Former Windows Chief on Microsoft Vs. Open-Source 387
prostoalex writes "Brad Silverberg, former chief of Microsoft Windows division, who left the company in 1999, is being interviewed by the Milestone Group, on Microsoft specifically, and the software venture capital world in general (Silverberg is currently working as managing partner for Ignition Partners). He provides an interesting viewpoint on Microsoft's understanding of open source: 'I don't think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution. In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below. Now for the first time the tables are turned and it's Microsoft that's being attacked from below by a lower price solution. Microsoft needs to figure out how it can demonstrate better TCO to justify its higher prices. Another aspect to that, which is an area I think Microsoft is also struggling with, which is when you are as successful and dominant as they are, how do you continue to foster that ecosystem? What really propelled Microsoft Windows success was an ecosystem that they created that allowed other people to benefit from your success. Actually your success was really a side effect or byproduct of their own success.'"
Bzzt (Score:4, Insightful)
Was Microsoft *ever* the low price solution? I'm sure I'm not the only one who laughed at the whole "they haven't figure that out yet" part. They haven't figured *anything* out yet. That's why we got rid of the feudal system -- because government, on all levels (including corporate management) should be for the people, by the people. My point is that Microsoft, being ruled by King Gates, is behind the times while they are trying to be ahead of the times. They are a working paradox. Open Source is to Closed Source, as Hive Societies are to Kingdoms; one clearly is better than the other and I think we can all agree which one it is.
Plus ça change ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ecosystems are bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
First step is to realise that "The Economy" is something that _WE_ created.... there is no intrinsic economy created by some supreme being.. and we shouldn't get carried away considering it as something holy that needs to be studied.
Re:Bzzt (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, there was the little thing called MS DOS that became the basis of operating sytems for many operating systems to come, including one or two that are still in use today.
No, it's not competing on price (Score:3, Insightful)
In the realm of personal computers, I do not think this observation is accurate at all. Microsoft's approach was not to compete on price in the normal sense of the word. Rather, Microsoft's approach was to bundle applications with the operating system. Since these applications and utilities were thus already "paid for" (or included for "free" in people's minds), people had less incentive to buy competing applications, even though the competing applications were often better.
I think the distinction is important. If a particular application becomes popoular, Microsoft just rolls a copy of it into the OS, thereby gutting the market for that application. How many people buy Eudora anymore? Or Netscape? Or Trumpet Winsock? This is not the same thing as competing on price.
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
The only market MS seems to be slipping in is the web browser market. Even there, with 2(+?) years of doing nothing to improve their browser, they dominate the market.
Re:TCO is bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Any concept of the inner workings of a Fortune 500 company? i.e. what it means to have thousands upon thousands of non technical users who are now required to use a PC for their job 8 hours a day? Any idea on earth what it costs to support these people? (hint- these operatives may make as low as minimum wage, but the people supporting them certainly don't!)
Why vrs Why Not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why Not? - Because they are no longer meeting all IT needs, in fact they are basically the problem. Security is more important today.
Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bzzt (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that they're no longer really competeing with proprietary UNIX in the data center (they've pretty much taken all they're going to get in that market) along comes a new OS that also runs on commodity hardware, but has the added benefit of being (mostly) free as well.
Once upon a time, they really could argue that they were cheaper than the "big boys". Now, in the portion of the data center market they control, that's not true anymore.
-- Dave
Re:Its whatever the kids use (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it's not competing on price (Score:5, Insightful)
WordStar and WordPerfect charged plenty for the word processors, plus if you wanted spell-check, that thing alone would cost you extra $300 or so. Then Microsoft came around with Word, which wasn't all great, but sufficiently functional and way cheaper.
The same with Windows NT - Novell is jumping the Linux bandwagon now only because it got its ass kicked by early Windows NT sales, which made Novell look way over-priced. True, early Novell was technologically superior to early Windows NT, but as the market expanded, NT got better and Novell became the bottom-feeder.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
I hadn't thought until I read the article just how good the parallels were, and how Microsoft's role has been recast since those days.
