Microsoft, Apple, Linux And 10 Years Of Change

[livinthailandos]

To be fair with most of you I'm not going to make this a long one because there where lots of stories but the main ones that stuck out most to me where

Microsoft

a. From Xbox to Xbox 360 red ring of death and a 3 billion dollar warranty fix

b. Windows XP rise getting hundreds of millions of users to use it, to Windows Vista realistic failure, to windows 7 adoption only due to Vista

c. Windows Mobile rise and fall. Weither or not you use the phone or like it. Its already been well noted its market share is constantly falling in part due to apple iphone, blackberry, andriod. This area is where microsoft had some marketshare before the iphone but lack of innovation and apple's iphone along with andriod basically showed microsoft how easy it is to steal marketshare

d. Music Player - Zune again same area as its mobile platform total lack of innovation, apple showed how it should be done

e. Ads against microsoft, from apple, have to admit apple did a great job and microsoft didn't fight back till way to late in the game

f. London Stock Exchange 6 hour 45 minute crash due to Microsoft .Net Framework collapse.

g. Microsoft Search / Bing - Needless to say microsoft has tried and tried and no luck so far

h. Too many cases but I seem to remember lots and lots of court cases against a basic monopoly

Apple

a. Ipod to Ipod Touch - easy enough for the mass audience to use, revenue and the amount sold globally cannot be denied. Showed how easy it was to keep your music with you

b. Macbook Air -

c. Iphone - So many things could be said and lots of areas to say to but really the iphone changed the entire mobile industry and the entire smart phone industry to. Along with its touchscreen and apps very few phone makers will ever come close enough to touch apple iphone

d. Mac OS X- I got mine back in 2006, still have it today, Again amazed how well this labtop worked. and the things it could do way better than vista or xp at the time

e. Itunes & Music. Needless to say piracy probably helped but apple truly showed how the music industry how easy it was for them to get knocked off their throne. No need to buy the entire cd for just a few songs you want

f. Ipad - still new to the market so a wait and see approach to if it succeeds or not. Won't be sold for another few months

g. apple tv - needless to say this product in a way is a flop have not seen mass adoption rates like iphone / ipod / labtops either I'm sure their was a potential but in my opinion it was not a success

h. Apple ads against microsoft in part due to vista's failure

Linux

a. If you need computer servers nothing else but linux will due, reliable, stable, and global mass adoption in this area cannot be denied along with numberous reports and statics

b. Live CD this is one area I'm very proud of, if you have ever used a linux live cd you know exactly what I'm talking about. Great way to try a OS without ever having to install it if you choose, great way to test your existing hardware to see if it works and to play with without damaging an existing OS on the computer

c. Distro's: If you check distro watch you'll see tons of linux distro's, people may complain their are to many personally I think its great, look at all the choices you have

d. Linux on a USB drive. Again take a entire OS and put it on a usb drive, how awesome is that

e. Software. Linux makes it so easy to get software without ever having to look online. Microsoft & apple have the apps but linux had this ability long before microsoft and apple got into apps for phones or anything else

f. Multi User Difficulty - Linux is for everyone lots of users may deny it or it doesn't work but from begineers to advance users / Linux Mint 8 - Slackware and on.

g. Linux works even on old computers with mininum hardware needed. Don't believe me check out dam_n Small Linux

So everyone I know this is long, I know I forgot more areas but look forward to your postings and if you have other areas that should be added post them

[Crushdepth]

I think you could add Google to the list as their activities have driven a lot of change:

* Search and contextual advertising comes of age.

* Use of advertising revenues to fund development of free online/cloud services (email, maps, Google Earth etc)

* Cloud services start to see serious adoption by business, government, public (Google Apps etc)

* Android OS begins to emerge as a credible challenger to iPhone OS / phones.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the *next* ten years. Google might nock a few large holes in Microsoft's main business (Windows, Office) and to a lesser extent Apple (iPhone). But I suspect Google is going to find itself the target of significant government regulation in the near future. They're just getting a little bit too big and scary for their own good.

[filingaccount]

A decent summary. Gives users an overview and can clear the fog for them a bit.

One note about the Linux bit though.

If you are looking for a versatile, VERY small (~ 100 MB), quick, fully featured Distro. there is only one: Puppy Linux.

They also have "Puplets" (Puplet Forum with latest work). These are essentially community modified versions of Puppy Linux that includes different softwares for different tasks.

Personally I use 3 different kinds for different tasks.

1 for Office work (includes Open office, GIMP, PDF writer etc etc).

1 for "show off" with Mac interface.

1 for PC maintenance with a lot of PC maintenance tools.

They all boot off USB flash memories and ALL PC's will accept to boot off the USB memory as long as they have a USB port and if you have installed your Puplet in "Floppy mode".

The one drawback is that the repository is limited, and requires modified versions of common softwares.

It is fantastically FAST though as the whole O/S and standard programs load into RAM at boot.

