5 ms·

> There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. For a lot of people there isn't. Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for re

by Aaargh20318 9y ago

> There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. For a lot of people there isn't. Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing the logos and text on the receipt and a million other things. The manufacturers of those scales sell a piece of software to do that, but it's always a 100% Windows app, held together with all kinds of (outdated) MS technology like Visual FoxPro. Often they have licenses that require hardware dongles, have bizarre drivers to communicate with the hardware and it feels like it's al held together with spit and ducktape. There is no Linux or OSS alternative, the protocols aren't even published and no one cares to reverse engineer them as the market is just tiny, and the target audience has no overlap with the techies that are interested in Linux and the like. And that's just one example, there are tons of crappy, outdated, proprietary apps like that out there. Apps with tiny user bases no one cares about so no OSS options will ever emerge.

RandVal30142 9y ago
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.
- ethbro 9y ago
  It's a monopoly for those users * innumerable_similar_niches. Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice. And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."
- kbenson 9y ago
  Your example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).

RandVal30142 9y ago

But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.

ethbro 9y ago
It's a monopoly for those users * innumerable_similar_niches. Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice. And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."
kbenson 9y ago
Your example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).