Commodity Value (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not forget that Windows was also running on commodity hardware. In the early years, it wasn't "Windows" - it was Mac or PC. People were buying a platform with all the advantages of commodity hardware; price, selection, customization, etc. The PC platform had considerable draw from the market. It was able to provide value to customers that previous proprietary computing products lacked. And in the end, the commodity platform "won".
That's not to say Microsoft didn't do a good job with supporting developers. They did better than Apple in many ways. But in those days, that simply ensured that "Killer App Version 2.0" was available for the "PC" as well as other platforms.
The real success for Windows was in it's being the catalyst for commoditization of the hardware market. And then riding the ensuing wave.
Now we're facing a possible next wave in IT; commoditization of the OS. Microsoft would clearly have issues with this. And they would rather fight it than try and ride this one too (or at least not start paddling for it until the very last minute). It's interesting to see that one notable who was plowed under by the earlier wave is now trying to set up to ride this one; IBM.
Har (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as Windows continues to be preloaded on a majority of machines, Windows will continue to sell (duh) and some of their apps will continue to sell.
On another note...
Ha! I remember a sentence in 'Undocumented DOS' so many years ago: "Your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows." So the developers are finally wising up, eh? About fucking time.Re:TCO is bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
You could apply a TCO formula to just about everything. For example, the "TCO" of my car includes:
- How much I paid for it,
- How much insurance costs me,
- What the gas mileage is (how much gas costs me),
- How many people can it hold (how "efficient" is it?),
- How many other uses does it have that would cost me money to get otherwise (like towing), and
- other factors that I'm sure I'm forgetting right now.
One definition of TCO found on the web is (and there are a few):
"The life cycle cost view of an asset, which includes acquisition, setup, support, ongoing maintenance, service and all operating expenses. It focuses attention on the sum of all costs of owning an asset, as opposed to the initial or vendor cost, and is useful in outsourcing decisions."
(From The Bridgefield Group [bridgefieldgroup.com])
Sounds great on paper... (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux far surpasses Windows in regard to the first question, yet that is overshadowed by Microsoft's UI. True, they make a ton of compromises in security, reliability, and ease of development, but at least they attract users that way. I actually dislike Microsoft, but I am willing to admit that they have found a very effective way onto the drives of millions...
While the OSS choices may be better in most ways, a flashy interface is by far the best at attracting a new user...
Re:No, it's not competing on price (Score:4, Insightful)
When you buy a well packaged linux distribution, on the other hand, it comes with a software package for (as far as possible) every application already covered. Since installing SuSE 9.1 I can't recall having to download a single package, excepting mplayer for DVD playback support, and there are very good reasons why that's not included in the package.
In fact, this is an arguement that is increasingly being used by Linux advocates (like myself) who argue that the total cost of installation is considerably lower than a Windows setup with all the applications required.
Re:Ecosystems are bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that models have no value, but if the model tells you exactly what the gold price is going to be in 30 days time (for example), you need to know what the uncertainty is... which means we are back to probabilities and statistics.
A good way to use models is to perturb the inputs slightly and see how your outputs diverge. This is classic chaos theory. If a small change in input doesn't change the output, your model is stable.
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
Re:Har (Score:2, Insightful)
So why don't you start your own Linux company and preload your stuff? You should be rich by about Wednesday, judging your expertise in the field.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
> obscene prices -- anywhere from $4,000 to $12,000
> -- for a computer that did essentially the same
> things that Microsoft could do with Windows.
Also, ~$4000 used to be a rather mundane price for a serious "business class" PC. For the longest time, PCs and Macintoshes were BOTH rediculously overpriced compared to the other 68k competitors. PC's only just recently matched the price point of those 1985 era machines.
Re:Its whatever the kids use (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Kinda interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
I use OSS/Free Software when it's the best tool for the job. Right now I'm using Opera on Windows XP, but my servers run Linux.
OSS being cheaper($$$) than propriatary software is just one aspect of it being better in certain situations. As much as is possible, I leave my religion and politics out of my professional life.
For RMS and the like Free Software could be called a religion, the belief that Free Software is always better can be argued for convincingly. But ideology isn't a good way to convert new users.
People don't like being preached at. Standing on a soapbox browbeating people will get you fewer converts.
To me, this is never a battle driven by competition leading to lower prices. Rather, it has always been the ideologies involved.
