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Windows Monoculture Myopia Revisited
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Sep 12, 2006 06:19 AM
from the laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.
from the laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.
round stic writes "eWeek magazine has an interesting look at the effects of the Windows monoculture on IT budgets, even as everyone agrees on the severity of the inherent security risks. The article contains interviews with Dan Geer and others who warned about the risks of the Windows monopoly three years ago. The article coincides with a piece in the Observer that suggests Vista is the end of the Microsoft monolith because of how complex the operating system has become."
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Dan Geer's Monoculture Bomb Goes Off 308 comments
Andy Updegrove writes "Three years ago, celebrated security expert Dan Geer lost his job at @stake when he co-authored a paper on the dangers that the Microsoft 'monoculture' represented for end-users. Last fall, he authored a similar warning in a Perspective piece he wrote for CNETNews.com, applauding the action of Massachusetts in adopting OpenDocument Format, thereby reducing its vulnerability to the same type of risk. Four days ago, Dan's prediction came true, when users of Word (but not those that only trade files created in StarOffice, OpenOffice, or other ODF compliant software) began to be infected with the Backdoor.Ginwui virus - a malicious Trojan program that hitches a ride on bogus Word documents. In short, an object lesson that in IT, as in biology, those that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture."
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Windows Monoculture Myopia Revisited
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End of a monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday October 24 2003, @09:55AM)
Re:End of a monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You forget business volume licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://del.icio.us/jvz | Last Journal: Sunday December 03 2006, @12:45PM)
bah (Score:1, Interesting)
It quite funny!!! (Score:1)
TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.interlingua.com/)
From the article:
Why do people keep perpetuating this myth? It should be widely known by now that all the important Linux developers get paid by their respective employers to work on the kernel. That's possibly the most significant sign of widespread acceptance of the open-source development model -- that companies such as IBM would pay their own employees to do work on a public project that is not exclusively to their own benefit.
In the same sentence, the author managed to confuse "richest" with "smartest" as well. I'm not very impressed with this article.
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://orasio.freeservers.com/)
Where would they both be now if they stopped fighting in, say, 1999?
In DRM hell, of course. There is where you can see how correct RMS was, back in the day. The GPL is of course the only thing that effectively stops MS from embracing and extending GNU/Linux. If Linus Torvalds hadn't learned about the GNU project and the GPL, lots of hard work by lots of people in the kernel could be made irrelevant.
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about perpetuating myths! They did outperform their rivals, by definition. You can't argue that they abused their monopoly powers in order to *become* a monopoly. They outperformed their competitors, achieved market dominance, and THEN achieved their monopoly status. I know it's hard for you to admit, but at one time MS was the scrappy little guy competing against entrenched giants like IBM, HP, DEC,
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://code.google.com/p/nmod/)
If people know anything about the Unix wars then it would become very clear that Unix vendors were fighting amongst each other to 'lock in' customers by deliberatelly making their unix versions incompatible in the eighties. It was a real mess, because if you bought one unix licence, you had to have your apps written for it, and you couldn't move without massive expense.
This wasn't the unix philosophy, it was the 'make loads of money' philosophy, and it wrecked unix as a serious platform for most businesses at the time (not meaning huge businesses here).
Meanwhile this tiny little company called microsoft offered a cheap and easy way out of the mess, called DOS. Ok, it was a bit shit, and ripped off CP/M something rotten, but it did what business wanted, and meant they could get away from the ravages of the Unix wars. Plus it was offered by IBM, which sounded very good indeed at the time, and was available on other hardware to if the IBM stuff was too costly.
I tried DOS back in the day, and it was ok. Not great, but ok. I prefer Linux now, but back then Unix was what the cool guys down at the local powerstation used when I was a kid.
Nowadays I prefer Linux for coding. I never use normal Unix, except for the odd dabble in BSD to produce ports of software. Until Linix though I never would have considered Unix as a serious platform to develop for. When I encountered it at Uni they still had four different Unix versions, and I had to re-code for each one, which meant I used the Solaris boxes, and nothing else until the first Linux boxes appeared, as duel boots with windows, and I was hooked.
