I've been reading so much for so many years about an MS hegemony that would be close to extinction, I've even believed it for many years !
But I've been working in IT for ten years and I know now the many reasons why MS won't fall (to my great disappointment I must admit).
They always manage to seduce and care for the needs of the kinds of people that are key to their business : developers, IT managers and CEOs.
What strikes me is that MS has always pursued a policy of "adding new layers of code to fix the flaws of the underlying layers" ... even claiming the patched software will run smoother ... and still they find people to believe in this crap.
And this policy works for hardware business too because new layer after new layer, you finally need faster hardware !
Well, to make it short, I'd say that MS makes money on some people's laziness, ignorance, greed or stupidity and they have developed all the techniques to remarkably make their ecosystem grow up !
As for the endless debate on Windows bugs and security flaws, my opinion is it has nothing to do with the size of MS users base : it's MS own greed that's got it trapped. They want to be first in class on every IT product in the huge catalog they market ; as a consequence, they have to face so many competitors that they must release faster and faster each time.
About Windows typically, the only way they've found to make a buzz on every new release is an ever growing features list .... it wouldn't be sexy enough just to say "we have fixed and optimized all technologies introduced with the last release", but "we've bundled in a whole bunch of new technologies" sounds much better to clients and share-holders' ears, the fact that only a few percent of them are usable or simply useful is of no interest !
Anyway, the main problem is that, in an effort to tie to Windows anyone interested in their technologies, any new "ground breaking" technology is always intrinsically tied to the heart of the OS.
But, years passing and features list growing, the OS has become so bloated that they can no longer test or predict all possible erratic interactions between components before release to market, hence the least efficiency of Windows compared to any other OS on the same hardware and the many bugs and security flaws for which end-users are actually the final testers.
MS doesn't talk about it of course but the mess caused by new components aggregating over the years is such that they can't even delimit a set of main components that could be considered as the kernel of the OS.
They've finally decided to do something about this, but only a few months ago (
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/)!
But, to get back to the subject of the article, I'd say nowadays the OS is no more the center of the battle. Many OSes have proved that they can offer viable alternatives and open the choice for customers. The better OS should just be the one that works best for you, but MS (again) has made sure that it's not possible.
Although less visible, the core of the fight has been the document formats battle for years now.
Q: what's the main cause of a company chosing to pay for MS Office licenses when it could install say Open Office and save the money to invest on fab machines or R&D ?
A: they need to exchange electronic documents with their clients and vendors, so they chose the mainstream office tools because they think it minimizes the chances of compatibility problems.
MS has been fighting for years to get a hold on all main document formats, information exchange formats and web content :
- they've used (and are still using) their dev tools and their IIS and IE deployed base to try to lock internet technologies and websites to IE-only compatibility (they've even tried to appropriate Java by making their own implementation in former Visual Java, no doubt that Sun would have lost its baby)
- after the many changes (that are still going on) in Word/Excel/PowerPoint formats to lose the competition, they're now trying to influence ISO organization to adopt their implementation of XML office documents as the new standard
- fortunately for us, a few months ago, when Vista was about to be publicly released, they abandoned the idea of using Windows monopoly once again to raise a new image format as their de facto replacement standard for JPEG
- they've even tried to enforce their own vision of a TCP/IP stack back in the 90's (You want our new Exchange server ? ... well you'll have to be equipped with DNS/routers/directory servers/etc that are "MS TCP/IP"-compatible !)
The key to MS growth is their using of their monopoly on the end-user's OS to enforce de facto "standards" bottom-up from PCs to servers, then to whole companies IT infrastructures, then to whole internet. They almost never use open standards, no matter how robust, widely used or field-proof they are, they always come up with their own implementation (often poorly engineered or a disguised copy).
The key to destroy this monopoly, open the market to other vendors and avoid any other monopoly of this kind is to enforce open standards for documents, web content and information exchange via international organizations.
Without IE and MS Office hegemony, there would be no MS monopoly on PC's OS and we wouldn't be having this conversation !
an XP/W2K/W2K3/Solaris/Linux user.
Then when I tried to manually get the package it would half-install and then not allow me to download any more.
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