I think that people like you, and people like me can and should work together on this. Lower prices is what prompted me to get my feet wet, so to speak, and that lead me to learn more about the OSS/Free Software philosophy. Use the lower price advantage to get people interested. Once they begin to listen to what you have to say, you can share the ideology without seeming like you're preaching or browbeating them.
LK
Hmm...supply and demand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bzzt (Score:1, Insightful)
As always, "...if your time has no value."
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
A new generation of management I hope will make a more objective decision about their computing needs. It seems like it takes forever for the old farts to die off though.
Oh, wait a minute, I'm an old fart too!
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because Microsoft is afraid. Microsoft has campaigns where Microsoft is telling that is it better than Linux. Microsoft is saying bad things about Linux. Now, ask your self. Why is Microsoft doing this if they are standing on solid ground?
Re:Bzzt (Score:1, Insightful)
How ironic, the inflexible mindset of the OSS crowd. I'm tempted to let your arrogance stand and fall on its' own; but I can't resist citeting out a quote from the linux advocacy site Linux Myths
Re:Its whatever the kids use (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:4, Insightful)
another problem is that MS funded TCO studies do not accurately anticipate downtime caused by malware or virus outbreaks. windows may be the winner in some studies, but statistics on paper can't guarantee a lower TCO in real life. If MS wants to be more credible, they should conduct a research on average downtime and estimate of financial damages caused by malware/virus last 6 months. My guess is that the world biggest marketing company won't do.
Re:It's wrong to say that you succeed with Microso (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape presented the vision of making the operating system irrelevant. Let's look at two of the most popular software products of the last few years: Google and Amazon. Yes, these are software products and each is completely platform agnostic. When I use Google or Amazon on Linux running Firefox, I get the exact same user experience as I get on Windows using IE. If this trend had continued, with the browser and its associated control of the user interface firmly in the hands of Netscape, Microsoft's monopoly position as the operating system of choice would have been lost.
Java was a danger due to a similar argument. Windows is popular because the most popular applications run on it. If Java delivered on its promise of platform independence, a whole new class of killer applications could have arose that were independant of the operating system. Microsoft would then no longer be the operating system of choice. Worse, it would not be the choice for the developers making new killer apps.
Killing Netscape and Java were not paranoid manoevers, they were carefully considered and rational defenses of one of Microsoft's two core strengths, the Operating System. Combined with the other strength: Office, Microsoft presents a huge barrier to entry for anyone attempting to wrest monopoly control over desktop computers from Microsoft.
The problem for Microsoft is they took out the companies, not the ideas. By the time they noticed, the idea of a universal browser was too well entrenched to go away. They have not yet succeeded in converting the Internet to a Microsoft only product (despite the best efforts of ActiveX and IIS).
Building a better Java is not an answer. At some point, the competitors would catch up to a standard such as a language, then how could Microsoft compete? Add features? To Sun's language?
And what happens when someone reimplements 80% of Office in Java? And suppose this new version runs just as nicely on Windows as, say, Mac? What's to keep people on Windows then?
No, these companies had to die. Nothing else would defend Microsoft's monopoly. That they attacked these companies is unfortunate, but part of our system of business. That they did so by exploiting their monopoly position is illegal and should have got them more severly punished.
Re:Bzzt (Score:5, Insightful)
You're also apparently unaware of some of the options Microsoft was faced with on their way to becoming the "huge, oppressive, evil monopoly" that made my second favorite operating system. Back in the day, you could drop $300+ on a copy of Word Perfect, or get Word for something like $100. Like Open Source today, Word was the inferior solution from a feature set and usability standpoint, but it was cheaper and offered enough functionality that most people didn't care. Later, Office sprung up as a way to further lower costs by offering the most common pieces of software for one low price. This left Lotus and WordPerfect scrambling to put together a package that was similar and/or better for a similarly low price. In the end, Microsoft's suite was better integrated, interoperated better (e.g. AmiPro/WordPro could open MS documents well but not visa versa, leaving MS as the defacto standard) and above all cheaper than its competitors.
Of course, this was well before they were officially a monopoly, back when Lotus and Word Perfect still had a chance to make a decent product, a chance neither of them was capable of. Microsoft won this war because they had better businessmen. The problem is, they didn't change their policies once they won...and you can't play the "exclusive contract" game once you've out-stripped your competeition.
