On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Jonathon Blake wrote:
It is such a small niche that microsoft has announced that they have
lost, and will continue to lose market share in the desktop, and
office suite, due to FLOSS products.
Uppsala University, for example, got a 90% discount on MS-Office. I'm not
sure of the exact figures, but I think that means that they got charged
the free-market price without the monopoly rents, given that MS has been
overcharing.
I haven't looked at any market share data recently, but the last time
I did, Linux & BSD were the OS of choice for servers.
I think, but can't say for sure, that most of MS' gain in the server room
came at the cost of Novell. Now that NT is gone and 2000 is on the way
out, I think that an increasing number are going from MS to Linux or BSD.
You would do well to remember what the most popular and most used
browser, and email client at One Microsoft Way is.
I think the biggest single factor is the death grpi MS has had on the
OEMs. Even BeOS, which beat MS in court, couldn't get an even break.
I agree that marketing or outreach coud be better. However, now that MS
has killed off most of the small companies, it may control a
disproportionately large portion of the advertising income of some media
and thus influence directly or indirectly the topics covered or the
content. So F/OSS marketing must take that into account.
Perhaps more teamwork with non-MS closed source companies could be done.
They have more to lose.
-Lars
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Software patents harm all Net-based business, write your MEP:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep6/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ilg=EN
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