for a computing consumer. Some of the things in the lists above you might not even recognise as traditional computing tasks but they are in the sense that they are done on a computer using an application. There will always be some need for a desktop or something powerful and tethered. It's just that the emerging market for computing is much, much bigger and more diverse than in the past and that is where we are seeing Linux/Android making the big gains. It is a mistake to judge the success or otherwise of Linux from the desktop market alone. You have to look at the bigger computing picture and see that the desktop is becoming a proportionately smaller and smaller part of that picture. |
| Fettoosh Apr 20, 2011 6:00 PM EDT |
Quoting:Yup, the war is over. So it seems, yet MS is still capable/able of taking hostage any firm that releases its hardware with Linux. The technological war is over but the psychological one is just beginning. MS used to make news any time they wanted to, lately, they make news only when they sue. Yes they lost the tech war, but the snake is still capable of making very venomous bite in spite of being severely wounded. So the war is still raging and might continue for a long time given MS huge coffers. Quoting:Desktop PCs are still vitally important to hundreds of millions of users.... So true, especially in the corporate sector and for serious home users. But, more advanced devices like the Atrix could change all of that. Corporations some day will wake up and realize that a full fledged desktop, a tablet, and a separate mobile device are no longer necessary. They would only need dock-able peripherals to add to the main computing device to run applications and access information. |
| dinotrac Apr 20, 2011 7:05 PM EDT |
@tc et al... You guys miss one very big dynamic -- PCs are not immune to mobiles. I'm reminded of an event that breathed new life into mainframes more than ten years ago: Linux was ported onto them. Mainframes have always had terrific I/O subsystems, and hardware support for virtual machines. Some dead old dinosaurs became fairly slick linux server farms. All this android technology -- esp WRT tablets -- will make people more and more accustomed to computing that isn't Windows. That, in turn, will make desktops that aren't Windows more palatable to more people. It's already happened with the huge rebound in Apple sales. Ginormous networking effects are not overcome in a day, but Microsoft is slowly fading into the woodwork. Heck -- even its patent threats have been largely de-fanged by recent court decisions. |
| skelband Apr 20, 2011 7:40 PM EDT |
@dinotrac: Funny that, I was just thinking that very thing on the way home. Is it even just feasible that an incumbent on the mobile scene could translate back to the desktop? Could people get sufficiently familiar and "comfortable" with an Android UI that integration with a home system might be slicker and more seamless if it had the same or similar interface as opposed to Windows? How many people with iPhones have also a Mac because they fit together better? I really couldn't say, personally, but it makes for some interesting thought experiments.... |
| dinotrac Apr 20, 2011 8:03 PM EDT |
skelband... I don't see why not. When you use one interface to deal with the giant touch screen taking the place of magnets to put pictures on your refrigerator, on your phone, on your freakin' stove, will you really be averse to seeing it on what has evolved into your pc? |
| Fettoosh Apr 20, 2011 8:39 PM EDT |
Quoting:Is it even just feasible that an incumbent on the mobile scene could translate back to the desktop? As things stands now, I don't think this would necessarily happen and mostly because, the average user doesn't really care what is installed on their special devices as long as the interface with their desktops/network is working for them seamlessly and flawlessly. Currently, even non-Windows devices has to be made to work that way with Windows computers and mainly because of MS desktop dominance. On the other hand, if the generic device idea I mentioned (ex. Atrix) takes off, that definitely will have a big influence and could marginalize the desktop computer as we know it. |
| tuxchick Apr 20, 2011 9:42 PM EDT |
Quoting: What does Rob Pike have to do with it? Everything. *nods wisely* |
| hkwint Apr 21, 2011 4:42 AM EDT |
TC: The EC asked for proof of how Dell, Acer et. all. are forced by Microsoft not to sell PC's without Windows. I think at least you and I pretty much agree Microsoft has agreements with OEM's which might be illegal, though of course they're "top secret". So if you can break in the OEM's corporate network to gather proof, anonymously put it in an envelope and deliver to Brussel (or push straigth to OpenLeaks or something alike), I think you can change history and many people will be very grateful! Until then, let's hope some other people post stuff to the EC. If the number one request at Dell's ideastorm is PC's without Windows and they're not answering demand - I'm pretty sure there's something wrong. I've had contact with the FSFE about the issue, AFUL even filed an official complaint at the EC. The problem is 'lack of substantial proof'. I'm pretty sure the proof is out there close to the EC, probably in the Microsoft Brussels office. So, the 'desktop-bundling' war isn't over, it has yet to start. |
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