Finally, your government systems analogy is kind of foolish. Hive Societies may be "better" idealistically, but historically have never really worked beyond a certain population level. On the other hand, kingdoms have been quite stable and succesful, especially in parts of the world where individual wealth and education are too concentrated to promote an egalitarian society. In fact, on the micro level almost all systems break down into localized oligarchies, with a single set of localized idea-men and a series of lackeys doing what these men say. A single charismatic ruler will always have better luck at efficiently organizing people and delivering services than a committee in a constant power struggle -- this happens so reliably, I think it is safe to assume that it is a genetic predisposition in the human animal to choose a definite vision when available.
Extrapolating from this, since user education in the computer field will always a bigger issue than price, and most Open Source packages are by definition indefinite, open ended entities, I think we can safely assume Open Source isn't going to revolutionize the proletariat's desktop any time soon.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I can buy a good personal computer for $500, and I am sure the price would have never came down to this level if someone hadn't come out with a universal operating system, with ease of use, to drive consumer demand, and therefore hardware production to the high levels we see today. In 1990 I could walk into WalMart and play a game on a computer(Solitaire), having very little experience with anything other than BASIC on a TRS80 before hand. I naturally assumed if I could play a game on it, I could probably use it to keep books, so I bought one. Now we have 16. I work in an industry (personal aviation) where low production levels of parts make everything cost >10x what it ought to (example, plain spark plug $20, fancy spark plug $50 each) The computer industry is spoiled with the low cost of high volume hardware, and they don't even notice. Microsoft's success benefited me. Of course, it would have been some company, it just turned out to be Microsoft.
Re:Bzzt (Score:1, Insightful)
In terms of desktop applicaitons, it certainly did, and it kicked it's ass. (Yes there was a time when people could deploy things like word processors and email with mainframe terminals.)
The Story of Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
1991: Wow, Linux is fun to hack. I just want to build an OS for myself.
1994: Wow, Linux is still fun to hack. I just want to build an OS for myself and a few thousand friends.
1997: Wow, Linux is still fun to hack. And people are taking this stuff seriously. I'm glad I built it from the ground up with security/efficiency/stability in mind.
I more or less agree with what you posted about Linux in the year 2000. But let's not forget Linux's roots.
Re:Yet again, MS can destroy the Linux market... (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft thinks the laws of economics don't apply to them. They whine but they don't compete. The retail cost of Windows XP is now more than the cost of many computers.
Re:Bzzt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Bzzt (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mean at the outset, in fact a linux solution can take MORE time to setup initially. But since it is generally setup and never touched again that is the only time investment.
As opposed to windows, which requires at least a few minutes of your time everyday, and another dose of an hour or two about once a month. It adds up to more than the extra hour spent configuring linux fairly quickly.
Re:Hmm... (vertical markets) (Score:2, Insightful)
where people really benefit from the microsoft monoply is the vertical market, software for solicitors, craftsman, real estate firms etc. you still can make a lot of bugs with (mostly badly written) software for very specific professional groups because you write it for windows and everyone has windows. think visual basic
PAT
Re:Bzzt (Score:5, Insightful)
As answered 100 times already, yes, the really were. Even now, allowing that "low price" includes ROI considerations like my time to setup systems, train users, and maintain networks, MS is a decent alternative. I'm a big fan of the LINUX potential, and hope that this or something like it kicks into high gear and gets in all those little places, but until "dumb users" (we all have them in our offices) get over their FUD of not Windows, it's here.
Consider that to the average Joe (think's he's computer savvy, but isn't really) that walks into his local mega-outlet to buy a ready-to-use computer-in-a-box, Windows is installed (although I have seen Lindows-installed PCs on the shelf, now), included in the price. Realistically, yes, the price is in there somewhere, but to Joe, it's "free" (as in "already done for me"). To change the OS, assuming Joe can figure that out, there's at the very least download and install time, if not a direct purchase of an OS box from the shelf to use. In this case, Microsoft can be argued to be the low-cost winner. Before you bash me, yes, this is where MS has been playing badly...monsters in my box.
