SOP
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cjcox Sep 14, 2007 10:18 AM EDT |
Since I've been working for major software companies since 1985... I can assure that all of this is SOP. And the world all switched to Linux back when we were forced to go to XP? No. And it won't happen this time either. HOWEVER... some WILL move... and that's significant. Just like they did when Win98 died. But are we talking about taking away more than 10% of Microsoft's desktop market share this time? No. But, maybe as high as 20-30% will look at alternatives and out of that, perhaps as many as 2-5% will opt for Linux. Overall.. Microsoft is still sitting pretty. It's still the ONLY OS required on all new hardware purchases (Ok... there are some exceptions, but nothing that would show up statistically). My current company develops enterprise level software on mainframes and "open" OS's (includes *ix, Linux and Microsoft... the quotes are intentional). We develop and support software on i-Series, Tandem and VMS as well. But you know, our infrastructure, instead of moving forward to a platform independent design is actually becoming more and more entrenched with Microsoft-ONLY solutions. Which is sad. |
| Steven_Rosenber Sep 14, 2007 11:48 AM EDT |
I've said this many, many times: open-source operating systems will follow open-source software that runs on closed-source operating systems. Microsoft stole the browser market away from Netscape in an underhanded way, and when the Netscape "threat" was gone, sat back while Mozilla stole it from them. IE is now a Windows-only product, and Firefox continues to nip away at the IE base. I don't know quite how MS Word was able to eliminate WordPerfect as a competitor and completely take over the word-processing space. I think it had something to do with Word being available for Mac and for Windows when WP was still heavily entrenched in the MS-DOS world. Same with Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3, I imagine. But when it comes to the OS itself, I still believe Microsoft is vulnerable. There have already been reports on how MS is way, way ahead in the overall numbers, but when it comes to the high end, Mac has a large and growing share of the desktops. Back to applications. Once you use Firefox in Windows, it's not that big of a leap to use it in Mac or Linux. If more people knew about OpenOffice, that it reads and writes MS Office-compatible files; that the GIMP is ready for production-level work (I use it every day, all day), that Evolution and Thunderbird can handle e-mail better than Outlook, and most of all, the threat of viruses, malware and other non-niceties is reduced to almost nothing -- and best of all, the whole damn thing is free -- how can they stay with Windows? If Linux gets 2 percent of the desktop market, it'll still be huge. 5 percent -- that would be quite a bit of momentum. Have you ever tried to explain FOSS to anybody out there who's never heard of it? They have trouble even wrapping their head around the concept -- that they don't have to either a) steal or b) pay through the nose to keep their computer up to date? GNU/Linux needs more marketing, smoother installs, better hardware detection, completely graphical configuration management, the ability to play every kind of multimedia ... and did I say marketing? Yes, I did. First one to do all this wins. |
| techiem2 Sep 14, 2007 5:38 PM EDT |
On a note related to the article, the "forced upgrades" to latest windows version are happening within the gaming community as well, to the great annoyance of many. For years most games have supported pretty much anything 98 or later, but within the last few years that has started to change. For example, when Dungeon Siege 2 was released in the last couple years, it required XP. Why? Who knows. We certainly didn't see any reason for it. MS influence? Most likely (I know MS published the first one, but don't remember if they published the second as well.) The most recent I've heard of from my gamer friends is that Valve has recently updated Steam and now it no longer supports anything before Win2k. I mentioned the possibility of them updating it to require XP or later next, then Vista only, and my Windows using friend is fairly certain that's the idea..after all they apparently announced the dropping on pre-2k support right after Vista was released. Those are only the ones I actually know of, I wouldn't be surprised if there are many other examples. Frankly, it makes perfect sense to me. We all know that gaming tends to push the hardware market, so why not the OS market as well? If someone is going to spend $600 on the latest video card, why not make them spend another $400 for Vista so they can play SuperFPSRPGMMO 5.0? Coincidence? Conspiracy? You decide. :) |
| mvermeer Sep 15, 2007 12:19 AM EDT |
> For example, when Dungeon Siege 2 was released in the last
> couple years, it required XP. Why? Who knows. We certainly
> didn't see any reason for it. The "why" becomes pretty clear once you actually try to make something work with various versions of Windows. LyX nowadays also doesn't (really) support W95/98 anymore. Reason: these are completely different OSs. Supporting them would mean effectively duplicating large areas of code (especially in installers/configurators and anything using system services, like the display side) using reams of #ifdef. Nobody could be bothered to do this for LyX (or had even a running system for doing it on -- yes I know, virtualization --), so out it went. By comparison, "multi-distribution hell" is paradise -- even including Solaris and other archaeo-linuxes ;-) |
| techiem2 Sep 15, 2007 8:28 AM EDT |
Yes, not supporting 9x I understand. But why cut out 2k? As I recall, 2k has always been a highly liked version for gamers since it's fairly light. Of course, that could be part of the reason right there, force all the gamers happily running 2k to finally upgrade to XP... Is XP really that much different considering they're both NT? (I'm not a programmer, so I really have no clue) :) |
| mvermeer Sep 15, 2007 11:22 AM EDT |
> But why cut out 2k? Yes, that's a bit weird. I also don't know Windows well enough to say what the saving is due to dropping w2k, or conversely, the added cost of supporting it. Perhaps it is the perception that people not having (or affording) the money to upgrade their hardware and OS to the latest, won't spend a lot on games either. And some folks are spending a lot on gaming. |
| jacog Sep 16, 2007 1:59 AM EDT |
@techiem: Yah gaming... this "DirectX 10 only on Vista" nonsense is one of those. Maybe in about two years from now people will develop for it regularly, but not right now I don't think. There's nothing special about Vista that makes it so that DX10 can ONLY run on Vista... nothing that wasn't put in there deliberately anyway. It's all just part of another deliberate forced upgrade scheme. |
| techiem2 Sep 16, 2007 8:00 AM EDT |
Yaknow, as I think over the forced upgrade issue, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Imagine some hardcore gamer with a leet rig upgrades from 2k/XP to Vista so he can play the latest games. He suddenly realizes: 1. His computer's performance has suddenly dropped and the base resource usage has suddenly risen significantly due to the overhead of Vista. 2. A bunch of his old games won't run anymore. Somehow I doubt he would have many nice things to say about MS right then.... And DirectX...yeah...almost makes you wonder if MS specifically made DirectX easy to work with (so I've heard) so companies won't use OpenGL...or offers them some sort of "incentive" to use DirectX.... |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 16, 2007 3:21 PM EDT |
@techiem2: DirectX isn't easy to work with. It's based on the COM model and therefor a pain to work with by definition. What MS did do is: a) include not only graphics in DirectX but also sound, input, etcetera. That's smart and I have no beef about that. b) They stopped supporting OpenGL. The Windows OpenGL library is frozen at version 1.2 which is really, really old. If you want to use any of the new post OGL 1.2 functionality then you have to do a whole lot of programing magic with function pointers and other crap, requesting all kinds of things directly from the video driver. You see, OpenGL should work like this: application -> Windows OpenGL DLL -> video driver -> hardware You need to bypass the Windows DLL and talk directly to the driver. Nasty. |
| techiem2 Sep 16, 2007 3:24 PM EDT |
aaaah. Thanks for clearing that up. :) |
| Sander_Marechal Sep 16, 2007 3:49 PM EDT |
If you want some more info, Groklaw has a large section dedicated to OpenGL it it's "MS Dirty Tricks" page: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history#OpenGL |
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