So yes, there was a time when microsoft were the good guys, just as there was a time when IBM were the bad guys.
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
The other half is the Hardware Story.
SGI, HP, Digital, IBM, AT&T, all the big Unix vendors did have their own OS flavor. (At least shell scripting was mostly portable). But they also had their own hardware, mostly with different CPU architectures. Compiled binaries couldn't run on the different hardware platforms, even if they were written using the same damn libraries. The problem with this was that the hardware was damn expensive, so once you were locked in, they could totally assrape you on hardware.
Then the IBM PC platform came out, which was enough of a standard, and performed "good enough" on the low end, and was dirt cheap because of the fact that everybody could manufacture them to the same standard, and prices went down-down-down while performance improved. I remember paying $4000 for an IBM PC (an 086) with 16 MB of RAM, back in the 1980's. Monochrome screen. It had a "turbo" button you could press to make it run at 12 MHz instead of 10 MHz - (you could screw up timing in games and animations if you ran it at 12). When you look at the advent of the "sub-$1000" market in the late 1990's, those machines totally outclassed the top end in the 1980's, and they outclassed a lot of these proprietary Unix vendors' desktop machines as well.
DOS was just the cheap OS you could run on these cheap systems. But the real savings came in the hardware realm. They still do - compare perhaps the LAST hardware-holdout, Sun, to an intel-compatible system. Price-performance wise, it's not even close, in the desktop area.
One by one, these vendors either dropped out, got bought out, or switched to Intel architecture, to save themselves costs on the back-end. But most of them didn't forget their old "ways", and still charged a hardware premium.
Eventually, even Apple switched to intel chips; because the specialty CPU vendor just could not keep up, even with "superior" architecture. (whatever happened to "twice as fast"?).
The inexorable slide towards monoculture, ironically, was because of the overall cross-fertilization and competition in the huge intel-compatible-PC market. Within each Unix-vendor's hardware market, they were a monopoly, a monoculture. Each one lost out because, despite their best efforts to prevent compatability, the customers switched to the intel-compatable platforms.
While we still have competition on the intel-compatable side (many CPU vendors, many Motherboard vendors, many adapter card vendors, many HD vendors, etc.) - prices will remain competitively low. But the market is consolidating, and has been for about a decade. The best news is that intel is losing the overwhelming dominance it's had for a long time.
It's ironic, that one of the tools for eliminating hardware dependency, Java, came out of the last hardware-holdout, and it perhaps saved Sun from losing the last slice of marketshare it had. (in addition to their intel offerings). Sun embraced multiculture, and it saved them. I would say, too, that IBM was probably saved by their embracing Linux (another "tool" of hardware cross-compatability, by virtue of it's Open Source foundation).
Microsoft, however, continues to reject multiculturalism, cross compatability. They really screwed the pooch with Java, and they also fucked themselves by taking a cross-platform OS (NT, ran on x86, MIPS, and PPC, at one time - Proof: xBox 360 uses some of the PPC fork of NT), and their rejection of anything Open Source. And their last gasp of a power-play,
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Funny)
(http://integramod.tripod.com/)
I think developers had already left the Win23 platform, as it was quite obscure and really sucked. There weren't very many 23-bit CPUs available, and they could only support 8MB of memory. And what idiot would ever design a CPU with a 23-bit memory bus anyway?
What is competition (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
If we look only at PC hardware
People bought MS DOS, not PC DOS, not Dr DOS
There were a few windowing environments and task swapping/multitasking
Deskview (sp?) GEM, OS/2, GEOS
People still bought MSDOS (Dosshell swapping later and MS windows multitasking)
They also leveraged their default status, when they went QBasic and the default editor, did anyone notice it was very similar to the QuickBasic and QuickC environments? (I loved QuickC 2.5 at the time)
123-> Excel
Wordperfect -> Word
They simply make a good enough product, and work on the weak points till it's no longer clearly inferior to the competition.