To another Joe, the really-savvy computer guru, like you, dear reader (who assembles his system from scratch picking the best components money can buy and lovingly screwing them together in is l33t modded case...), looking at the Suse, RedHat, and Microsoft OS boxes on the shelf, no, Microsoft is not the clear winner in the low-price category. (Especilly to the l33t users who say "screw the shelves" and get their latest from BitTorrent.)
Consider also Joe, the manager of the mega-corp IT department, who licenses and maintains 10,000 desktops. MS is again arguably a low-cost winner, again, especially considering the simple ROI factors.
Note, no insult intended to anyone actually named Joe, who may or may not know how to do any of these things...
MS did a great job of figuring it out early. Although it's since been kicked for unfair practices, they started out selling "irrelevant" software to IBM, who only wanted the hardware money, and became a giant. While their own APIs are closed, they've done plenty for the developers who wish to create software to run on their platform. They rallied the world and got basically anyone who makes hardware to provide (either MS or OEM) drivers that work. They did OK figuring plenty out.
And can someone point out a "Hive Society"? Surely you don't mean some kind of bee-like or Borg-like collective or commune... The "kingdom" (more of a republic, really) I live in is doing pretty good, despite all of the bees buzzing around in Michigan and Montana. However, I think I know what you mean. In the long run, yes, the hives may outlast the big, fat kingdom, but in the meantime, the kingdom will, well, get big and fat...MS posts billions of dollars of revenue, and the collection of your favorite other software manufacturers is a shadow of their tax liability...
Now, I know it looks like I'm on the MS bandwagon; I just believe that you can't bash them just because they're the biggest. Pick on them because they behave monsterously; that they do.
Re:Its whatever the kids use (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't think kids want to play PC games? And what about IM? Run XP to get the latest IM functionality (try to get the webcam running in the MS IM on Linux. Now try it with XP)
And have you've seen MS seminars at colleges? They give away the OS and compilers.
>Forget TCO and stuff like this.
Business methology isn't going to change in 20 years. You will still need to justify decisions and "Well, I used it in high school." isn't going to cut it.
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Fewer boxes, much lower licensing costs, much lower operational and labor costs, etc.
Re:Kinda interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
In terms of adoption, it's not the ideologies of the developers that matter so much as those of the users, except when they differ to such a degree as to be incompatible.
Users want something that gets the job done that costs as little as possible. Generally speaking they could give a shit if it's open source or not, if it's Free Software or not.
To the user, this is a battle over prices, driven by competition. If Microsoft gives them Office, they probably won't bother with OpenOffice.org, due to the immense momentum of MS Office. However, that's not going to happen, so Microsoft has to resort to lies - they sure aren't depending on their technical superiority. They, like we, know that would be fruitless.
Re:Bzzt (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh it might not in this or that area at the moment, but history has proven, and will inevitably continue to prove for the foreseeable future, that open source will get to this or that area sooner or later.
Open source doesn't have to release in time to make it's quarterly. It doesn't have to compete, it can lag behind something else today and spend the next 5 or 10 or 20yrs catching up other areas before getting around to it. Open source does not and cannot die. There really is no debating this.
Where the community concentrates their efforts and have been given the time to show the fruits of their labor no commercial entity even begins to compare. More and more we will see projects mature and close source companies ousted. After all, there is no way a commercial entity could compete with the much more yet, yet infinately more stable and secure development which goes hand and hand with open source.
If you can't beat them, join them. (Score:3, Insightful)
As many here have said, Linux won't go away.
So if MS can't make Linux go away they should simply become like IBM. With there power they could really influence the Open Source community in any direction they want.
The first step is to port Office to linux(it's already working on mac os X, so that wouldn't be to hard to port). Then you make a killer GUI that will smash Apple's aqua to bits and finaly stopping all those switchers from the x86.
The important thing is to keep people on the x86 with office, Space GUI(space is cold and dark you know , gotta keep there old image
Then when they are the employers of 90% of the linux kernel coders (which they surely will be).
Now they have the power to control the way linux moves.
Becuse they employ the mayority of the kernel and surely most of the developers to X and all the other important liberaries.
