- Site menu:
- Latest Discussions
- Latest Newswire
- Archives
- Submit Story
- Story HOWTO
- Syndicate
- E-mail Alerts
The Linux vs. Microsoft war is over
It's been 20 years since a geek from Helsinki first started dabbling with an operating system known as Linux. For many of those 20 years the upstart open source operating system has been seen as a potential Windows killer. So, on this anniversary, where do we stand? |
|
|
Comments (32)
12 earlier comments in the full thread.
The war is over? Then why don't we see Linux, Mac, and Winderz PCs side by side in the stores? Androids are mobile entertainment toys, they're not PCs. Did something change when I wasn't looking and we don't need to worry about legal assaults against Linux and FOSS anymore, the patent wars, subverting standards, DRM, subverting public policy, forcing trade "agreements" and terrible laws on other countries?
@tuxchick: The war is over
Yep. It is easy to get obsessed with the traditional desktop. Linux will never win that one. But for a large portion of mainstream computing tasks, the desktop itself is becoming irrelevant. People are doing their computing (reading email, editing documents, IRC, video...) on mobile devices and Microsoft are just not there or at least not in a big enough way that matters. They did have a little go and totally fumbled the ball.
It's not a question of MS losing desktop share to Linux: the desktop, although still crucial for many things (like development) is becoming a lot less relevant to most people. If you think about it, most users at home use their desktop principally for the things that they are now using their mobile phone for.
There are other parallels where we see this happening as well. How many people now don't have a land-line phone because they do all of their call-making on a mobile? The land-line just became irrelevant for them. I know a large number of these people.
Yep. It is easy to get obsessed with the traditional desktop. Linux will never win that one. But for a large portion of mainstream computing tasks, the desktop itself is becoming irrelevant. People are doing their computing (reading email, editing documents, IRC, video...) on mobile devices and Microsoft are just not there or at least not in a big enough way that matters. They did have a little go and totally fumbled the ball.
It's not a question of MS losing desktop share to Linux: the desktop, although still crucial for many things (like development) is becoming a lot less relevant to most people. If you think about it, most users at home use their desktop principally for the things that they are now using their mobile phone for.
There are other parallels where we see this happening as well. How many people now don't have a land-line phone because they do all of their call-making on a mobile? The land-line just became irrelevant for them. I know a large number of these people.
I can't recall the product name or the company ... but it really doesn't matter. There is a commercial out there about a phone that comes with a docking station. Something like: "it's a computer and a phone". I believe that it is Android based too.
That is a major departure IMO from the "traditional desktop".
Is that where we are headed?
EDIT:
It's the Motorola ATRIX and it does run on Android.
That is a major departure IMO from the "traditional desktop".
Is that where we are headed?
EDIT:
It's the Motorola ATRIX and it does run on Android.
It's the Motorola ATRIX and it does run on Android.
Yeah, and the idiot that cleared that commercial for air time should be fired.
That commercial claims that the device "comes with 48 gigs of Memory"
10 years of teaching people the difference between hard drive space and memory has just been undone....
That is, for the Dancing With the Stars and Jersey Shore pop culture crowd anyway. I've written them off as brain-dead and dead-weight for any significant contributions to society.
Yeah, and the idiot that cleared that commercial for air time should be fired.
That commercial claims that the device "comes with 48 gigs of Memory"
10 years of teaching people the difference between hard drive space and memory has just been undone....
That is, for the Dancing With the Stars and Jersey Shore pop culture crowd anyway. I've written them off as brain-dead and dead-weight for any significant contributions to society.
@TC:
Yup, the war is over.
Doesn't mean all the traces are gone any more than the fact that Little Rock schools didn't get desgregated until 1954 meant the Confederacy won the Civil War. Neither did all of those Japanese soldiers holed up on islands mean that WWII wasn't over after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wars are often decided long before the fighting stops, and long before the loser scores its last victory. The great Japanese general Yamomoto -- the one who planned Pearl Harbor -- believed that the attack was a grave mistake, and that Japan lost the war the day it woke a sleeping giant.
Yup, the war is over.
Doesn't mean all the traces are gone any more than the fact that Little Rock schools didn't get desgregated until 1954 meant the Confederacy won the Civil War. Neither did all of those Japanese soldiers holed up on islands mean that WWII wasn't over after the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wars are often decided long before the fighting stops, and long before the loser scores its last victory. The great Japanese general Yamomoto -- the one who planned Pearl Harbor -- believed that the attack was a grave mistake, and that Japan lost the war the day it woke a sleeping giant.
@helios:
It may be non-volatile storage like a hard drive, but there's no "drive" in flash memory. Calling it a "flash drive" is a misnomer.