It's a very effective way to compete.
Re:What is competition (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/gilmoure/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 16 2002, @05:41PM)
It's not what you know...
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure you can.
Yes, they were the little guy. But that all changed when IBM stupidly entered into a contract allowing Microsoft to ship the OS on every IBM PC, while still retaining the software rights. This brought the company massive revenues as PCs became a commodity, allowing them to expand into other markets.
They did not outperform anyone; they were in the right place and got lucky.
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://victor.hogemann.eti.br/)
Here at Brasil, the word "smart" doesn't always means "intelligent". For us at Rio de Janeiro, "smart" (esperto in portuguese) is someone that is good at taking advantage over other people, by ignoring the rules or fair-play.
So, in a way... yes, Microsoft is full of "smart" people.
sabotaging own install base (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.devinmoore.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 24, @06:16AM)
Please read the Observer article before commenting (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because the article is not about the downfall of MS as the headline seems to suggest, but about the way complex software is build. It suggest that building big, monolithic applications has reached an end as Vista shows that even a huge company like MS can't really write complex software in this way anymore.
Now agree or disagree with this, but please spare us the "OMG MS will never die" comments.
Re:Please read the Observer article before comment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please read the Observer article before comment (Score:4, Funny)
So are you saying that their cathedral is bizzare?
I'm no expert, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh great (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 09 2004, @09:25AM)
Fool me one, shame on you...
End of the monopoly... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to play devil's advocate here (so don't bite my head off); while Windows may be complex, its ubiquitous nature does reduce the need for applications to be particularly portable, and for programmers to be particularly knowledgable. That's an arguable benefit, but it maybe the drive for varied OSes has its drawbacks.
It would obviously be preferable to have a well-written universal OS, but that brings us around to the old saying: The best kind of government would be a benevolent dictator, but how many dictators stay benevolent?
Windows and M$ may be evil, are certainly a pain in the arse, but are they also just an inevitable consequence of the technological and economic environment we have created? If it weren't M$, would we just be having the same problem with someone else? If the devil didn't exist, would it have been necessary for us to have created him?
What do others think about this? (Again, I'm only playing devil's advocate - I want to see how others view this situation)
Re:End of the monopoly... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://nutsncents.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 08 2003, @07:47PM)
It would be vastly better if we have well-written universal API layers. Like Java, C#/.NET/Mono, Qt, GTK, and other beautiful cross-platform toolkits.
Unfortunately, except for Java and C#, we don't have any toolkits that go "all the way" in being cross platform, with the possible exception of Win32 (WINE), but Wine is reverse engineered, not bottom-up designed, so there are limitations.
There's no reason for application interfaces to be deeply tied into the OS. Properly engineered, a user-space environment on Linux should be able to run Windows or OS X or whatever applications, and vice versa. The reason we do not have this is not because of engineering limitations, but because of vertical vendor lock in. Lately, this seems to be easing slightly.
I envision a future where applications come with API requirements, not OS requirements. "Requires GTK 2.42, OpenGL 3.0, and SDL. OpenAL 5 required for 3D audio." Software manufacturers would probably support particular "distributions" on the box ("Runs on OS 12.5, Mandriva 2012, and Windows Super-Next-Hubble-Viewpoint"), but like *current* binary software for Linux you shouldn't have many problems installing on the "wrong" distribution; with minor API-requirement caveats.
Think Python applications (these are often cross-platform). Think Java. Think C#. As CPUs get faster, we can put up with some of this overhead; and indeed, in some cases there is very little overhead (WINE does Win32 in userspace on Linux really quickly. Imagine if Microsoft gave up the OS business, but just started selling something like Wine. The "Windows" application layer for Linux, OS X, Unix, Solaris, whatever.