Now they can optimize the whole system for there killer GUI, office, smb(Don't remember the real name of the protocol
And they can become the biggest distro
Ofcourse they have to do this slowly, phase out windows first in the server area then in the coperate area and last the homes.
They have to understand that there kernel is CRAP and would cost more money to develop to a better kernel then linux then to use the linux kernel.
Remember, there are som really great minds employed by MS. They just need to let them lose.
Re:Bzzt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, there are a number of markets in which Microsoft still has the low price solution...for example, if you want a reliable load balanced database, SQL Server kicks the price pants off of Oracle and DB2. Sybase is languishing and open source doesn't have anything remotely near the feature set of these four (no, we can't all use MySQL).
PostgreSQL? It doesn't have quite the feature set of Oracle but IIRC it does support several forms of load-balancing and along with pl/sql and several language APIs, it has stored procedures and other goodies that the other big players you mention have... I guess I'm just asking what toher "big boy" features do you require?
Re:Paradigm change (Score:2, Insightful)
You may read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
But it could be seen even before. Even before the www, I recall that we dreamed about computer environment where you could move across the world, but just to aproach nearest terminal, log in, and there you are, your desktop, files and everything is there. We used to have Novell/Win3.11 network in our comp lab in university. OK, it was not across the world, but it worked fine. You could log whenever you wanted, and everything was there - PC's acted just like terminals, from your perspective. Next version, with NT network, never worked OK. Some programs could not be installed only on server (to be honest nonMS ones)... so the idea went away. Diskless stations had to be replaced with stations with HDDs...(actually, even in Novel/3.11 they were not diskless, but disks contained no real data). If you needed Corel, you had to pick exactly that station with Corel installed.
Then www appeared, but they never liked the idea. If they allow IE to act like complete PC - meaning that you can do text processing in it (for example) - they would replace OS with browser. They would replace their golden hen (desktop OS) with something they cannot control so tightly, and with something that other coulc probably copy. Why would they change current state of affairs? Thick client is what made them rich, and they will try to follow that model as much as they can. They don't like gmail, ebay and everything else ferature rich but web-based - since it is excactly the path what they do not like to happen.
Re:huh? (Score:1, Insightful)
And don't even get me started on attempting to set up fallover servers on windows...
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
And that is one thing open source is horrible at. Where has the open source community been the whole time all these worms have infected the world and ruined people's days? Nothing in this world can be a success if you can't spread the word- and kudos to the people who are able to do it. People who build a great product and then stop with a "I built it, so come" attitude are stopping short and only punishing themselves, and for that I have no sympathy.
In my time away from the shop I'm an independent shareware author. I've found that often times when I'd like to keep adding features I really need to stop and give some time to marketing efforts. And I don't write entire products from scratch. I've licensed technology when it was intelligent to do so and used open source technology when appropriate (with aknowledgements, of course
As much as we'd like to say the role of a software company is to spend all efforts on writing great code, this really couldn't be further from the truth.
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the real truth of TCO:
If the business is not computer-related, and thus the people in the company are not computer literate and shouldn't be expected to become computer literate, then Windows has lower TCO because it lets you do the simple things simply. If the business is computer-related, or large enough that it is expected to grow some in-house expertise, then Windows has higher TCO because it ONLY lets you do the simple things simply, at the expense of making the complex things really painful to deal with.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Also in my experience doing windows based tech support across the range of MS products most users would probably require pretty much the same amount of training moving from say 98 to XP as 98 to Fedora (Workstation setup) or other Desktop Linux.
Re:Its whatever the kids use (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I really disagree with your conclusion, but this part of your argument is bullshit. 'Back in the day' making boot disks for MacOS was as easy as pie.
Up until System 7.5 MacOS came on only a half dozen disks, without any kind of copy-protection scheme, and you didn't need an activation key to do the install (you still don't, btw). All you really needed was a Macintosh computer. You could even trim the install disks down to one disk by making a cross-platform system installation and copying it (and a few other files) to a floppy, much like you could (and still can) with MS-DOS. Admittedly, by the late nineties MacOS had ballooned to several dozen floppies (and usually came on a CD-ROM), but by the time that happened you could easily burn a CD from the original.
