[Sussex] Microsoft to collapse..

[Steve Williams]

Geoff,

I think many of us have been predicting the demise of Microsoft (some
even earnestly willing it) for some time. Bill Gates has often dismissed
some new technology (the Internet for one) only to turn round and
embrace it fully. The difference now is that there are few open avenues
for Microsoft to head down in order to increase it's revenue stream.
They have tried the consumer market (Windows Media Edition, X-Box) but
here the competition is well established (Sony, Nintendo) so the chance
of them succeeding here is minimal - they'll simply be yet another
provider in the market, and not even the best.

The only real way Microsoft is going to survive is to embrace change in
the market in which it currently dominates - the desktop. We all think
linux is already drizzling on Microsoft's Desktop parade; soon it'll be
thunderstorming it down. Some time ago I rather jokingly suggested that
Microsoft would slag off linux, right up until the moment when Bill
Gates (or Steve Ballmer) decides that it's pointless trying to be the
rabbit in the middle of the road staring down the onrushing juggernaut.
Then we'd see the release of Microsoft Linux 2006; who knows, maybe this
is what's "something revolutionary under way in a back lab in Everett or
Mountain View".

After all, it'd be easy for Microsoft to download Gentoo (oh god, all
right then, or possibly Debian) and use it as the basis of it's own
distro. After all, the GPL and other OS licences encourage this sort of
thing.

In the end Microsoft may well end up being a designer of nice hardware
(keyboards, mice etc), consumer stuff (Pocket Windows, X-Box, Windows
Media Edition) and a top-notch Linux Distro that is easy install, stable
and reliable and that leverages the experience of a huge Windows desktop
user base. Anyone care to argue against a Windows clone desktop (window
manager) running on a linux base? Not me, and Microsoft haven't got
where they are today by being duffers in business.

There are two good things here:

1. Microsoft will be up against established competition like SUSE,
RedHat, and for the more knowledgable, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo etc.

2. They may well have to release their source code back into the public
domain under the terms of the GPL (or whichever licence) - no doubt this
will cause them to choke on their licence agreements, but if they've got
any sense they'll realise that the OS development community is an
immense asset, and they'd gain more by being open than not.

</rant>

Steve Williams.




On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 10:39 +0000, Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> A nice little article from the business department of ABC News (a 
> somehwat suprising source):
> 
> http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655
> 
> It mentions how Linux and Firefox now have the "mindshare", not Microsoft.
> 
> --
> Geoff Teale
> Free Software Foundation <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
> 
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