Can Linux supplant Windows?
Correction at 6:35 a.m. PDT: This article was initially written on the assumption that the study was new. It was actually published in 2005.
For those waiting for a grand cataclysmic battle between Gog (Linux) and Magog (Windows), with one supreme victor, don't hold your breath.
I was reading through a 2005 study by Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, and was surprised by how little has changed in the past four years, despite Linux and Windows duking it out in ever-increasing intensity.
Since that study was released, Linux has continued to swipe at Microsoft's Windows market share. But, as the study predicted, Microsoft's huge installed base has proved both a strategic beachhead and an impenetrable fortress against the Linux threat.
Not that Microsoft can afford to rest on its laurels. Open-source interest and adoption grows from strength to strength, with government adoption, as recently highlighted by Gartner, feeding into enterprise adoption. This, coupled with Microsoft's weakening core business in Windows client software, suggests an opening for Linux that its proponents are eager to exploit.
And yet, as the study's authors surmised, a duopoly between the two is much more likely than a monopoly by either. What's most interesting to me is that this same duopoly dynamic seems to be playing out across the open source/Microsoft divide, most visibly in the browser market. Open source seems to beat many proprietary vendors relatively easily, but Microsoft is tough.
The study, despite its vintage, gives hints as to why Microsoft remains a formidable competitor for open-source alternatives like Linux:
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position. This result holds true regardless of the strength of Linux's demand-side learning. Furthermore, the result persists regardless of the intrinsically better design and potential differential value of Linux. In other words, harnessing demand-side learning more efficiently is not sufficient for Linux to win the competitive battle against Windows.
Microsoft's huge installed base and its ability (and willingness) to lower prices to compete with open-source solutions like Linux keep its moat broad and its gates high. It's one thing to be able to trounce Unix with a massive price differential, but it's quite another to displace Windows with its comparatively low cost and ecosystem benefits (i.e., Microsoft can lower the cost of Windows while keeping the cost of complements like SQL Server or Exchange high).
This is why we see Red Hat displacing Unix at a torrid pace, but so far doing little to cripple Microsoft. It's why other open-source solutions manage to topple non-Microsoft proprietary solutions first, with Microsoft generally the last target.
Most proprietary vendors lack the breadth of Microsoft's offerings. Most also have prices that start so high that it's difficult for them to credibly (and profitably) drop prices enough to effectively compete with open source. Microsoft is different.
Perhaps this explains Microsoft's visceral, early response to open source. I once asked Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, why Microsoft stands largely alone in its adamant opposition to open source. He didn't have a compelling answer, but this study suggests a couple: Microsoft has fought open source so hard because it, more than any other vendor, has perhaps the most to lose and because it has the best tools to fight with.
All of the strategies the study's authors noted for fighting open source (selective pricing discounts, FUD, co-option, etc.), Microsoft has deployed. If the authors' suppositions continue to prove themselves correct, we'll continue to see much more of this over the years, but we're unlikely to see either Linux or Windows ultimately topple the other.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
You simply do not comprehend why having so many distros is a good thing.
Unlike the 'users only need what we provide' model on Windows, Linux is flexible enough to run in many different environments, from small embedded devices, to supercomputer clusters. From the desktop to high performance real-time. The various distros provide easy paths to all of these areas. Even the desktop distros provide enough difference that one distro will fit one user, while another desktop distro will not.
I have wrestled with the "which distribution" question myself lately, including trying about 5 distros inside VM's, and attempting (and failing) to install KUbuntu, OpenSuse, and eLive on an old 256MB PC, before settling on Puppy, which installed fine. I think most of the installers, though better than the Slackware installer I used 12+ years ago, still need more work to work on various hardware, including installing in limited RAM situations, and to provide better feedback when there is a failure. It would be nice if (perhaps like FreeBSD) there were a somewhat larger base-system agreed upon in the Linux world, but I understand the distro creators and users enjoy the flexibility of configuring their systems any way they like. (Puppy, for example, seems a very different animal from the rest.) Still, there could be ways of unifying some more aspects of the configuration of various distributions without locking anyone down. (Perhaps a standards body could help debate the merits of various package formats?)
Hardware virtualization could be game-changing; if motherboard or BIOS vendors start building a Linux-based hypervisor+OS into their BIOSes, so that you can load Windows optionally *after* boot into Linux (which becomes a sort of extended BIOS), perhaps more users would choose to just stay in Linux instead of "bothering" to load Windows. This has happened already on some motherboards; some integration with cloud-computing apps may make Linux-based PCs very common within a few years (as they already are in some segments, such as netbooks). Support could still be a (valid) fear in many users' minds, partly because there are so many varied distributions, and this could make it hard even for a local Linux expert to know exactly how to fix or tweak your environment remotely. But I think remote support for Linux is generally much easier than for Windows would be..
