[mdlug] Cracks in the Evil Empire

[allen]

M. D. Krauss wrote:
> Yes, but in terms of adoption, what matters to corporate management is
> what matters to the market.  People are most comfortable using a system
> that they already know, and most people learn what they need on the job.
>
>   
The importance of the corporate market certainly was crucial to 
Microsoft's success and it'll continue to be an important source of 
revenue. But just like the mainframe market diminished in importance 
relative to the entire computer market, leaving IBM with a largely 
irrelevant effective monopoly on the mainframe market, Microsoft's 
corporate market will become a small enough part of the computer 
industry to lose its industry-controlling power. It's already happened.

Microsoft is a non-participant or just another competitor in several 
markets they sought to crack: set-top boxes, game machines, cell phones, 
the entire embedded market, the PDA market. They're trying desperately 
not to be left out of the po' folks computer market but provided the 
OLPC doesn't end up as a gigantic fiasco, they won't win there either. 
And, that last is a market that Microsoft can't justify without 
abandoning its business model. Profit margins are, by MS standards, too 
low to be interesting.
> Hmm... Ubuntu (and others) lacks support for high-end games. Vista and
> XP lack real stability and security.  I know someone will say that the
> average user doesn't care about stability and security, but they do
> when their computer starts crashing.  We really need a jazzier word for
> it.  Something like "nocrashocity!"
>
>   
FOSS advertising, such as it is, is pretty lame. But how much does that 
really matter? The absence of the profit motive takes away much of the 
urgency that's common to the corporate world. Without that the need for 
big hits just evaporates since it's important to look like a winner 
almost as much as it is to be a winner.

Get it right, get it wrong, who cares? The board of directors isn't 
going to chuck you out if development stalls at the .9.0.12 release and 
you can't ship in time for the crucial Christmas season. No options to 
vest and stock price to worry about. If you screw up bad enough the 
worst thing that can happen is your code is forked. I don't think too 
many people'll jump off a bridge over that.
> Yes, but they will be forced to upgrade eventually.  In this light,
> Vista is a great opportunity for GNU/Linux, if the message can get out.
> "Tired of being forced in to massive organization-wide upgrades?
> Upgrade just one more time, to *whatever-flavor* GNU/Linux, and be
> done; or upgrade to Vista -- and then in a few more years do it all
> again."
>
>   
Sure they, the corporate world, will be forced to upgrade. That lock-in 
that Microsoft tries to apply to every market doesn't bite any harder 
then it does in the corporate world. But outside that market the 
attraction of Windows lies mainly in the absence of alternatives.

That's an advantage that's eroding by the day and Microsoft is aware of 
it. Evidence some of their more pathetic, not to mention unsuccessful, 
attempts at sewing FUD. The corporate buyers don't need to be frightened 
and the home buyers can't be frightened but what else does MS have to 
defend itself? There's the attempt to use the patent system to throttle 
FOSS but that doesn't seem to have had quite the legs it was originally 
feared so no help there. They sure can't compete on price, although 
they're trying with some very aggressive pricing in foreign markets and 
to foreign governments.

It's not all that obvious what Microsoft hopes to accomplish in many of 
the foreign markets it's trying to buy with low pricing. It's not as if 
you can force some African subsistence farmer to upgrade to Vista++ and 
Office 2012 for a couple of hundred bucks because he won't have backward 
compatibility.

Allen