Windows Monoculture Myopia Revisited 319
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."
End of a monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
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Note the fact that there are plenty of reptiles in circulation, even beyond public office.
Re:End of a monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think vista will pull it off eventually. But only because of the existence of Linux, if M$ fails with vista it's kaputt.
Re:You forget business volume licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA perpetuates myth (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Where would they both be now if they stopped fighting in, say, 1999?
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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)
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)
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)
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?
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You can't argue that they abused their monopoly powers in order to *become* a monopoly.
They did something even better. They abused IMB's monopoly powers to become a monopoly.
What is competition (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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That's because MS-DOS came pre-installed on most PCs, just like Windows did. IBM entered into a stupid contract with Microsoft that allowed Microsoft to ship the default OS for every PC while retaining full rights to the software. Regardless of quality, Microsoft became the dominant OS provider.
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"They got set up as the default and made their software good enough."
Note I didn't just say good, nor did I say not bad.
They just made it good enough so people didn't really look for an alternative.
Re:What is competition (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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If by "outperform" you mean "make tricky business deals with IBM et. al.," then yes, Microsoft did "outperform" their competition. If you're talking about quality of product, on the other hand...
Re:TFA perpetuates myth (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It's not like there's one absolute "smartest software company on the planet", but if there were, Microsoft would probably have a pretty good claim on the title. In terms of their developers, they have a
Free Software as a simple consequence of economics (Score:3, Insightful)
The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.
Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
Some more el
sabotaging own install base (Score:5, Interesting)
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1. Subtle changes to Windows which stop projects like Samba from working - at least until such time as the Samba developers figure out the subtle change.
2. New feature(s) which, while retaining compatability with old versions, offer major advantages. This provides a major carrot for businesses to upgrade, while setting back compatability projects by at least a few years. Windows 2000 Active Directory domains are an example of t
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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.
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Interestingly, they have also all found the solution to the extensibility problem: modularization. Indeed, MS Office macros, Mozilla plugins, and Linux kernel modules are all popular ways to add functionality, and they work reasonably well. Of course, you need the whole of MS Office, Mozilla, or Linux (at least
No silver bullets (Score:2)
Indeed they do, but I doubt modular design is the holy grail of software development. Right now, as you observe yourself, most of the extension is small-scale and built on large-scale foundations. In that context, it seems to work reasonably well. However, as we move
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)
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A sandbox takes time to build. Probably quite a bit with a fresh API.
Oh great (Score:4, Informative)
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$, would we just be having the same problem with someone else? If the devil didn't exist, would it have been necessary for us to have created him?
What do others think about this? (Again, I'm only playing devil's advocate - I want to see how others view this situation)
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I'm not shouting you down - I want to hear your opinion - but I don't think this really answers anything (or if it does and you're being too subtle for me, I'll need further explanation).
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Some shops do sell Macs but most I know of don't, nor do Dell.
That isn't of course the only reason, but it is one of the reasons that help MS become a monopoly.
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Education and selective culling on the basis of apathy would help (as it would help many, many things), but M$ was always going to happen. I'm just agreeing with you in other words, I suppose.
Still, it's entirely acade
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Now, although IBM has faded in this market, the MS OS has continued its market lead primarily, I think, both through the fear of being different and the convenience of sticking with a known quantity. But, at the present, I think the situation is meta-stable. (In 19
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I think that the large market share for Microsoft arose basically because of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the different is how it got started - that's why the IBM PC got such a large market share. Microsoft just rode on IBM's coat-tails.
I agree, but it's more than that. It's also arrogance. Many people actually believe that Windows is an awsome system and all the rest suck. No joke. I've talked to many in management AND IN IT who scoff at other OSs (Oses?). They decry the lack of standards and bit
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I don't agree with that. I would argue that Microsoft is _not_ a monopoly. There are alternatives, and they are realistic alternatives. Thus, the reason Microsoft is so big is that people keep buying Microsoft despite the choice they have, not because Microsoft is the only option. So, contrary to an actual monopoly, Microsoft doesn't have practically unbounded freedom to raise prices and drop quality - people
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That still leaves the question though: did this happen because M$ is M$ and thus evil, or would it have happened anyway due to societal laziness? I suspect the latter. Still, maybe society is ready to move on...?
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I don't like it when people stick the attribute "evil" on MS. As far as I know, the worst things they have done is advertising their product and bundling things together (which makes things difficult for competitors, but only by virtue of providing more convenience to consumers). I think this is what any corporation should do, in Microsoft's position. If any ne
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I see the merit in everything you said, although perhaps your defense of M$ business practices only covers the bare basics of normal business - I'm sure they've done some fairly unethical stuff as well, especially in relation to patenting. Much like many others, true, but then it's the fate of all successful commercial enterprises in the west to be eventually dragged down and impeached by the public - it's not as though they particularly need defending :-)
I especially agree
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It doesn't change my mind, though. From the Wikipedia article, I get the idea that Microsoft looked at Stacker, liked what it saw, and wrote its own implementation. I see nothing wrong with that. There is no mention of Microsoft using any of Stac's code. Yes, they infringed on Stac's patents, but it's not clear that this is because they copied ideas about how to do things or that they did a clean room implementation of disk compression, and that infringed on Stac's patents (that's
NOT the End of the monopoly... (Score:2)
Some bullet points from TFA:
IT dabbles with Linux. But the momoculture is here to saty.