If you want an example of this environment, look at Linux, Solaris' Linux Application Environment, FreeBSD's Linux Application layer, and lxrun, the Linux application layer for (ick) SCO Unix. IIRC, AIX is also Linux compatible.
I think it can work; and giant commercial developers have no problem operating in this multisegmented space. Sure, there are a few more compatibilty bugs than in the Windows monoculture, but there's a greater diversity of applications and environments (from very small systems to giagantic systems), and if the commercial OS space was more competitive in the Desktop world (multiple vendors of multiple pedigree OSs) we would see these compatibility issues worked out quickly.
Windows monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to add to this.... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.ariesgeek.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 01, @01:12AM)
With that being said, they have done quite a bit of evil too. But there's so many negative posts about Microsoft, I had to comment on the one positive post that I saw that wasn't just a "microsoft rules you lunix users muhahahaha" troll.
Ok, Mods, do your job. Mod me down for saying something positive about evil evil bad bad Microsoft.
Re:Just to add to this.... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.valerieandevi.be/)
Yes, we sysadmins can relate to certain icons in any language but it's not as strong as knowing command line scripting and making the computer do stuff through that. A script is in general not made to click on certain well-known places but instead executes some commands that have effect on the computer.
That is why *nix (Linux, BSD,
I am a Mac sysadmin for a large company and I can get the computers in Singapore to do the same things I let the local branches do but I have generally no idea what to do when I'm using Remote Desktop.
Is it remotely possible (Score:1)
(http://plexipages.com/reflections | Last Journal: Thursday February 02 2006, @11:14AM)
Is it remotely possible that Gates and Allchin know this, and that's why they're fading into the sunset?
End backward compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the UI is fine and they should keep it fairly consistent. But if they'd just lose having to support things that ran on 95, 98, 2000, ME,
And dump the registry, that was a really stupid idea.
But I think this could work. Most new copies of the OS are sold on computers built by Dell and other pc makers so they can control what goes in them. Hardware could be certified to work on the new version. Fairly new hardware could get new drivers that could be loaded on and it would work too. But older stuff would just get left behind.
Anyway, just a thought. On a random note, painting a two story house by yourself sucks!
Three years ago? (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.southurst.id.au/)
What took them so long? That was 2003 - it was a "monopoly" (Not really - it never has been and never will be...) long before then.
But what about INERTIA? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are approximately one grillion machines running XP and Windows 2000, and doing their jobs more or less successfully (if not securely), and being supported. Many (most?) will not be upgraded to Vista, given the high costs and dubious benefits. So they will stay the same.
How does this work out to the end of the monolith?
Vista the end of the Microsoft monolith? (Score:2)
I don't think its the end of a monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
Another neat note is that MS's XNA framework and GAme Studio Express is just out in beta and quite a few people are liking what they see. Unfortunately, it'll take another beta release to get the Content Pipeline out the door, which means painful conversion of Mesh files, but thats ok for now, as people get to learn the IDE.
I've always been told that making money has nothing to do with having a decent base product. While that might not be the selling point, the fact that you have good accessories, or at least desirable accessories usually can push the fence-sitters onto your side.
*NIX will never die. Windows will never die. I don't think it matters how much each side tries, since the appeal (to the GP) of "Widely Used" vs "Better" have always offset.
complex operating systems (Score:1, Troll)
From the second article.... (Score:1, Troll)
Slight nit with the CISO's position (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30 2005, @03:18PM)
This is much smarter security-wise and economically than trying to support many different operating systems in production systems. For one thing your support costs go way down, especially if you choose the right vendor, because you are buying and deploying in quantity. While you as (for example) a SUSE shop will still get slammed hard when Linux is targetted, the shop that tries to suport Linux and Windows at the same time will get hit with Linux AND Windows vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it's likely that no matter what operating system is vulnerable, some mission critical system some place will be compromised.
So, a possible strategy is to standardize, but on something that is not a dominant "de facto" industry standard. For larger outfits, you may choose to standardize differently for different divisions and subsidiaries. You still get the scale effects of standardization, and while it does mean you respond to more security problems, you're probably scaled and organized in a way that makes this possible to handle.