The real point of, however, is that Macs (the hardware) were expensive and few people were willing to shell out the initial investment to get one. The required initial investment for a PC could be, easily, half to a third that of a Mac (if you were willing to take some risks with no-name parts and cobble it all together yourself. The no-name parts were a bigger risk in the late-eighties and early-nineties than they are today).
Whether anybody actually saved money by buying a PC instead of a Mac is dubious (the faster upgrade cycle on PCs tends to even the playing field by substituting "rents" for "spent-costs") but lots of folks (myself included*) prefer to spend a large amount of money over a long period of time rather than all at once, even if they end up spending more (hence the popularity of credit cards, car leases, rented furniture and layaway plans).
To a first order approximation, the popularity of MS-Windows (and MS-DOS before it) is entirely due to the fact that it ran on cheap, multi-source, readily available hardware. Sure, the bundling plans helped a bit (but they probably weren't really necessary) and the rise of Dell and Gateway had some late term effect, but the initial impetus was from cost and availability.
* I still use Macs, but I usually buy second hand: this is how I manage to spend a lot less on initial investments than if I bought my Macs brand new. I end up spending about the same amount of money, once all the upgrades have been applied (faster CPU, more memory, bigger hard-drive, better video card, etc.) but I get to string it out over six months, which makes my wallet feel fatter along the way.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has produced:
* MS SQL Server (cheaper than the golden Oracle standard)
* MS DOS (cheaper than CP/M and friends)
* Windows 9x+ (when in a Wintel configuration, traditionally significantly cheaper than an Apple Macintosh setup)
* Windows NT+. This competed heavily against *IX workstations, as it was cheap and easier to use for folks that knew Windows 9x but not *IX. It ate a lot of the CAD market and the 3d graphics market.
* Microsoft Mouse. While Microsoft's keyboards have traditionally been almost as ridiculously expensive as Apple's keyboards, they make fairly low-cost mice. The two-button kidney-bean design spread all over.
* MSIE, Outlook Express, and a few other Microsoft packages are free-as-in-beer.
It's true that their cash cow, Office, is not very attractively-priced today compared to other office suites, that they sell pricy developer tools (though certainly not the most expensive out there), and that Windows is more expensive than Linux, Microsoft has traditionally been a major budget leader -- it got where it did by underselling the existing players and advocating an open PC hardware platform (Microsoft, learn from this -- the more open and inexpensive something is, the more appealing it is!).
Today, Microsoft is *fat*. Like all large companies, when it makes an acquisition, it acquires people that are very skilled at burrowing into a company and making themselves inextricable. It has masses of managers. It maintains expensive research labs (which, despite the respected people working in them, produce disappointingly few interesting things that actually hit the real world -- compare to, say, Bell Labs). It has employees that have come to expect a certain standard of living. It simply has more overhead than it used to.
Re:Developers! etc... :-p (Score:4, Insightful)
I admit that I have less experience with Microsoft's tools than I do with with the Linux ones. However, I was fairly unimpressed with what I saw. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I'd love to be enlightened, as I see a number of MS people talking about how great the MS development environment is, but it seems to, well, kind of suck to me.
* The build configuration manager in Visual Studio is not very good. You create a new build (I think the defaults in a new project are "Debug" and "Release"), but if you want to maintain several configurations (Build, Release, non-GUI, etc), it gets to be a pain in the ass, and you have to copy options around from configuration to configuration. GNU make is much more flexible.
* A number of people seem to like the editor. I'll concede that it has a reasonably nice interface for completion, but I use xemacs as my editor, and Visual Studio really does not compare, now that I have xemacs set up *just* so. xemacs has similar completion (though without the argument descriptions and with an indexing pass) via etags.
* I've gotten errors/warnings during compilation from VS that I've found unclear before. I will concede that this may just a matter of the fact that I am very familiar with gcc and know its warnings well.
* VS apparently has a debugger that lets you modify code at the source level while debugging (that's one heck of a hack). Haven't played with it, but a few people have spoken of it positively, so I'll fly with it there.
* As GNU make runs, it prints out all the commands that it is executing. If a build step fails, you can see exactly what command was executing and what previous commands did. I've had times when Visual Studio said something like "Tool Command Failed", and I was reduced to commentin out lines in the pre- or post- build environment until the errors changed to determine what was going wrong.