The system requirements are extremely low as well, and one could say that a Celeron 300 Mhz with 128 MB of RAM would run Puppy Linux well enough not to cause many frustrations.

Imagine you can get a full working operating system for the same size as some drivers for other operating systems....

[tariq786]

Linux is already in majority on SERVERs but on desktops it still needs time.

[somchaiq]

All of my Company Computers, Notebooks, PC's and Server are running on Ubuntu Linux. Stable and reliable. My Son is playing at an old Notebook using EDUBUNTU a Education Version of Ubuntu with a lot Games and anything for free.

I use Open Office for my Daily Work, Thunderbird with Lightning Plugin as replacement for Outlook, Firefox and Google Chrome as Browser, Gimp as Photoshop replacement, and many other Programs.

Real the only Problem with Linux is that the People are to lazy to rethink, to learn something new.

[welo]

We all know that this was a pretty successful decade for Apple and probably the worst for MS. And I think MS deserved it! The company was always best at using its dominance to take over other markets and drive out the competition without a technical superior product, and this strategy failed several times during the last years (XBox vs PS2, Zune vs iPod, Live Messenger vs Skype, Windows Mobile vs others...)

However, looking at your list I notice a negative tendency:

Windows XP was a major success! It might be overshadowed by Vista's failure but considering that it still goes strong nearly 9 years after its release - surely also because of lacking a strong successor - it's not fair to mention it only to point out the Vista disaster.

And I think you are absolutely wrong about Windows 7 (your words: 'windows 7 adoption only due to Vista'). Windows 7 is a rock solid state-of-the-art OS. It doesn't matter whether it is better or worse than Mac OSX, it is definitely good enough and will give MS a solid base for the years ahead.

What I hope for? That MS will be successful developing a good OS product, for the users' benefit, and maybe keep failing on other markets.

I completely agree with crushdepth, Google has been a major innovator on various areas (one might add gmail as one of the first large scale web 2.0 apps) and is already seen by many as the next dominant player.

And did I really see disappointed reviews of the new Apple iPad?

welo

[cdnvic]

XP is a success now, but it was a bug-ridden security nightmare upon first release. OS X has been solid from the get go, (unlike OS 9, which was a pig) but still gets less than 4% of the global market share. I honestly doubt that Apple is too concerned about Mac market share. Their margins are high, and they have more product lines than most of their competitors.

I find it odd how so many assume that Apple's big rival is Microsoft when in reality the biggest threats to Mac sales are Dell, Hewlett Packard, Acer, and Amazon.

Where Apple has been most influential is not computing, but the music business. iTunes legitimized digital music.

Google is a marketing success but it's not as powerful a search tool as Altavista pre-Yahoo.

The last decade saw former internet giants like AOL and Compuserve come crashing down with others like Yahoo holding on by inertia alone. In the 90s they competed to become "The Internet" but wound up losing almost everything in their quest for dominance.

Small ISPs mostly disappeared, those that remained were often just resellers for major cable and DSL suppliers.

At the beginning of the decade a WAP phone was a novelty, now smartphones are the norm thanks to Palm, and Blackberry. Yet one of those companies is on life support as Apple, Nokia, and others have stolen much of the consumer market from them. The other still owns the business market.... for now.

If anything, the first decade of the century has shown not to take anything in tech for granted. The landscape can change in a heartbeat.

[Gary A]

I think Win 7 has hurt the popularity of Linux systems. I too love to hate Microsoft and spent LOTS of time trying to use Linux. I have at least a dozen different distros and have tried them all. I still have the latest Ubuntu on a hard drive but have not done anything with it since installing Win 7 Pro.

I was a VERY disappointed user of Win ME and wasn't much happier with Win XP. I suffered through the XP updates and service packs until they finally got it right. I used XP Pro for quite a few years but have not forgotten all the grief.

I have never liked Apple mainly because of all the proprietary and expensive add ons, programs and parts. They no doubt have a good product but I'm much happier to go to a small local computer shop to buy programs and particularly parts and upgrades.

I have to give credit where credit is due and as far as I can see, Win 7 is the best that MS has ever come up with. I had absolutely no plans to change to Win 7 but downloaded the evaluation copy and was quite impressed. I had played with a friend's Vista and decided that was just another problem packed release that I would never buy. Now both my desktop and my laptop and running Win 7 Pro. The most irritating thing about Win 7 is the different versions available. I still view that as a rip off. If you want to be happy and comfortable with Win 7 you are nearly forced to buy the Pro or Ultimate versions.

[nikster]

I think the iPad might just ring in a new era of computing to be honest. It's not quite there because it's (apparently?!) intended to be tethered to a "real computer" instead of being a stand-alone device. But there isn't much missing.

If you were an alien just arrived on earth you'd probably wonder why people that use email, internet, and Word, deal with the huge complexities that operating systems present (and try to solve). I think the iPad shows a way out of this. If I can use bittorrent on it, and maybe one or two other things, I could use it for everything except my work (programming).

