What Microsoft is doing RIGHT and why open-source is LOOSING
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
Tags: linux, open-source, thoughts, Windows
March 27th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I’ll give you 3,4,5 and 6, but 1 2 and 7 I got some issues
first when it comes to medium scaled project, which are application lunchers, web browsers and similar, because Microsoft can’t make a good profit out of them, so here the open source communities have an edge, because the people who work on open source are people who have passion for their project, and I personally prefer passion and okay skills, to great skills and disinterest. After all having passion for a project is like being mario on star power, you can run through a hundred Gumbas like they aren’t even there.
and lets be frank even with large scale software the open source has some advantage, ZERO ASS COVERING, people who develop linux spend no, and I mean NO, time writing mails explaining to their boss why they didn’t meet the deadline, or going to a meeting who’s purpose is ment to fill the head man on where the project is, so he can add his insights to a project he hasn’t seen one line of code of. they spend every moment working on a project, by working on the project, not covering their asses or looking for a promotion.
Also, you can say Microsoft can sit on people and has a lot more developers then open source, open source has Linus, the guy kicks all their asses and takes their freaking name, the greatest proof of this is not Linux, it’s git, google it, it proved to me once and for all that someone with a brain that can do what he thinks is best can beat an army that are lead by a duckling. and until you don’t find out about “git” you will not understand why he is worthy of such praise. mind you he wrote git in two weeks, Microsoft failed to do it for 20 years, and so did every other company out there.
Lastly we come to advertising, the problem is most advertising nowadays sucks, because while it does make you know the brand you know nothing about the brand and lets face it Microsoft is big enough and well known enough for this to have no meaningful effect anymore, Vista, well known how many actually upgrade? ‘nuf said.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:15 am
well.. except for your misprint on “where used to it” (we’re)
I agree, and you should add *Money* in capital letters to the equation.. (I know you’ve mentioned it along the article).
Quality (derived again by the fact that they are big and have loads of money) is another thing , I know that they are not perfect (maybe far from it) but they do have some good products, and if you try to compare those to “open-source” ones you’ll see the difference.
and like you said “force in numbers” they are everywhere, they rule the general public, the masses.
and that’s all I have to say about that.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
About Visual studio, I can definitely say that Java has some IDEs which are as good as visual studio (some are free, some are not), and sometimes better. That being said, they don’t support C#.
Microsoft will continue to rule the desktop world (considering what happened with vista, its not as obvious as it was a few years ago). About servers.. I’m not so sure.
But you do have to admit that there were huge improvements on the open-source OS area. Ubuntu is much much easier than previous linux distros, and office replacements are pretty good.