Apple may be (justifiably) concerned that selling a stand alone OS could harm hardware sales and the high margins they enjoy. It is also possible that Apple cannot compete on price with Microsoft OS' (which could explain generally the high cost of a Mac vs PC.)
Before this turns in to a Microsoft vs Apple/PCvs Mac flame war, please note I make no claims as to which OS is better, and say that Macs are generally higher than comparable PCs, though I realize this is not always the case.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10250196-2.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
Google already has a suite of browser-based productivity apps which are more-or-less usable. If I, as a consumer, could buy a Linux based computer that launched a browser instead of a desktop on startup, and if I could use that browser for productivity applications, surfing, and watching TV and movies, then I would probably be a happy camper. And what if the monitor was the consumer's TV set instead of a computer monitor?
Remember MS-DOS 5 and how you could either run the DOS shell file management application at startup -- or use another application such as a word processor as the shell, or have none at all and just go to the command line? Then Windows came along as a graphical user interface application that ran on top of DOS, taking the place of the DOS shell. What if a Linux-based set-top box ran a browser as its primary user interface instead of the currently-employed Windows-line graphical user interfaces? That could be a great consumer product.
Now I can get drivers and software with ease, driving all the latest neat toys.
And these aren't wrappers anymore...they are from the mfgs.
Im certified on both OSs, and run both. They are just tools.
But I'm telling you, over the long run, Windows hasn't a chance against
Linux.
When somebody puts up a web page that only works with IE, they may say, "I don't mind if only 95% of the world will be able to see it". But if you point out that only, say, 30 % of the graphic designers can see it (I'm guessing), or 0% of the webpad users, that may not sound like a good idea.
I've been working in engineering for decades. Microsoft has been a very popular platform for CAD and embedded software, basically from the beginning of DOS; not because it was any good, but because the computers and software were far cheaper than the alternatives (switching from unix to DOS was horrible but necessary). People are realizing that this no longer holds; as a platform for development, Windows does nothing for you (unless you are developing Windows applications), and is actually getting worse over time -- now we have 'new features' being pushed into the machine on a regular basis. When you are working on a large project you want to have the same computer on Monday morning which you left on Friday afternoon. Meanwhile, it's now possible to get virtually all of the development tools you need on Linux (in fact, many of them run 'native' on Linux and need cygwin on Windows). And there are still some tools which are only available for POSIX (or aren't fully functional in Windows). So there's a lot of linux use in this sector, and increasing fairly rapidly.
Standard OS's (I use the term 'standard' to encompass all POSIX environments, which includes linux and MACs since Apple made the brilliant decision to fall in line with OS/X) come with a standard suite of development tools, including gcc, python, perl, make, svn.
Windows-based development tools for engineering come piecemeal from difference vendors, each with its own 'IDE' (since the platform doesn't even supply a text editor, each tool comes with its own editor, project manager, build automation system, and doesn't generally integrate well with other tools). The Microsoft tools are only good for developing apps for Windows, whereas many open source tools are far more general purpose.
I've also heard people developing engineering apps who say (without actual numbers): "our customers run Windows, not linux", I don't think that's true any more. What they really mean is, "nobody complains too much; those who prefer Linux will be able to somehow use a Windows app, if that's all we have; whereas those who use Windows likely won't be able to use a linux app at all". So if it can only be one or the other, it has to be Windows. This mechanism has been a major factor in Microsoft's success in all sectors.
The best approach is to give them both: In general, don't use any development tool that won't port to other, standard environments; if you decide to create an app for Windows, fine, but don't use a development tool which will chain it to Windows. take a look at Netshark, Blender, Audacity, Inkscape; any of the apps which work well across platforms, find out what they're based on. wxWidgets, for instance, is used for many of these. You'll be ready for the whole market no matter how it goes.
- by fisherman385 May 30, 2009 11:29 PM PDT
- The most powerful computers in the world run on some variant of Unix or Linux. Many production, development and research servers around the world run on Unix or Linux. Now let's understand one important point; the Linux is a free operating system which means you can use it free of charge. But some distribution have made it that if you want support, then you would pay for it which is reasonable. But since Linxu is for non-profit then it does not directly compete with Microsoft! Of course Microsoft looses market share and feels threatened as more people use Linux but Linux community could care less for the most part if someone uses Linux or not.
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(20 Comments)Now these days, Linux can be easily run on desktops and laptops and again it is consumer's choice whether to use it or not. When you buy a new PC, it will not only come with a Windows OS but it will come with an array of commercial software including; Office, anti-virus, spyware, media players, graphic applications and etc. But if you install Linux on that machine you will end up running the free version of all those applications. So the competition is really between the free source software and the commercial software not as much between Linux or Windows.
Now as much as PC makers claim that Linux may not be a good sell for many reasons, probably the main reason that they want to produce Windows machine is that they want to go with commercial software. Now the reason could be; the liability and legal issues, and then also businesses usually stick with each other. They usually find non-profits threatening.