Time was, the spinning drum was the memory. The Story of Mel contains one such example.
It may be non-volatile storage like a hard drive, but there's no "drive" in flash memory. Calling it a "flash drive" is a misnomer.
Time was, the spinning drum was the memory. The Story of Mel contains one such example.
@ gus
Yeah, that got by me....point taken.
Yeah, that got by me....point taken.
One more point: The non-volatile storage and the memory may be one and the same. That's what the ext2 filesystem's Execute-In-Place (XIP) feature for embedded systems is all about: being able to run the code directly from storage, rather than incurring page faults and storage I/O. Everything old is new again.
Okay, enough harping.
Okay, enough harping.
Desktop PCs are still vitally important to hundreds of millions of users. Any real productivity requires a PC-- audio production, accounting, publishing and writing, graphics, gaming, CAD, and so on and on. Smartphones are not desktop replacements. They're not even good email and Web surfing replacements. They're great little tools and they're not PCs.
+1 TC
I suppose you're right, Dino, and my desire to see heads on pikes will never be realized.
What does Rob Pike have to do with it?
@tuxchick: I agree with you entirely, but that's not my point.
"Number of Smartphones Worldwide Exceeded 180 Million Units in 2009"
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1421013
"International Data Corp is showing that in the final quarter of 2010, smartphones passed global PC shipments for the first time in history."
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/07/idc-smartphone-shipme...
Consumer computing is expanding at an exponential rate and it's *not* on the desktop.
To the likes of you and me, "computing" means using a desktop to do publishing, coding, browsing the web and stuff. The the ordinary punter on the street, it means watching YouTube videos, reading email, sending messages, reading the web, reading e-books (more often newspapers and magazines delivered in electronic form), playing games, using GPS mapping, ...
And more and more, they are not doing this on their PC at home. They are doing it on mobile phones and (to a lesser extent at the moment, but more in the future) on pads/tablets.
We here on LXer have a very narrow view of what is typical for a computing consumer. Some of the things in the lists above you might not even recognise as traditional computing tasks but they are in the sense that they are done on a computer using an application.
There will always be some need for a desktop or something powerful and tethered. It's just that the emerging market for computing is much, much bigger and more diverse than in the past and that is where we are seeing Linux/Android making the big gains.
It is a mistake to judge the success or otherwise of Linux from the desktop market alone. You have to look at the bigger computing picture and see that the desktop is becoming a proportionately smaller and smaller part of that picture.
"Number of Smartphones Worldwide Exceeded 180 Million Units in 2009"
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1421013
"International Data Corp is showing that in the final quarter of 2010, smartphones passed global PC shipments for the first time in history."
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/07/idc-smartphone-shipme...
Consumer computing is expanding at an exponential rate and it's *not* on the desktop.
To the likes of you and me, "computing" means using a desktop to do publishing, coding, browsing the web and stuff. The the ordinary punter on the street, it means watching YouTube videos, reading email, sending messages, reading the web, reading e-books (more often newspapers and magazines delivered in electronic form), playing games, using GPS mapping, ...
And more and more, they are not doing this on their PC at home. They are doing it on mobile phones and (to a lesser extent at the moment, but more in the future) on pads/tablets.
We here on LXer have a very narrow view of what is typical for a computing consumer. Some of the things in the lists above you might not even recognise as traditional computing tasks but they are in the sense that they are done on a computer using an application.
There will always be some need for a desktop or something powerful and tethered. It's just that the emerging market for computing is much, much bigger and more diverse than in the past and that is where we are seeing Linux/Android making the big gains.
It is a mistake to judge the success or otherwise of Linux from the desktop market alone. You have to look at the bigger computing picture and see that the desktop is becoming a proportionately smaller and smaller part of that picture.
Quoting:Yup, the war is over.
So it seems, yet MS is still capable/able of taking hostage any firm that releases its hardware with Linux.
The technological war is over but the psychological one is just beginning. MS used to make news any time they wanted to, lately, they make news only when they sue.
Yes they lost the tech war, but the snake is still capable of making very venomous bite in spite of being severely wounded. So the war is still raging and might continue for a long time given MS huge coffers.
Quoting:Desktop PCs are still vitally important to hundreds of millions of users....
So true, especially in the corporate sector and for serious home users. But, more advanced devices like the Atrix could change all of that. Corporations some day will wake up and realize that a full fledged desktop, a tablet, and a separate mobile device are no longer necessary. They would only need dock-able peripherals to add to the main computing device to run applications and access information.
@tc et al...
You guys miss one very big dynamic -- PCs are not immune to mobiles.
I'm reminded of an event that breathed new life into mainframes more than ten years ago: Linux was ported onto them.
