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One area they still have a stronghold is in Office and productivity software. There was an entry on HN about this : http://linuxaria.com/article/the-biggest-fa

by eksith 14y ago

One area they still have a stronghold is in Office and productivity software. There was an entry on HN about this : http://linuxaria.com/article/the-biggest-failure-in-open-source-is?lang=en http://linuxaria.com/article/the-biggest-failure-in-open-sou... If any of those were to be made open source, MS would effectively corner the open source office market as well. I'm not holding my breath though. I'm actually shocked at how quickly the Microsoft stack in my daily work has now gone down in use from where it was only about 5 years ago. With the exception of Office as in above and Windows for Photoshop (almost daily use) and Visual Studio (some projects still need it), the rest is entirely Open Source from OS and on. Currently I'm using Mint and Debian with OpenBSD on the side. As much as people bash MS for all sorts of (well deserved) things, the bottom line is that they do get a lot of things right. It's not just political wrangling that allow them to stay in business, obviously, since if the products are really lacking too much, they'd be hurting too. I do think the culture in the company is changing, hopefully for the better. Edit: I think, by and large Windows 8 is a mistake, but not in the way it was designed. The way it was marketed. Win 8 makes sense on mobile/touch devices and no where else. And that's all I have to say about that. Hopefully, they don't plan on keeping the trend into the next version of Windows, but we'll see. Even though joysticks are arguably a better means of control, there's a reason cars still have steering wheels.

jussij 14y ago
> corner the open source market Once you've "corner the open source" market what does that get you? I assume Red Hat has "corner the open source" Linux server market and the're earnings are nothing compared to MS. This is a serious question, what do you get when you've cornered any open source market? Google cornered the Android market until Samsung made billions from Google's efforts.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  This is what is so hard for many FOSS fans to understand. The ecosystem has only expanded to the extent big corporations are willing to invest money on it. If IBM, Google and others had not invested into FOSS as a means to help them sell services, most likely the situation would be quite similar to the mid 80's, in what concerns software development tools. In the markets where you cannot sell services, it is very hard to make a living from FOSS.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Why do you say this is hard for FOSS fans to understand?
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Many dream of a world where all software is FOSS. The point is, only corporations pay for FOSS in form of SaaS, consulting, support contracts or trainings. Usually the only way consumers pay for FOSS is when buying hardware with FOSS inside. However if you plan to create a company developing products that are software based, where the average developer salary would be around € 1500 netto, quite normal in many European countries, it will be very hard to keep the company afloat when targeting markets outside what I mentioned above.
- astrodust 14y ago
  A better metric would be "earnings per unit of market share". RedHat's market share is much smaller, so it's hardly surprising their earnings are lower.
astrodust 14y ago
A wheel is a far better method for controlling a car than a joystick. Rotating a wheel offers far more precision than pushing a stick. Fighter jets need to make rapid, abrupt moves, but their movements are nowhere near as precise or well timed as a Formula 1 driver where turning tens of milliseconds too late or a few degrees too tightly can completely ruin your lap if it's in a critical section. Precision flying, while requiring a very high level of coordination, is not nearly as demanding as trying to drive Monaco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_Monaco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_Monaco) at race speeds in traffic. Windows 8 is a joystick for what should be a wheel.

by eksith 14y ago

jussij 14y ago

> corner the open source market Once you've "corner the open source" market what does that get you? I assume Red Hat has "corner the open source" Linux server market and the're earnings are nothing compared to MS. This is a serious question, what do you get when you've cornered any open source market? Google cornered the Android market until Samsung made billions from Google's efforts.

pjmlp 14y ago
This is what is so hard for many FOSS fans to understand. The ecosystem has only expanded to the extent big corporations are willing to invest money on it. If IBM, Google and others had not invested into FOSS as a means to help them sell services, most likely the situation would be quite similar to the mid 80's, in what concerns software development tools. In the markets where you cannot sell services, it is very hard to make a living from FOSS.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Why do you say this is hard for FOSS fans to understand?
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Many dream of a world where all software is FOSS. The point is, only corporations pay for FOSS in form of SaaS, consulting, support contracts or trainings. Usually the only way consumers pay for FOSS is when buying hardware with FOSS inside. However if you plan to create a company developing products that are software based, where the average developer salary would be around € 1500 netto, quite normal in many European countries, it will be very hard to keep the company afloat when targeting markets outside what I mentioned above.
astrodust 14y ago
A better metric would be "earnings per unit of market share". RedHat's market share is much smaller, so it's hardly surprising their earnings are lower.

astrodust 14y ago

A wheel is a far better method for controlling a car than a joystick. Rotating a wheel offers far more precision than pushing a stick. Fighter jets need to make rapid, abrupt moves, but their movements are nowhere near as precise or well timed as a Formula 1 driver where turning tens of milliseconds too late or a few degrees too tightly can completely ruin your lap if it's in a critical section. Precision flying, while requiring a very high level of coordination, is not nearly as demanding as trying to drive Monaco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_Monaco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_de_Monaco) at race speeds in traffic. Windows 8 is a joystick for what should be a wheel.