One problem of course is that presumes you have a choice of applications which can meet your needs. One of the arguments some economists (who have magically rediscovered some of the disadvantages of competition) is that software is subject to the "network effect", which amounts to that if there is only one platform to target, then the market for software for that platform is bigger. This means you benefit from the competition in the application space. The downside of course is that you suffer from lack of competition in the OS space, from the OS vendor's attempts to tilt the playing field in the application space, and of course the monoculture effect.
These days various flavors of Linux are at least as good as Windows by any reasonable standard, when considered as an operating environment for your computer. Linux and BSD fall short availability of suitable applications for these customers, and support for those applications. In some application areas, Unix flavors are a bit ahead of Windows IMHO, but overall the Windows market has the full spectrum of applications better covered than Unix. This barrier is a catch-22; developers will come to a platform when there are adopters, and adopters will come to the platform when there are developers.
So, a legitimate strategy to avoid the monoculture problem is to use a Unix derivative such as Linux, BSD or MacOS. However the practicality hinges on the differential in application availability being less than your concern for security.
MacOS is probably the most important player to watch. It may well break the network effect log jam, to the benefit of Linux and BSD as well.
The one place where movement towards this rosy future can be thwarted is in standards compliance. Consider the number of web servers that run on Unix variants, but whose clients are overwhelmingly Windows desktops. The standardization of HTTP, HTML and these days javascript makes this possible (although failure to support standards inflates costs). Standards for data interchange and communication are a critical enabler of a heterogenous software ecology. Without them you cannot work with suppliers and customers who make different vendor choices than you.
The monoculture was created willingly by the users (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @08:33AM)
But MSFT revenues are 11 billion $ a year, which is chump change compared to money spent by the top 1000 corporations counting everything from travel, rent and raw materials. Down to earth reality is that the compatibility and interoperability (or just the perception of them) between MSFT products is still delivering better value to the companies than switching to Open Standards defined by third parties. MSFT will always price its products just a shade under the switching cost. As years go by and the switching costs keep increasing, it will be able to raise the price. If corporations bite the bullet, pay for the switching costs today, they stand to gain a lot in the future. But since corporations are driven by quarterly numbers, there is not much incentive in taking that kind of risk for long term benefit.
All this means the MSFT monopoly and monoculture will persist for a long time.
[*1] The list price of 400$ for MSOffice and 130$ for WinXP is largely fiction. No one pays that much for it in the real world.
bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 05 2006, @10:36PM)
Alternatives to Windows are free. As in beer. As in licensing costs: $0. License management costs: $0. Time spent calling to re-license the operating system because you installed a sound card: $0. License audit exposure: $0. As in infinity% cheaper than Windows. As in incremental cost per unit = 0. The cost of alternative supporting application and utility software is $0. Alternative database application software is $0. Alternative firewall softare is $0. Alternative antivirus software (if and as applicable) is $0. Word processing software - $0. Systems/network management tools - wait for it - $0. Documentation [gentoo.org],comprehensive howto resources [tldp.org], and technical support [ubuntuforums.org] - all $0.
Turning away from solutions such as Linux because of cost is like being on fire and turning away from a bucket of water because the water might be too hot. Arguing against alternatives to Windows on the basis of cost is the very height of idiocy and is ultimately disingenuous. The real issue when considering alternatives is the fear of change and organizational inertia. How much of either can your company afford?
Risk analysis for managers and techies (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 20 2006, @09:16PM)
If you go out on a limb and choose something different then your "risk" of getting the crap beat out of you if you fail is HIGH and the return is LOW.
