Microsoft doesn’t matter because it is inevitably doomed to irrelevance. everything that they do has been or is in the process of being commoditised. a decade ago it was possible to see that this would happen. now we’re almost in the final stages of the process. MS will drag on for quite a few years yet, but the share market is brutal…once the market realises their dominance is fading, their market cap will vanish rapidly as investors panic and try to unload their stock. this wont kill them, they have too much in cash reserves to be killed overnight, but it will make them vulnerable to asset-stripping vultures.

MS may, towards the end, attempt a desperate conversion to real open source. if they do that, then they may survive in a much reduced form, but they and their proprietary monopoly will still have lost.

btw, regarding Olaf’s point. another factor here is that when users begin to expect & demand open access to their data, then the apps that they use to access and manipulate that data become replaceable commodity items, which means that users end up being free to use any compatible application on any OS. Application lock-in and OS lock-in reinforce each other and depend upon each other. break one and they both inevitably fail.

Open Office is a good example. MS Office, particularly MS Word and Excel, is one of the primary mechanisms that keep people tied to MS Windows (with some grudging, delayed support for Macs). As OO becomes a viable alternative, the lock-in to MSO begins to unravel. This is already beginning to happen.

this is why it’s important that FOSS apps like OO and Firefox and Thunderbird run on Windows as well as on linux and other free unixes. they are a stepping stone to free operating systems. Once users switch to free apps, their data is no longer a hostage to keep them on proprietary Windows.

Apart from all that competition there is also the possibility of forking free software projects.

Google is not a player in the OS game. They don’t have an OS and there is no evidence to suggest that they could do a better than average job if they decided to create one. Storage of data on the net is not a replacement for a PC, there is a lot of stuff that you don’t want to give to google (EG bedroom photography).

Sure. Jokes aside, I do agree with your post that MS cannot sustain its monopoly forever, and they are certainly sliding downhill already. Whether or not Linux will prove to be the inevitable successor is debatable, however. At present Linux is the best viable alternative, but the future is by no means predictable and other contenders for a New Monopoly may well arise in the meantime - such as Google for example. A lot of it will have to do with the direction of consumer whims, and where the market decides to go, and which company (or free software movement) happens to get there first and seize the opportunity.

I couldn’t agree more here, Russell. The best things I saw during the last time were “Lost” and “The Wire”. For the latter, you need a “wire”, as it’s neither broadcasted nor planned to be where I live…

cheers,
Wolfgang

You are correct that there are obstacles to HDTV, but as I’ve only just got SD digital TV and I own a heap of regular DVDs that I haven’t watched yet I won’t be facing such problems for a while.

Olaf: Good point, I was mixing up the OS and application issues a little bit there. Although in the case of DRM the OS is involved in denying users access to their own data.

Shannon: OS/2 could have beat Windows if IBM had the will. The advantage of free software (as for any loosely coupled organisation) is that there is no-one to wave the white flag. MS has hired a few senior Linux people over the last few years and gained nothing from it.

Here’s my old “quiet inevitability” post from linux-elitists. And another response to Yet Another Monopoly Whine.

The most positive thing to come out of the Google/Doubleclick deal is that it made MSFT into the whiners. Their mojo is lost, their shark is jumped, it’s just a matter of time until the office furniture auction. Do they have good chairs?

What OSs do that? It sounds like an app issue, not like an OS issue.

a few day ago, on a topic like your “It seems inevitable that Linux will dominate the AV section” statement that this is wishful thinking. I even thought about shouting out for help like “Houston, we have a problem”, because *especially* DRM and the non-playable Blu-Ray and other scrambled and DRM’ed HDTV formats *are* a big problem.

But after thinking about it for a while, I came to the conclusion that you are right here. DRM is defective by design. The customers who nowadays buy into the big screen home Hollywood theater market just don’t get it how they lock themselves in.

What we need are more projects like Peach and its predecessor Elephants Dream, and people will look our way with lots of envy.

It’s a question of time IMHO. As a hardware vendor who only ships pre-installed FREE software, I can’t go and offer a HTPC now which will play anything high quality (like 1080p).

But the more users we become, the more power we have - and if Hollywood ends up dying because the whole world turns to the pirate bay or such for good quality content, then that’s their problem and not ours. We warned them often enough to open their eyes and stop that stupid digital restriction right from the start.

I see it like you. It’s not a question *if*, but only *when* we will have won. Victory seems inevitable indeed.

Cheers,
Wolfgang
–
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://blog.thedebianuser.rog/
http://www.zareason.de/