* VS creates a ton of temporary and other files when you create projects. That's a little annoying.
* Pre-.NET version of VS use pseudo-text project files (.dsw). They *look* like text files, but VS cannot handle alternate line terminators on them. This is a pain when checking files into a CVS repository.
* I've had VS crash on me a during builds or other activity fair number of times. I haven't had gcc, GNU make, or xemacs crash on me in a long time.
* Free or bundled-with-VS diagnostic tools on Windows are relatively poor. I've cobbled together a set of tools that I generally use on Windows (filemon, regmon, Dependency Walker), but they don't really compare to the excellent free diagnostic software available for Linux.
* RAD tools -- I'm not a big fan of the Access or other RAD tool interfaces in Microsoft's development tools, but then I don't like glade and friends much either, so I can't really call out either.
I dunno. I'm just curious as to what I'm missing that people think is so fantastic.
Re:Bzzt (Score:1, Insightful)
You're also not including other costs. How much time does each user have to wait for a reboot, and how much time redoing lost work? How much time lost to mandatory upgrades and tuning? Include time and cost for newer, bigger, computers required to use the same trivial applications.
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:3, Insightful)
By "Open Source folks" I assume you mean "companies that sell services centered around open source software"? Keep in mind that most of the developers and people writing OSS don't really care who uses it (though they certainly like when people do). They're not out to destroy Microsoft (well, not most of them, anyways
I'm an IT guy in a small company, and didn't really track this closely, but I definately saw a decrease in the amount of time I spent dealing with network problems after switching to Samba/linux (from NT4). Sure, it took me some time to get everything set up (but the same is true for installing any OS), and it probably took more than using, say, Windows Server, but now I basically don't have to think about it.
I've used other server products too (nt4, 2k, netware 5), so I do have a bit of a basis to compare (though I have to admit Netware 5 was very nice, and I'd love to run it except it costs too much for a generally non-tech company that doesn't want to spend money on IT).
I'm sure there will be many people replying telling me how this is all BS, that windows is much easier.. but thats the point, I don't really care. For me, this was easier, I spent less time overall, so yes, that translates to lower TCO.
Re:Ecosystems are bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
"There is nothing so horrifying as witnessing the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts."
--unknown
Re:Let TCO wars begin.. (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how much MS spends money on advertising reality does not change. People who have ever used linux know what the deal is. For example ZDNET australia once published a study showing that an average linux sysadmin controlled many more servers then an average windows sysadmin. Until MS makes windows easier to manage en masse this fact will not change.
The real problem with MS is not TCO. It's that the people don't need to go through a procurement process to download and install free software. No approvals, no delays, no beuracracy. Admins are much more likely to slap a linux box to do something if the alternative is to fill out paperwork and have five managers give their OK to spend $500.00.
Freedom is important to corporations (and corporate drones) too.
Re:Bzzt (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Excuse Me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely untrue. MS Word has always been different from Word Perfect, but Word was designed around discovery, not around workflow. You can get more done in any version of Word Perfect faster, and WP had cascading markup well before the days of HTML -- a lot of people prefer this to the Microsoft stylesheets and sections method. Word Perfect -- up until 6.0, which was the first attempt to go beyond workflow into the WYSIWYG paradigm and it was slow as hell -- was a brilliant piece of software with a simple interface. Best of all, if you didn't know how to do something, you could press F3, type the letter of what function you were looking for, and it would tell you how to do it. There was a menu if you wanted, and syntax highlighting if you wanted. Otherwise, it was just you and the text. No distractions. Very productive. Worth the $300.
You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design
Open Source is hardly the model of connectivity. In fact, since the model demands that somebody be willing to do the work they need done, or willing to do the work for somebody else, there are segments of the market -- beginners who are non-programmers with no other computers -- who will never be connected. Furthermore, I've notice many Open Source afficianados are complete dicks. Hard to have 100% pure communication when your success depends on a guy whose answer to every question is "STFU and RTFM, n00b." Heck, those words don't even make SENSE outside of the context of the community.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory.
The one he never made? You know, bringing up points that are provably false doesn't help your argument or your image.
Do you call everyone kid?
Only children,