The convenience of one platform means less management expense. The cost of ownership skyrockets with diversity. The ecomonics say to standardize, standardize, standardize.
What management looks for and likes in Vista is diversity within the monoculture of the Windows OS.
ASLR (Add
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I run a Mac / Linux shop, and the amount of crap I don't have to deal with is astounding. That other people chose differently is not really my concern; although I will note that I generally don't find their reasons for doing so to be convincing.
Well, you asked what I think.
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The amount of crap he doesn't have to deal with is even more astounding. Off course he knows that other people ( like me ) chose differently but he doesn't care and I also noted that he doesn't find other people reasons convincing.
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Re:End of the monopoly... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm starting to think, as a result of this discussion - see other threads - that Windows (or something like it) was an inevitable phase in the evolution of OS software. Much like the IBM PC in the 80's, as somebody else said, at first it was fear of the unknown and incompatibility that drove people (well, the market in ge
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Well, the kicker here is - these things ARE pretty much cross platform; Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, etc.
It's where you need to talk to the OS (Administrative Script Programmers chime in here - ) that causes the problem.
Sure, I can use a Perl script to admin my windows network, to talk to Active Directory through the ADSI interface, talk to the event l
Windows monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to add to this.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Now if only we could find a way of combatting the Slashdot monoculture...
Moderation: it's group-think, only faster! (j/k, what's the alternative?)
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The moderation system is sort of successful, but it is FAR from ideal.
Re:Just to add to this.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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But did MS add anything? MS didn't do anything to make GUIs popular, it was GUIs that made MS popular. If MS didn't exist GUIs would have still became popular, because that is what people want. If MS didn't exist we would still be using GUIs now, except we would be complaining about Apple computer's evil monopoly.
MS didn't really do anything significant other than being in the right place at the right time, with the right contract with IBM.
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Actually, a lot of developing countries are going to Linux because Microsoft won't localize Windows to their language and because Windows is way too expensive for them.
The biggest barrier for figuring out a computer in a random country is the language barrier. Do you speak Arabic? No? Then you'll probably have a difficult time
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Windows is, for all for practical purposes, multiligual. Introduction to MUI (Multilingual User Interface) [microsoft.com]
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common UI .. (Score:2)
You don't need Windows© to run a Windows Desktop Environment [sourceforge.net].
Start-> Run check!
Multiple Windows check!
Control Panel check!
Status Bar check!
Desktop Icons check!
Clock in the Status Bar check!
was Re:Windows monopoly
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!
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They are not running some school project; they build operating systems that run on 99% of computers. So MS as a company needs to throw away their mature codebase and build a new operating system from scratch? And alienate millions of existing customers by breaking compatibility? And facilitate 3rd party apps instead of promoting their own products? Wishful thinking maybe; but insightful? hardly.
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Companies don't upgrade their OS, they keep the same one until they are f
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What's wrong with the registry? Over the years I've come to understand it better, and it doesn't bother me anymore. The issues (e.g. corruption) I had on Win95 and to a lesser extent, NT4, seem to have gon
Three years ago? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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Hell no, they will do whatever the trade magazines and microsoft sales drones tell them to do. I have yet to meet ONE IT director that not only understood what the hell he was in charge of, but had the ability to even formulate a plan on how to research and impliment the best solution for the company.
The last job I was at, the new IT director demanded that the video production depa
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.
Slight nit with the CISO's position (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re:The monoculture was created willingly by the us (Score:2)
You mean like UNIX?
You know, back then, in the days of the Unix wars, everyone expected Unix to rule the desktop in the future. But since your nice independent parties were too much involved in their constant bickering, no coherent standardized Unix desktop ever appeared. Instead, you had many platforms, and had to support all of them. An incoherent mess, as user- & desktop
bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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In total, Linux isn't free for companies. First, switching the entire infrastructure from Windows to Linux can be very expensive, especially if there is no prior experience with Linux. Second, it is easy to get Linux geeks, but good Linux admins are hard to find. Third, you really call the ubuntu forums "professional support"? Direct support from the developers, guaranteed by contract, *that* is professional support. If your machines suddenly stop working, you would start a thread in the ubuntu fo
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"But expertise costs money!"
When you hired your current IT expertise, did you buy carbon, water, phosphorus, etc. and construct them from scratch? Or did you have an expectation that they would be an assembled organism and that they (I know this is a wild idea) might actually bring some knowledge and experience with them to the job inter
Risk analysis for managers and techies (Score:3, Interesting)
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 app
I disagree with this article (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 trie
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: (Score:2)
Just FYI, the disk is a a disk that came on a MSDN subscription. When you subscribe to MSDN you get a lot of nice software.
Re: (Score:2)
s/Mac/server/
Only use signed drivers,
Which immediately rules out a lot of cheaper hardware where the install instructions say "Click through the warning that you're installing unsigned drivers".
use the OS disc that came from the factory,
Lots of companies don't provide a CD any more - just a separate partition. If you have a hard disk failure - that's your problem. (Or sometimes they will sell you the media - for a fee).
Try to take it outside of that protected area and you risk
Re: (Score:2)
Or they could invest the same amount of money in premium support, or even premium developers to help improve their software.
Official support is a source of money for the developers of the OS, and the in-house developers can contribute their improvements. Now all users benefit more directly, the same amount of jobs are created, and the big company ha
Re: (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.