HI J-S, On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Jean-Sébastien Guay <jean-sebastien.g...@cm-labs.com> wrote: > IMHO the situation with Windows users at large is less bleak than what you > make out, the recent situation with Vista coming in far below expectations > helped on that front. Non-tech people are starting to see that there are > alternatives, and that (other than MacOS) a choice of hardware doesn't lock > you onto a single OS.
Things are certainly get better than they were a couple of years ago. Netbooks and cloud computing are two factors. Vista being harder to use than XP, breaking people applications/dropping support for hardware is something that even my parents complained about vigorously when they were forced to purchase Vista on new hardware. We are still a long way from having genuine choice about hardware and software though. MS has a tremendously right grip on almost every PC manufacturer save for Apple and the specialist Linux firms. The only easy way of matching the hardware your want with the OS you want is build it yourself, this obviously isn't what the average users wants to do. > But that's a matter of opinion and we don't have any cold facts (other than > perhaps the actual market share of Windows vs other OSes, but that won't be > reflected by web server stats). We can just hope that people making products > are choosing their APIs based on merit instead of based on a misguided idea > of which API will sell more products... In the end I don't think a user > cares whether DirectX or OpenGL is under the hood, the results are what > counts, but the people managing projects are choosing one or the other > sometimes for the wrong reasons I agree. This will still be an uphill struggle when you see death of OpenGL articles being published, it requires one to see beyond this FUD. OSG users obviously already have, but I would guess to do loose potential users purely because of the year in year out FUD against OpenGL. This are certainly getting better, but there is still a massive way to go in getting the playing field levelled. >> It is indeed good news, it's one of key points of me posting the >> stats. To highlight that fact that for our community at least things >> aren't as MS centric as they were previously. > > And perhaps that's a trend that's larger than our community only? I think the trend for browsers is a wider one. None Windows OS's are certainly on the rise too, but no where near the penetration of non Windows OS's we see in our browser stats. This probably reflects that nature of the applications that OSG users develop, and perhaps the fact that tech savy users are more able to understand and act upon their preferred choice of OS. >> Having a viable choice is a good thing, having competitors to IE and >> even Windows starting to get on to a more level footing will mean that >> you'll have the choice of which platforms suits you best, and MS will >> be forced to start competing with better products rather than abusing >> it's monopoly position (like it's done so far with OpenGL/D3D). > > Yes, which is why I don't agree with those who say D3D should die. Some places competition is good, but not typically in the area of standards. OpenGL is an open standard, Direct3D is a close standard that is pushed my a monopoly with the explicit intent of destroying its competing open standard. If Direct3D hadn't existing we'd have vendors competing between quality of their OpenGL drivers, instead we have them competing primarily in Direct3D performance/quality, and OpenGL drivers from most vendors have sadly seemed to play a very distant second in priority. It really isn't a huge waste of hardware vendors time having to work on two separate HAL's for their hardware, it's a idotic situation and an extremely bad engineering solution to a problem in hand. The find it very hard to reconcile the view that competition between OpenGL and Direct3D is beneficial. One only has to point to Intel and ATI OpenGL as clear proof of the damage that is has done. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