Google is on the verge of turning into a company just as dysfunctional as MS - all their business resides on one idea, and that idea is under attack. Anyone could build the technical foundations of Google. Bing is proof of that. Maybe if Apple gets too pissed off with Google, they might just do their own search. They have the engineers, they have a long history of search research (first fast desktop search), and they'd be able to grab 5% of the market overnight by switching their iDevices to use their service by default.

If Apple dumps Google, I don't think they'd want to tie themselves to anything owned by Microsoft. Google looks so big now but I don't think they'd be able to withstand an attack by Apple, Microsoft and Firefox - maybe they took on too many fights, moving into everyone's market with Chrome OS, Chrome Browsers, and Android...

BTW some interesting thoughts by Jaron Lanier here: http://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html - in it, Lanier says that the Google model basically won't work in the long run, as it can't be that the aggregators make all the money, while the producers of content make little or no money. Quote: "Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth."

Edited February 1, 2010 by nikster

[siamect]

BTW some interesting thoughts by Jaron Lanier here: http://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html - in it, Lanier says that the Google model basically won't work in the long run, as it can't be that the aggregators make all the money, while the producers of content make little or no money. Quote: "Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth."

Jaron Lanier is employed by Microsoft, so his goals are different from yours...

Noone has ever tried to found a civilization through advertising...

Martin

[nikster]

BTW some interesting thoughts by Jaron Lanier here: http://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html - in it, Lanier says that the Google model basically won't work in the long run, as it can't be that the aggregators make all the money, while the producers of content make little or no money. Quote: "Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth."

Jaron Lanier is employed by Microsoft, so his goals are different from yours...

==> Good point! Even though he's been around forever, the old cyber hippie, it still matters. Makes bashing Google a convenient thing to do for sure.

I just found this gem - a 1994 interview with Steve Jobs. 1994 was when he was not running Apple, and NeXT had just closed down its hardware division. 90% of this article is just as relevant now as it was back then, fantastic stuff

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/318...teve_jobs/print

[Thanh-BKK]

Hi.

If Apple were to open their Mac OS so it could be used on PC hardware (non-Apple that is) i believe their market share would explode. That would be bad news for Linux, specially if Mac OS were competitively priced (read - cheaper than Windows).

The only thing preventing Apple from taking over the world is their locking OSX down to Apple hardware - which is seriously overpriced.

I agree Windows XP was a major success and Vista was a major failure. Many many people bought computers with Vista and very soon asked in forums "how can i downgrade to XP?" due to the issues. Windows 7 appears to be a really good OS from what i have read (have not tried it personally and likely won't) however as the "Windows" platform per se still dominates the market it will be the most insecure for the time being - naturally, the platform dominating the market is the major target for "bad guys" and viruses/worms/trojans/malware/spyware will continue to haunt that platform.

Linux has gotten so user-friendly that now really everyone CAN use it - if they are willing to get their heads out of their @sses and are willing to learn something new. It is not more DIFFICULT but instead simply DIFFERENT. I have gotten my boss to use Ubuntu, and he knows about as much of computers as a random soi dog knows of astrophysics..... still he is using it and discovers new and useful functions on a daily basis - without screwing something up! I myself have been using Ubuntu exclusively for personal computing since almost two years and as of last week i am using it exclusively in a productive environment too, with having kicked XP off the last computer at my office. Now i need to make a sticker for the front door stating "this company runs legit, FREE, software and everyone is happy with it".

I do, however, remember my several attempts in trying to adopt Linux before... and my epic failures with that, dating back to 1999 after one single virus wiped out my hard disk and made me lose gigabytes of downloaded mp3's - in a time where dialup was the common internet source still this WAS a major loss, and i felt that Windows 98 had to go.... however SuSE 6.4 (which i bought at the shop and which did cost more than Windows 98!) never wanted to run the way it was supposed to, i could not get it to go online with my external modem and AOL (yes! The cheaper of the only two available providers....) and even the (serial!) mouse didn't work correctly..... many other distros failed in a similar way and "back to 98" it was, then...... hard to read online documentation/tips/tricks if you can't get online......

As that was pretty exactly 10 years ago (end of 1999) i can say that the major step forward was made by Linux, nowadays i just boot from the Ubuntu CD, select "install Ubuntu" and no more than 20 minutes later i have a fully working system where all hardware usually works as it should. No driver hunting except for graphics, this isn't really "hunting" either but a two-click operation and a reboot) and no issues.... whereas with Windows it took me an hour to install 98 on a Pentium 200 with 64 MB RAM while it still takes an hour to install Vista on an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ with 2 GB RAM, the basic functionality is still the same too (need to use a bunch of CD's for drivers, a bunch of reboots, a bunch of fiddling and all additional software has to be searched for, downloaded and installed and then comes the "super virus of the year" which does all the hunting and installing by itself and wipes out your work). But, no doubt, Vista DOES look better than 98

Kind regards......

Thanh (boyfriend probably getting a Macbook soon so i'll have my opportunity to experience that OS, too)