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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.27 13:49:00 -
[1]
At this point, I don't think there will ever be serious competition to Microsoft for desktop operating systems. The reason is that there's no conceivable reason to entice people to switch.
If Linux was as easy to install as inserting a CD and turning the system on, and it had 100% application compatibility with Windows, you still couldn't get the majority of the people to use it. To them, it's a hassle that would give them the same practical results that they can get right now with Windows.
The only way you could get people to switch over is to give them an application that's so awesome and with such widespread appeal that people are willing to switch. But what sort of killer application could Linux have that couldn't be easily ported to Windows?
So I don't think you'll be able to significantly chip away at Microsoft's market share beyond what's already done. Rather, the market will move to something else.
IBM was king of the mainframes, and they used to be hated the same way Microsoft is hated now. But when PCs became popular, IBM failed to understand the new market. IBM remains a huge and profitable company (much larger than Microsoft), but we never talk about them anymore as the Big Evil Company.
In a similar way, I expect the market to move to a web services model. Microsoft's attempts at that so far have been laughable.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.27 20:44:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Dearwin
I think people forget how little of the full computing market share is for home users.
Very true so far, but . . .
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Theres hundreds of millions of dollars and even more man hours invested in incredibly niche business applications. Billing Software, Financial database apps, inventory software. All based exclusively on Windows, many DEPENDENT on MS code.
Many systems are dependent on MS code, but many others are not. Not only that, but many systems are dependent on very old MS code. I flew out to New York a few months ago, and on the way back they left my luggage in O'Hare (my layover stop). The lady who helped me track it down was using a Win3.1 system.
The software I write for a living right now will never see any legitimate home use, but it doesn't run on Microsoft stuff, either. It's all web application code built for a specific business. We're on an old-style Unix system now, but will probably be on Linux soon. I doubt any of it will ever touch a Microsoft OS.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.27 20:46:00 -
[3]
Originally by: Mtthias Clemi
I feel i was too mature....
MICROSFT RULES SHUT UP HATERS!!! USE VISTA IT BE GOOD! RA RA RA
LINUX SUX HahahahahaHAHAHAHahahHAHHAhaahHAHAhAAHAhAhAhHAahaHAHAhahAAHAHahAHAHA
DS is a smelly poo.
Yeah? Well, your mom.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 17:12:00 -
[4]
Originally by: Mtthias Clemi
Im not an average user, and i still find that it does everything that i want, vista never questions me, as far as i can tell all that is required is for you to be set as administrator.
Exactly. All you have to do to make it work right is turn off all the security.
Security is a tradeoff, and Microsoft has always screwed that tradeoff up. Sudo on Linux gets that tradeoff much, much better.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 17:45:00 -
[5]
Originally by: Mtthias Clemi
In what way is being administrator the same as turning off security?
Lack of privilege separation.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 19:04:00 -
[6]
Originally by: Dark Shikari
Vista isn't absolutely horrible; it does the job, and works. And if you enable the User Access Control and don't run as an administrator, its definitely more secure than XP, though at a cost (the annoyance)
This is what I meant when I said Microsoft gets security tradeoffs all wrong. It's easy to make a computer perfectly secure--just unplug it. Making it secure and useful is hard.
UAC is bad because it makes it harder to use the system. All but the most pedantic users will eventually shut it off in frustration.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 19:28:00 -
[7]
Originally by: Jenny Spitfire
If everyone goes opensource and free software, your parents or you would be out of jobs and would be sleeping on the streets.
I write software for a living, and I would not lose my job if the world went 100% open source. I'm a contractor, and my income is guaranteed by contract law, not copyright law. If they don't pay me, I don't write code for them anymore (and I'd probably sue, too). They can try to hire someone else, but they're probably not going to write code for free, either.
I'm not alone in this. The majority of software out there never hits retail shelves. It's written by either contractors or direct employees to solve the specific problems of a specific business (or sometimes a class of businesses).
Moving along, another big security problem is that Microsoft tends to make the same mistakes over and over again. As an example, search around for "Microsoft RC4 vulnerability".
RC4 is one of the few remaining stream ciphers that's still considered secure (more or less). The problem is that all stream ciphers are very fragile. Small implementation details can destroy the security of the whole system. This is true of encryption systems in general, but particularly true of stream ciphers. It's considered best practices to avoid RC4 and other stream ciphers whenever possible.
