It had been a while now that I’m reading about how Microsoft is going down and open-source is going to rule the world. Lately I’ve been giving this issue some thought and wanted to share my conclusions, so here goes:
- Scattered resources - Microsoft has many(many!) developers\QA\design… people working for them while open-source projects which has the advantage of being able to recruit "all" the developers in the world actually has much much less than that working for them. What happens is just another example of human nature, when people are not told what to do, they will do what ever they want. This means that we end up with many open-source projects working on the same things. The problem of open-source is not that the resources are limited but that they are unlimited and scattered.
- Advertising - There isn’t much to say here which is not self implied, but still, remember that the power of advertisement when it comes to the general public is HUGE.
- Where used to it - I know many people trying out Linux or other open-source platforms, but no matter what, what they are looking for is the similarity to Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has us by the *alls here and we can all say "well if we won’t change it, it won’t change" but the poor truth is that people don’t like to try new things and evolve.
- Awesome IDE - admit or not, Visual Studio is an amazing program. I don’t think there is another IDE that will compare, that means the developers use Microsoft which means they develop for Microsoft and that means you get the old "I can’t switch to Linux, there are no programs…" argument which is not true but again, people don’t change.
- Community - At least when it comes to the community we can say that the BIG open-source projects have a community to match or at least be at the same league of the Microsoft community(the world).
- Evolving - We are witnessing the past few years that even a company as big as Microsoft can evolve, maybe not as fast as open-source but we are seeing the Live! Office coming to life and other new projects.
- Force in numbers - If you think about it, they’re so big that if you piss them off they can just sit on you.
This reasons and many others bring me to the believe that even though people don’t like Vista and even though it is cool to hate Microsoft we are looking at one big company that is not going anywhere and is actually going to win.
What do you think?
Nadav