Mainframes have always had terrific I/O subsystems, and hardware support for virtual machines. Some dead old dinosaurs became fairly slick linux server farms.
All this android technology -- esp WRT tablets -- will make people more and more accustomed to computing that isn't Windows. That, in turn, will make desktops that aren't Windows more palatable to more people.
It's already happened with the huge rebound in Apple sales. Ginormous networking effects are not overcome in a day, but Microsoft is slowly fading into the woodwork. Heck -- even its patent threats have been largely de-fanged by recent court decisions.
You guys miss one very big dynamic -- PCs are not immune to mobiles.
I'm reminded of an event that breathed new life into mainframes more than ten years ago: Linux was ported onto them.
Mainframes have always had terrific I/O subsystems, and hardware support for virtual machines. Some dead old dinosaurs became fairly slick linux server farms.
All this android technology -- esp WRT tablets -- will make people more and more accustomed to computing that isn't Windows. That, in turn, will make desktops that aren't Windows more palatable to more people.
It's already happened with the huge rebound in Apple sales. Ginormous networking effects are not overcome in a day, but Microsoft is slowly fading into the woodwork. Heck -- even its patent threats have been largely de-fanged by recent court decisions.
@dinotrac: Funny that, I was just thinking that very thing on the way home.
Is it even just feasible that an incumbent on the mobile scene could translate back to the desktop?
Could people get sufficiently familiar and "comfortable" with an Android UI that integration with a home system might be slicker and more seamless if it had the same or similar interface as opposed to Windows?
How many people with iPhones have also a Mac because they fit together better?
I really couldn't say, personally, but it makes for some interesting thought experiments....
Is it even just feasible that an incumbent on the mobile scene could translate back to the desktop?
Could people get sufficiently familiar and "comfortable" with an Android UI that integration with a home system might be slicker and more seamless if it had the same or similar interface as opposed to Windows?
How many people with iPhones have also a Mac because they fit together better?
I really couldn't say, personally, but it makes for some interesting thought experiments....
skelband...
I don't see why not.
When you use one interface to deal with the giant touch screen taking the place of magnets to put pictures on your refrigerator, on your phone, on your freakin' stove, will you really be averse to seeing it on what has evolved into your pc?
I don't see why not.
When you use one interface to deal with the giant touch screen taking the place of magnets to put pictures on your refrigerator, on your phone, on your freakin' stove, will you really be averse to seeing it on what has evolved into your pc?
Quoting:Is it even just feasible that an incumbent on the mobile scene could translate back to the desktop?
As things stands now, I don't think this would necessarily happen and mostly because, the average user doesn't really care what is installed on their special devices as long as the interface with their desktops/network is working for them seamlessly and flawlessly. Currently, even non-Windows devices has to be made to work that way with Windows computers and mainly because of MS desktop dominance.
On the other hand, if the generic device idea I mentioned (ex. Atrix) takes off, that definitely will have a big influence and could marginalize the desktop computer as we know it.
Quoting: What does Rob Pike have to do with it?
Everything. *nods wisely*
TC: The EC asked for proof of how Dell, Acer et. all. are forced by Microsoft not to sell PC's without Windows.
I think at least you and I pretty much agree Microsoft has agreements with OEM's which might be illegal, though of course they're "top secret".
So if you can break in the OEM's corporate network to gather proof, anonymously put it in an envelope and deliver to Brussel (or push straigth to OpenLeaks or something alike), I think you can change history and many people will be very grateful! Until then, let's hope some other people post stuff to the EC. If the number one request at Dell's ideastorm is PC's without Windows and they're not answering demand - I'm pretty sure there's something wrong.
I've had contact with the FSFE about the issue, AFUL even filed an official complaint at the EC. The problem is 'lack of substantial proof'. I'm pretty sure the proof is out there close to the EC, probably in the Microsoft Brussels office.
So, the 'desktop-bundling' war isn't over, it has yet to start.
I think at least you and I pretty much agree Microsoft has agreements with OEM's which might be illegal, though of course they're "top secret".
So if you can break in the OEM's corporate network to gather proof, anonymously put it in an envelope and deliver to Brussel (or push straigth to OpenLeaks or something alike), I think you can change history and many people will be very grateful! Until then, let's hope some other people post stuff to the EC. If the number one request at Dell's ideastorm is PC's without Windows and they're not answering demand - I'm pretty sure there's something wrong.
I've had contact with the FSFE about the issue, AFUL even filed an official complaint at the EC. The problem is 'lack of substantial proof'. I'm pretty sure the proof is out there close to the EC, probably in the Microsoft Brussels office.
So, the 'desktop-bundling' war isn't over, it has yet to start.
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help
Sign up and post (it is free) or Log in and post