Accountability for the people who choose MS products for their organizations will help. If your boss said "if a SINGLE desktop gets infected with a virus or spyware you are fired" would you choose Windows as your desktop/server OS?
diversity is not complex and expensive .. (Score:2)
"It's not easy to click your fingers and say, 'Windows is a liability; let's just switch.' You soon realize you have to spend even more to get specialized staff for each computing environment," - Andre Gold
You can have diversity without complexity. All your servers connected through a VPN running on embedded hardware would eliminate most of the risks of a monoculture without having to switch to multiple platforms. Running pure Java applications on top of this and the OS becomes irrevent. It would provide a secure end to end solution. The Internet is protected from bots and trojans and your network is protected from the Internet.
interesting. (Score:2)
(http://www.pattensoap.com/)
I wish the "media" and "news" services would stop projecting their HOPES and WISHES as being real news or valid predictions. There is a big distinction between making an educated guess/prediction, and trying to make a case for wishful thinking.
I would have hoped that news services would be a little bit above this type of spotty journalism.
Let me go on the record as saying THIS IS NOT THE END OF WINDOWS AND CERTIANLY NOT THE END OF MS.
PS
A real prediction would be it's the beginning of the end of for Apple's OSX.
I disagree with this article (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
I can't really agree with this. The major problems came when Microsoft decided, after about two years in development since the start in ~2002, that they were to change the foundation of "Longhorn" from Windows XP SP2 to Windows Server 2003. This was also by the time Microsoft changed their goals of what their next OS should be. Yes, when it was in the middle of development! Development managers may start feeling dizzy now and consider leaving Microsoft.
I wouldn't even want to do it in a personal software project.
To see the problem, check out this build 5048 review [winsupersite.com] (build 5000 was the kernel switch) with screenshots. It looks almost like "old Windows" again with mostly the same old features after a few years in development? Windows enthusiast Paul Thurrott is screaming blood. What happened to the progress they had made? Well, they had to strip a ton of features to get their stuff working again. Say hello to huge two year delays, feature cuts, and sweating.
So Vista seems to me to be more about a planning/design mistake than a complex beast that will take around 5 years to get out the door. Vista has actually only had around 2-2.5 years of uninterrupted development on the correct kernel and with the final goal of what it should even do!
I'd like to object to the article and actually claim I'm impressed by how quickly Microsoft put together something that looks to even end up as stable during that short time with this many features, given the stupidity that went on in planning. Or rather in-development-planning.
Of course, WinFS and other technologies had to go due to this wild change of focus in mid-development, but that's not surprising or a lack of efficiency due to having think of backwards compatibility, like this article claims.
But it's at the same time very visible how Microsoft is struggling, and I'm doubting we will see a clean release of this one when it "goes gold".
embracement (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday February 07 2007, @04:47PM)
if you think about it, this could mean that ms ships as a host operating system and one preinstalled 'guest' operating system.
from this point on, anyone can run his sw in windows, older versions of windows (with which it is competing) and most of all: any linux distro or other OS.
this further on means, that non-technical people will run linux on their boxes, like any other application. for them, there is no big difference whether it's an application or a complete operating system. this means also, that ms has found it's niche, where it always was. the end user. i doubt that there will be many non-technicals, that will later change to have another OS as their host operating system.
this also solves the 64bit problem, the old 32 bit apps can still be run.
Interesting assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.silverglass.org/)
It's interesting the unstated assumption in the arguments against heterogenity: that any given company must support multiple platforms for heterogenity to work. I don't think that's true, though. If any given company uses a single platform, but different companies choose different single platforms, the end result is much the same overall: exploits have a much smaller target they'll work on.
And further, I don't think the arguments about the cost of supporting multiple platforms hold up. There's more than enough research supporting the contention that it takes fewer people to support Unix-based desktops than Windows-based ones, and that makes sense given the remote-admin capabilities built into desktop Unix that come from it's server roots. So suppose a company switches to a 50/50 mix of Windows and Linux desktops, and a Linux tech can support twice as many desktops as a Windows tech could. Yes, supporting two platforms costs more than supporting one. But at the same time you've just halved the number of Windows support people you need because you've got half the number of Windows desktops (assuming you've got more than 1 or 2 people could support). You need to replace them with Linux support people, but you only need 1 Linux guy added for every 2 Windows guys you're dropping. If you started with 4 Windows techs, you'd drop 2 Windows techs and add 1 Linux tech for a total of 3 techs now. That's a 25% drop in personnel costs. When figuring costs, you have to add in the reduction in personnel costs as well. Plus there's the reduction in licensing costs that offset any increase from having multiple platforms.
