Okay, sorry. What was initially supposed to be a response to an
(IMHO) inapproprriate analogy turned into a statement about why we
aren't really in competition with Redmond.
Submitted 26-May-00 by Hoyt:
| Fun to MS bash, but the reality is that MS is the competition and
| the poorer product has been known to win and the other die out (VHS
| vs. Beta?).
In that particular case, the superior technology was far more
expensive for the end-user. Additionally, to put it in software
terms, the ``Operating System'' (tape format) had to be licensed from
Sony. This increased costs for ``developers'' (movie studios), who
chose to use the more freely available VHS.
In this case, we are not only superior, but less expensive (both in
terms of initial cost and TCO). Furthermore, since the developers do
not have to support some would-be mega-corp's dreams of grandeur by
paying royalties on the use of the underlying technology.
Also, unlike the aforementioned videotapes, this is not a case of one
standard will survive. As long as *anybody* uses Linux, development
will continue, if only by that single user. That's part of the beuty
of it.
Microsoft achieved its dominant position in the market not because of
the quality of its product, but the lack of options. Remember, Linux
has come further in the nine years since it was first envisioned than
Microsoft's OS offering did in the same time span. Certainly a great
deal of that time has been spent ``catching up'' in terms of hardware
support, etc.
Microsoft successfully brought the computer to the masses with an easy
to use (if buggy) dress for good old 16 bit DOS. We aren't competing
with that. We are bringing choices, alternatives, and power.
Compared to Windows, our GUI projects are in their infancy. Win has
been a commercial product in one form or another for longer than our
OS has existed. This makes it the defacto standard by which our GUI
will be measured by potential users.
There are a great many talented people working on improving both of
our dominant GUI's (notice the choice). Theere are also many people,
like Daouda, who are working on making them play nice together and run
apps designed for the other smoothly.
Some of the coolest undocumented features in any given MS product can
not be reproduced exactly even in another MS product because of *how*
development there works. They have teams competing with each other
and hiding the APIs they use to roll the product out. Eventually,
nobody even knows how to use those undocumented APIs.
Here, if developer A sees an incredible feature in developer B's
product, he *can* find out how it works and incorporate it into his
own software. Whithout opening the Open- vs Closed- Source can of
worms, it is apparent that any system in which the best features of
many products can be readily reproduced by annother with sufficient
skill will ultimately lead to better products.
Some of you still use Windows extensively, and that's fine. We have
that choice. For me, there are three pieces of software I run in
Windows, and all three are games. One of them has viable Linux
alternatives, which I support, but find still inadequate to my needs.
While I do not hold out much hope of Linux ports of the three
particular games, I can now think of my $180 investment in Windows as
a game console. My $50 investment in Mandrake was for an operating
system that works the way I like.
--
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( ) * Anton Graham
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