Strange symbiosis among Apple, Microsoft, and open source
For all the rancor between opposing technology camps--Microsoft vs. the open-source community, Apple vs. Microsoft, etc.--there's a lot more symbiosis going on than meets the eye. In fact, it's hard to imagine Apple without Microsoft, open source without Microsoft, and so on, as Harry McCracken suggests in MacWorld (not online at time of writing).
PC users...have long benefited hugely from the existence of Macs. Microsoft and PC manufacturers have cribbed so many of Apple's good ideas that it's tough to imagine what Windows machines would look like today if the Mac had never existed.
For years, however, that debt went largely unpaid. The PC platform finally started giving back in 2006, when the first Intel-based Macs shipped and the Mac essentially became a PC--and a really good one at that. Intel's mammoth investments in chips are sustainable only because its processors end up in most of the world's Windows PCs. Mac users reap the same technological windfall even though it's the Windows majority that provides the economies of scale.
Of course, Microsoft also propped up Apple's waning fortunes back in 1997 with a $150 million investment and, more importantly, a commitment to build Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer. Without Microsoft's software on Apple's machines, they arguably would have been much less palatable to the general public.
Not that these two companies are alone in their curious symbiosis. For example, where would open source be without Microsoft? After all, it is Microsoft that helped to create a standardized hardware platform (Intel) for both "desktops" and servers, which paved the way for Linux, but it is also Microsoft that consistently sets the bar, at least on the "desktop," that open-source projects strive to meet and exceed.
Microsoft, in turn, owes a growing debt to open source, and is increasingly getting involved with open source, most recently releasing an open-source software development kit for Bing to help developers write Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch (iPhone) applications. Linux is pushing Microsoft to innovate again in the server and mobile markets, while a host of open-source applications, databases, and middleware challenge it on the Web, "desktop," and mobile.
Open source, whether in Mozilla's (Firefox) hands or Google's (Chrome), is also challenging Apple and Microsoft to innovate again in browser technology, which, in turn, Apple is enabling, at least, in Google's case, through its own open-source WebKit technology.
Strange world, technology. On the ground, there are ideological skirmishes between rival camps of customers. In the boardroom, plots are hatched to ridicule the competition.
But in reality, Microsoft needs Apple needs open source needs Google needs....You get the picture.
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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. 
Unfortunately, the bar that Microsoft sets isn't all that high to begin with.
umm... maybe because they charge money for their software?
?ok, that?s probably just issue of current market share.
If it doesn't live up to what users want, all a user has to do is look at the code and make it better.
As for comparison, Linux Mint is compared to Ubuntu is compared to Debian is compared to Slackware is compared to SimplyMEPIS is compared to PCLinuxOS is compared to Fedora is compared to RHEL is compared to CentOS and so on and so on and so on.
Most computer users don't want to (or can't) look at the code and make it better hence why thy go with Apple or Microsoft OS's.
Even if you are a loyal user of proprietary software, it is in your interest to support open source alternatives. Doing so will keep your proprietary software vendor from becoming complacent.
Consider how Microsoft Internet Explorer stagnated for years with poor standards support until Firefox reached a significant market share.
A good rule of thumb is donate 10% of what you spend on proprietary software to open source projects. If you spend $100 on Sony Vegas, contribute $10 to PiTiVi or Blender.
But at the same time, Windows support data execution prevention (DEP), Stack protection, exception handler checking and dynamic address relocation/randomisation. Mac OS does not...
We are seeing a convergence where Mac will be implementing some of these security enhancements and windows is moving towards a Microkernel as well (some components always been inside a Microkernel since the Windows NT days but this was used only for debugging and crash dump generation). Windows 7 for example has now most of the kernel in KernelBase.dll and supports User Mode Drivers, so it doesn't take many brain cells to realise that Microsoft too will be moving to a Microkernel.
So yes, there is a strange symbiosis between the vendors, but where it will lead us? Is it good for competition? Will it lead to innovation? who knows.
This is however, is one of Apple's best decisions, in it's management of this KDE Project Fork. They could have just as easily turn it into a closed proprietary project and kept these other developers out. But then they would not be benefiting from contributors like Nokia, Google, KDE and many in the Open Source World, of sharing their ideas.
