For a decade people have been asking the question "Will Microsoft ever lose it's market dominance?", well here's the simple answer.

First off, a very quick economics lesson.

A monopoly can only exist when certain barriers to entry exist, and there are many when it comes to computer operating systems!

- Astronomical setup costs (Imagine how much money you would need to start a company called MicroHard, hire hundreds of programmers+business people, get contracts with major hardware developers, and setup a global communications network!)

- Competition (You will be competing with the big boys! Do you know how much money bill has? not to mention the others like SuSE, Redhat, Mac... etc....)

- Legal issues (You will be involved in MANY lawsuits)

- The list goes on....



This may sound very grim.. however the life of a monopoly has different stages... first off when supernormal profit exists, competition is INEVITABLE!

And competition is exactly what is happening... 5 years ago the story was very different... Microsoft is losing it's market share for a variety of different reasons (security, licensing, corperate image....) which is the start of the economic process..






Here's what you should expect to see in the next 5 years,

1. Microsoft will attempt to offer the same as it's competitors, you can expect MS to offer alot of security, dynamic data handling, and hands-free networking...

2. MS will focus the majority of it's efforts on corporate users.. because thats where the money is

3. MS's competitors will continue to gain market share, especially open source because of the end user (a good example probably being yourself)




Here's why.

Microsoft WILL be focusing it's efforts on corporate users, which means the End User will get lost in the equation somewhere... Corporate users normally deal with End Users...

Also it's basic economics, and unless MS can offer something as unique as the GUI it brought out more than 10 years ago, this process will continue.




Please vote in my poll....


Thanks for reading, enjoy you're open source! Microsoft is currently lobbying to make Open-Source illegal (yeah right, we're not all American thank you very much bill...)

(If you didn't already know, MS&the FBI want to pass a law which will make your root password federal property... insecure.org -> good reading -> the freedom of information)

Microsofts monoply wil presistt, unless those who have the power to change things at root levels jump on board then it shall prevail, but then there is too many parties with self interestes. Corpatrations rule the world with governments at a close second. The IT industry is the old boys club and school tie personified, can you say weird words about the bus sped of pci Oooh, you don't know anything.bollocks.

As long as the slackwares etc. of the worlds keep at it there's some hope, beyond that you might aswell aceept the world is flat.

"Microsofts monoply wil presistt, unless those who have the power to change things ..."

You are the only person with the power to change things in your life..

Congratulations for running OpenSource

You should adjust your poll. (how bad did THAT sound)

Option 1 and 3 are the same thing. If Linux gains, M$ looses, and vis versa.


But to your question,

I predict M$ will continue to loose market share. The longer they wait for Longhorn the more damage that will be done. Linux has picked up more momentum in the last 6 months that soon it's going to be a hard force to stop. And with the 2.6 kernel coming very soon, you'll see a plethora of improvements coming to our OS.

I predict that M$ will loose the battle in the EU and will, out of they're own cockyness, refuse to pull Windows Media Player out of they're OS. This will force the EU to ban they're products for non-compliance. So now you have Asia and Europe all using Linux. The US will jump on the bandwagon soon after.

M$ will be left with nothing. And all the while Apple will stay the same.

microsoft will continue to dominate simply because it has the money to make sure it will, wheather its spending 100's of millions on pampering polititians and feeding them with FUD to get them to change laws or just massively out spending the competition, 1 way or another...

Questions 1 and 3 arn't the same..

There is competition to m$ which isn't opensource....

Your comments and poll are mostly business-centric. Although you did mention the end-user aspect, you merely glance through it in about two sentences.

So here is my opposing viewpoint. Businesses/companies/corporations are driven by $profit$. profit = revenue - costs. The more profit they get, the longer they'll continue to do things the way they were, because it's a proven cash cow.

So, if they can do the same things with lower expenditure, they jolly well will provided that the conversion costs doesn't significantly bite into their balance sheet.

MS understands that, which is why they are pushing the TCO and ROI factors as well as other marketing jargons. This is where real managers get separated from the wannabe yuppies:
1) The wannabes will get scared of the jargons and believe in the hype. Almost unquestioningly they will accept everything at face value.
2) Seasoned managers (and/or those with some clue) will consider everything the MS drone mentioned and analyze it. See whether it applies to their company or otherwise.

Linux advantage is that it's free. Now here's the problematic part. Companies want accountability for the products and services they use. However in the Linux domain, there's only a few key players in this area... namely Red Hat and SuSE. But I'm sure that soon, RH will pretty much be out of the picture due to their controversial pricing/end-of-life support cycles. The good news is, some well established names in terms of corporate support are getting in the fray, namely IBM and Sun.

Linux's future in the corporate world doesn't seem that bleak now, 'innit?

However, on the end-user/consumer side... Things are very, very much different. Consumers just want the shortest and painless route from point A to point B. They generally don't care on any other aspect of the issue, which is what most Linux advocates don't understand.

They don't care about system info being passed on to MS during Windows Update. They don't care about IE not fully standards-compliant. They don't care if Windows is the only platform vulnerable to virus attacks. Nor do they care about Windows' flawed security model. All they care about is that it works, and it's easy. But it's not all about ease-of-use... read on.

And end-users are stingy too. If possible they want everything for free. Which is why MS is smart enough to work out all these OEM deals with almost all PC vendors to include Windows with their PCs. End-users don't bother about "absorbed pricing" and whatnot... for all they care, Windows is free because it came with the PC.

If it was purely easy-to-use and works very well, MacOS would have won hands down... it's a no-contest. However, MacOS can only run on their own hardware platform. And this hardware platform is expensive when compared to x86. Although I'm a hardcore anti-Macfan, if Mac ported their OS to the x86 architecture, I'd admit... it would be massive hit for this ease-of-use crowd.

For the stingy ones... if they are at least minimally competent at computing in general, most of them would have already moved on to Linux or the BSDs. But a large majority of them are not... hence they are still tied to Windows too lazy to unlock their minds.

Sun don't support linux, they push solaris over it

Some Linux projects Sun's been doing, and I've read reports that they're developing some flavour of Desktop Linux, can't find the links now it seems.

Not to mention that they have been supporting Cobalt RaQs running Linux for years since they acquired the company.

Of course they'll push Solaris for the "Enterprise Solutions", doesn't mean they'll leave Linux as a white elephant

they bashed linux once in an attemp to push solaris. read it in linuxuser and developer magazine (www.linuxuse.co.uk)

I prefer not to dwell on the past... As the old saying goes, "Let bygones be bygones."

Focusing too much on negative aspects of life in general can get you down... I prefer to see the good side of things, or at least try.

Sun Strikes Huge Linux Desktop Deal With China

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031117S0015

.......lets see how it plays out ?

well they only did it once and they let it be - it seems they have sense

lets not forget the focus of this thread:

Software -> Operating Systems -> Market Share

Sorry Azmeen you lost me with your technical knowlede.. I come from a small company where we orginally only delt with MS and MS costs... then I introduced linux to the equasion.

We re-wrote ALL our applications (which cost $$$) but in the end the cost of MS liscencing was equal to the one-off cost of re-writing our code.

So we will only get a financial benifit when everyone else is purchasing new MS software or re-newing their "rental" aggreements.

Linux gained market share when we did the switch... this poll asks the question "Will more companies be doing the switch, and if so will that effect teh over all market share of MS"...

I'd love to hear what you guys think....