Hi, Sorry to start a new thread. I goobered up my out-going earthlink.net. I'm in the process of dumping earthlink, but it will take a while.
Anthony's thread was an HBS article looking at the future of open source v. MS. The report is here. http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4834&t=technology HBS does great work, of course, but these authors really left out one big factor that HBS scholar Clayton Christensen talks heavily about: migration of functionality from one platform to another. Lots of companies are using open source in ways that were not imagined even a year ago. Linspire and Sonos, for example, are both coming up with strategies for beaming music to different parts of your house. Both solutions run Linux. The thread Anthony started dealt mostly with the desktop as it is currently configured, but in 5 years, most people are going to use computers in ways that only a few do today. For example, Linspire's MP3beamer lets you beam music to your cell phone. Sonos' wireless music net lets you shut off your teenager's stereo system in the basement from your bedroom on the second floor using a Linux-powered handheld. That functionality simply didn't exist 2 years ago. More people in Asia access the Internet from handhelds than from desktops. Sony clobbered RCA because they took music from the desktop to the handheld in 1960. RCA had a lock on the desktop radio world. Sony didn't even mess with RCA's locked market. Windows is going to mow down Microsoft in exactly the same way, unless they learn from history. So far, I'm not sure that Microsoft is transistioning with sufficient speed from the desktop client to the everything-else-is-a-computer client. Their X-box and Windows Media Center is a very good start, but the problem is the business model. They sell software. Sonos doesn't sell LInux. Linspire doesn't sell OOo, KDE, or Audacity. Sonos and Linspire both sell you the opportunity to acquire and use the code in new ways to do stuff you couldn't do before. Before Linspire, Joe Sixpack had to actually go to CompUSA physically or on-line, credit card in hand to pay for and install software packages one at a time. Linspire's CNR (Click N Run) software only tags your credit card once per year for most of the stuff that Joe Sixpack will use for several years, and if you buy a Linspire computer pre-configured, there's no bar card event at all. Before Sonos, Joe couldn't control multiple play lists in multiple rooms while monitoring little Suzy's fever, hence making parenthood less grinding. Bottom line: people who talk about Microsoft's continued dominance are probably thinking that the software industry 5 years from now will largely resemble today's software industry, which is a wildly incorrect assumption, IMHO.