But Microsoft doesn't heed that advice:
Word and Excel problem in 2005: http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/007.pdf
Interview with Phil Zimmermann (creater of PGP) about the above: http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3027
Win NT SysKey, from 1999: http://www.bindview.com/Services/razor/Advisories/1999/adv_WinNT_syskey.cfm
Orginal XBox hack: http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/17_Mistakes_Microsoft_Made_in_the_Xbox_Security_System#Extracting_the_Secret_ROM
Remote desktop flaw, 2005: http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5EP010KG0G.html
(I thought I remembered an RC4 flaw from NT3.51, but I can't find a link to confirm.)
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 21:04:00 -
[8]
Originally by: Patch86
Capitalism is like a great big competition, where everyone is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of everyone else. Microsoft are "winning" by extracting massive amounts of money out of everyone else. Finding a solution that doesn't cost you as massive an amount of money is a pretty capitalist thing to do, and it's been what capitalist companies have been doing for centuries. And, as yet, the sky has not fallen because of it.
That's closer to mercentilisim than capitalism. The big advancement in capitalism was that you can have deals that make everybody rich, instead of having to screw everyone in order to make yourself rich. Admittedly, most companies work more along mercentilist lines.
Originally by: Jenny Spitfire
Let me guess, you are writing software for internal use in banks, health services, etc.
Something along those lines, yes. And as I said, most software is written for just those sorts of internal uses. The software on the shelf at Best Buy represents a very small amount of the code out there. If all of the retail software were replaced by Open Source, my job isn't going away. In fact, my job is a great deal easier because of many Open Source software.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 22:10:00 -
[9]
Originally by: Patch86
Oh, I don't know. Capitalism is driven pretty solely by profit. Companies (and individuals too, really) have two ways of effecting their profit- increase income (by charging their customers more, for example) and decrease costs (by spending less on their day to day business).
Yes, it's driven by profit. The distinction comes when you consider comparative advantage and other economic developments that show that it's often unprofitable to try to screw everyone over.
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Microsoft are busy maximising their profit by upping their product prices,
Microsoft charges for Vista Ultimate about the same as it charged for Win2k (the equivalent OS for its time). Even as a monopoly, they're still bound by rules of supply and demand. Increasing their prices would mean a lot of people either stick with XP, find an alternative, or use an illegal copy.
Outside the US, Microsoft does charge comparatively more, but this is due to the weakness of the US dollar against other currencies rather than anything Microsoft does.
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collecting licence fees, and employing methods of keeping their market share.
All companies try to increase their market share. Now, Microsoft has used far more aggressive tactics, many of which are unethical or illegal, to get that share, but trying to increase market share in itself is nothing bad.
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The legitimate capitalist response of any of MS's corporate customers is to try and maximise their profit by finding a lower cost alternative. This is true of individual customers too.
This alternative isn't necessarily open source software, but it might well be.
The problem I see is that this market may not be able to handle competition. It's easier in terms of customer support and software development to have just one OS. In such a case, government limits on the monopoly may be the correct option.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 23:00:00 -
[10]
Originally by: Jenny Spitfire
The way I see it, supporting paid software is supporting capitalism.
So is buying milk.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.06.28 23:25:00 -
[11]
Originally by: Jenny Spitfire
And supporting freeware is supporting communism. 
So is buying oil products.
See, I can make silly comparisons, too 
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
|
Posted - 2007.06.29 14:14:00 -
[12]
Originally by: Miss Anthropy
Mercantilism tries to encourage more exports while discouraging imports. It's a highly protective economic practice and was used heavily from between the 16th to 18th centuries. A free market (Capitalism) is one in which the government does not intervene and allows businesses to engage in private economic activity.
That's one aspect of mercantilism. The underlieing factor is that they considered the economy to be a zero-sum game--for someone to gain, someone else has to lose.
The other underlieing factor in mercantilism was considering that a nation's wealth is measured in its gold reserves, even though gold has little intrinsic value beyond the fact that it's rare.
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Microsoft are not mercantile because they are not a government or company restricting imports.
I consider many companies to have a "mercantile" outlook in seeing the system as a zero-sum game, rather than the capitalist idea that competition is healthy and deals can be made where all players win.
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