And finally, there's the BSA. We've all read the reports about their audits and the havoc they create. If your company's already supporting non-proprietary platforms, you're in a much better position to do an Ernie Ball if the BSA gives you grief.
Microsoft succeeded because... (Score:2)
They had the only OS that ran on the cheapest hardware at a time when hardware was the most expensive part of the system.
However, they are no longer the only OS that runs on the cheapest hardware, and hardware is often not the most expensive part of the system anymore. The equation has changed, but the interesting question is, has or will Microsoft change sufficiently to adapt to the new equation. From looking at their Vista strategy, I have serious doubts about that.
People will be forced to upgrade to Vista (Score:1)
It's all very well knowing that Vista adds nothing compelling enough to upgrade, and that WinXP still does the job just fine, but the Microsoft EULA does not allow you to move your old OEM copy of Windows XP to new hardware, so when your old PC dies or becomes obsolete, you'll have to buy a new one with whatever flavour of Windows is going.
Sure there will be those noble few who buy a bare-bones system and drop their own OS (Linux?) on there, but by and large, Joe Average, as well as Big Corporation wants Windows.
Re:Top Windows writer abandons Microsoft (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 20, @06:40PM)
Its software is buggy, overpriced, and stress inducing.
Man, I could not agree more with this... just now I am trying to save my girlfriend's notebook Windows Home installation. I just received a DVB USB dongle, installed it on mine (winxp) and after that tried to install it on my girlfriends notebook. Unfortunately the installation was unsuccesful due to the ether (i.e. just *because*), and after I restarted the machine showed the BSOD and restarted (woops, driver programs...)
I tried to recover the installation with a Windows Home installation disk i have (you know, proceed as a normal install until it ask you if u want to fix the installed system), and after doing that now the #"$"#$"!#$ FUCKER !#!"%% windows asks me for my serial number... I enter the serial number UNDER the laptop and the fuck says it is not valid WHAT THE FUCK IT IS IN THE FREAKING STICKER UNDER THE NOTEBOOK...
Of course now I downloaded the XP key recover and discover app which I am running in my notebook to get a valid WIN XP HOME serial, then I will enter it and validate the program, and then I will crack the WGA.
Fuck, and what enrages me is that I have a fucking license to instlal windows Home... My installation disk actually constains WIN xp pro and win xp home... and I installed xp Home because tha tis what the notebook had... I am not pirating or nothing I just want it to work....
So next time some fucking moron says that windows just work they are just saying bullshit... unfortunately, I also have Ubuntu in my latop and of course the DVB usb dongle wont work with it (at least not until configure make make install compile kernel gcc''+p'ppo ó+++-p --path ----prefix ) so, Windows is the best option (no I dont have the money to buy a Mac)
Re:Top Windows writer abandons Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
By using your custom "XP Home / XP Pro" CD (I have never heard of a MS printed disc that does that), you are using a different disrtobution of XP than the one that came with the laptop. While not as drastic, it would be like trying to fix a Red Hat install with your Ubuntu disc.
Windows does just work if you treat it like a Mac. Only use signed drivers, use the OS disc that came from the factory, etc and it works. Try to take it outside of that protected area and you risk running into problems like this. Some people are very familar with XP and tweak it to do amazing things just as some take a Linux distro and customize it, although the latter has far more room to customize and far more places that you can screw up if you don't know what you are doing.
Re:The whole problem in a nutshell (Score:2)
2) Vista cannot be compared to Linux, but to distros. So, I would rather compare it with SuSE 10, or Ubuntu Dapper/Edgy.