As far as comparing Apple's supposed Microkernel as opposed to Microsoft's Monolithic kernel are concerned. This is another area of debate on just what they really are or aren't. They have all been changing and morphing their kernels for years. But this is the first year we'll see Microsoft dropping driver integration into Windows 7's kernel. Making it much lighter and more Microkernel like than a Monolithic kernel based OS.
Now Linux too, needs to do something similar, even though certain manufacturers have become quite skilled at "shimming" their own closed proprietary drivers into various OS kernels (Nvidia). At the same time, in the Open Source Development World, certain developers are working on projects like XEGL. Where they want a driverless OS directly in charge of the hardware. This angers Nvidia, but ATI/AMD is saying have at it (because they would rather not deal with making various expensive drivers that have to be continually updated). This would then eliminate bloat both in the kernel and OS in general, with only the API's to facilitate communications or interfere and slow down the whole process.
Then you would really have an extremely fast system. But all hardware would run the same and individual competitive components or features would be rendered useless. Unless the manufacturers started sharing in an Open Source way as well as software makers. That most likely will never happen!
But..... there is hope, as seen with many closed proprietary hardware and software companies crossing over to the Open Source World of learning to co-operate on projects too large for any single corporate enity to even attempt. Like Khronos Group's OpenGL rebuild and overhaul. There are many members doing together what would have taken one company a near lifetime to do. OpenGL and it's family of API's is now the largest distributed hardware interface in the World, despite Microsoft's attempts to "Embrace Extend and Extinguish" it. It's still what most every OS in the World relies on to speak to it's hardware. Doing that even in Microsoft's own various Windows Versions. Some things are just too indispensable or expensive to write by even one very large corporate entity!
Right now even Microsoft is learning that they aren't big enough or rich enough to quickly write and replace some Open Source Server Programs. Now if they could just learn to go by some of the same rules they benefit from, the whole World of Web and Computer Technology could benefit from these Corporate Groups sharing their knowledge instead of fighting with each other!
Although I am myself guilty of such
- by JVerity September 1, 2009 10:23 AM PDT
- Had the government dealt effectively with IBM's monopoly in computing when it had a chance (in the 1960s and 1970s) - namely, by busting that company up so as to spur true competition in the mainframe market (where virtually all the profits were) - there would have been 1) a trio or more of solid, robust and viable computer makers competing with each other (eventually in PCs as well as in large-scale machines) and 2) much less chance of a single PC standard becoming so dominant and therefore 3) no IBM monopoly for Microsoft or any other company to inherit, as essentially happened. And 4) open source would have arisen as an effective software-creation model much much earlier than it actually did. Three (or more) competing PC standards, each backed by a viable manufacturer, would have prompted users (aka the marketplace) to demand compatibility between these systems, and users would have initiated collaborative efforts to hammer out workable standards for document exchange, networking, and so forth, all much earlier than we have actually seen. The market's invisible hand, that is, would have been freed much earlier to act in its own interest.
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(22 Comments)To praise Microsoft for helping Apple thru dire straits, or to say that Msft "needs" Apple to spur its own inventiveness, is to miss the point. Microsoft invested in Apple primarily for political reasons - to preserve some semblance of effective competition in the desktop computer market and keep anti-trust investigators at bay. Without a viable Apple, Microsoft would have been much more suspect and drawn much more attention to itself than it did. Like IBM's mainframe rivals (the Seven Dwarfs, as they were called), Apple pretty much lived, then, at Microsoft's whim. The monopolist always needs to keep up appearances and will tolerate and even aid competitors when necessary, just to further its own economic interests. This is a delicate but quite profitable balancing act.
Microsoft's dominance in desktop operating systems may well have brought the price of PCs down, but this was accomplished by essentially dodging the research and development costs that would have been necessary for the company to thrive in a truly and fully competitive marketplace, a marketplace where a handful of large, self-sustaining companies slugged it out and provided customers with even better machines and software and networks than we all currently enjoy. (Hard to imagine, perhaps, but it's entirely possible that computing, right now, could well be much more advanced than it is.) Just look at the Internet and Web, where this model has worked in spades: Truly open standards have been developed to enable virtually every computer on the planet to work together in sharing information and messages and more - not because this helps any particular provider over the others but because it benefits users, who finally had a low-cost, "open" collaborative development platform at hand.