Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy 395
Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"
Yes? Is this a question? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price (Score:5, Insightful)
It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot.
In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...
XP on EEE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think ordinary users notice. When I talk to my non-tech-savvy friends, they usually ask me if this or that price is right for a given computer, mostly without taking into cosideration its characteristics (Once a girl I know asked me if a 300 price tag for a laptop could be right, and when I asked for specs, she only replied "Acer"). Besides, we've got big PC stores here (like PC City) whose prices can be 50% more expensive than those you find in smaller, franchised, specialized shops, and they still sell the most.
So no, ordinary users will judge the price based on how awesome the salesman tells them it is (and, of course, if it doesn't come with Windows, don't bother calling it a PC, please, it just confuses them).
$3 is not significant on a $200 computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure they can! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure they can! Sure, Linux is free, but Windows can be also made free. After all, it's not like it's not already amortized, or something. They can even _pay_ the PC makers to put Windows inside, if it's just in some models. Linux cannot really compete with that, can it?
Failure of Moore's law is more of a threat to MS (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft can not possibly maintain 10 operating systems with radically different code bases and programming interfaces. In fact it's likely that some use scenarios will be too specialized for a commercial company and will instead be realized by open-source coding by the prospective users. Eee-PC and OLPC are already more about failure of Moore's law that it's continuation. People want to have a cheap, light and silent notebook with extraordinary battery life, but the technology to run Vista+Aero on such a machine is not anywhere on the horizon. So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants.
rolling my eyes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flexibility Not Price (Score:5, Insightful)
Only because of how MS made its OS. Some OS's *cough*Linux*cough*BSD*cough* let you choose among dozens of different UI's without messing with the kernel.
How Linux can compete with Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
+ Simplify the interface and make it usable
- As much as I love KDE, there are just too many options.
- GNOME needs to be more usable. Sometimes I think that it was made for 5 year olds.
- Once you get over the fact that Office 2007 is not Office 2003, Office 2007 is a good example of how to make things simple AND usable.
+ Get support from big companies that sell to schools
+ Increase interoperability with Windows applications
Linux is on its way and I think that Windows XP highlights just how far Linux has come. As much as it many not seem like it, Windows may have moved more towards Linux than vice versa. Linux developers need to understand what Apple has done. Linux is great, but I think that the people who develop it don't understand the people who actually use the products!
Actually, Moores' law is what keeps MS afloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, Open Office and Linux would catch and match them feature for feature, so new customers would have no incentive to go with the proprietary solution, since their protocols would eventually be reverse engineered bug for bug, feature for feature, driver for driver. The only way MS keeps Linux at bay is by releasing new feature laden stuff that takes advantage of new, updated hardware.
My prediction: The end of Moore's law will herald the end of Microsoft.
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
The school district I grew up at pays MS $400,000 every year for the software assurance program (and then $75,000 to Symantec to secure it). The total budget is about 150 Million. This can not be sustained.
Windows can not compete with Linux. That's why they use lock-in, FUD, etc.
Familiarity isn't worth that much (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.
There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.
Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
*Shakes head*
And yes, I can shake my head too.
LoB
Re:Pertains to density at a given price (Score:5, Insightful)
The text you describe appears nowhere in the article [wikipedia.org] for Moore's Law. This should come as no surprise, since Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, not Steven Moore.
I figured that would have at least gone to the trouble to vandalize the article yourself and add in such garbage. However, a quick look at the page's history [wikipedia.org] shows that you did not even go to the trouble to do that. (not that it matters; vandalism on Wikipedia is typically reverted in under a minute.)
Congratulations, you are not only a liar, but you are also lazy. Please take your poorly made strawman arguments elsewhere.
Re:How Linux can compete with Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
GNOME needs to be more usable. Sometimes I think that it was made for 5 year olds.
A lot of irony in this comment. The sign of a great UI is that the young and uninitiated can easy learn them.
Re:$3 is not significant on a $200 computer (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Clear for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
I keep hearing this mantra, but I think a lot of it is a case of people looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. Do people really think that software was more efficient in the days of the Commodore 64?
I remember in the late 1980s, a fair number of games for the PC would take at least 3 minutes to start up, just to initialize look-up tables and pre-render sprites! In the early 1990s, Netscape would literally take more than 45 minutes to start up on his PC. In the mid 1990s, I remember seeing, for the first time in my life, a game rendered at more than 30fps.
My point is, people are a lot less patient these days with computers. No one in their right mind is going to wait a minute for an application to start up, and certainly not 45 minutes for a browser!
If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s. I used to think like you do, that software was incredibly efficient and incredibly well written in the 1980s. Then I tried to run some software from the 1980s. A game from the 1980s often runs slower on today's hardware than today's games do. There are all sorts of ill-conceived hard coded limits in old games. Take software from the 1980s and try to run it on data sets measuring in the gigabytes: no dice.
Again, people expect more from their software today than they did from yesteryear. I'm extremely suspicious of people who say that old software is more efficient/better written than today's software. I've used software from the C64 age. Guess what: IT SUCKED.
Re:Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Propietary TENDS to have closed standards by its very nature - it's just a logical procession by the coders of closed source unless forced to otherwise by outside circumstances.
Re:Clear for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
Does Linux run as fast as you describe an OS would if its authors didn't have ulterior motives?
Re:The Year of Linux on the Ultraportable? (Score:3, Insightful)
More than that, I installed Ubuntu from scratch myself, knowing nothing about Linux beyond what I could find on Google and had picked up from using the Eee for a week or so. The only thing that gave me significant trouble was the wireless card, but that's working fine after a bit of tweaking. I'm now using egrep, shell scripts and a bit of perl to do some great stuff which has advanced my PhD research (into medieval literature) astronomically.
The problem is not that Linux is in any way "unusable", but that many people are scared of learning to use new tools. I have genuinely come across a lot of people who think they will "break" their computer if they do anything beyond what Windows easily allows. Downloading codecs for MP3s or using the command line to move or rename a file would be terrifying for them because they fear the kind of hissy fits that Windows tends to throw if you tinker with it. We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!
Re:$3 is not significant on a $200 computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft can only afford the $3 XP license in the third world because the entire cost of XP development is paid by the people paying the high price of licenses in the first world. If they start making similarly low-cost Windows license available in the first world, where not only will they compete with Linux (good for MS), they will also provide a low cost alternative to Microsoft's more expensive OS earnings (bad for MS), then they risk destroying the market that is paying the premium that covers their fixed costs so that they can have a low-cost third-world version that makes a slim profit only because the entire fixed cost of development has already been paid for by the market in the developed world.
The only way Microsoft can survive if it does that is if (1) it can transform its business model to rely more on making money on service and support for business rather than software licenses, or (2) it can manage to raise the cost early adopters of its top-line OS's pay even more, without somehow losing all its early adopters.
Re:If need be, they'll give windows away (Score:5, Insightful)
In the past, MS has effectively given away software -- in the form of licenses that could be used on two computers: so that a license bought for a work machine could be taken home and used on the home machine.
Microsoft has two advantages over Linux: familiarity and applications. Recent Linux distributions are as easy, if not easier to use than Windows, but many applications (such as iTunes) are simply not available on Linux. Both of these advantages can be swept away if Linux gains a significant foothold in the desktop market.
I just wish that Apple would see that helping Linux would also help Apple. Breaking MS's dominance is the most important goal and Linux can help that to happen.
Re:Yes? Is this a question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and No (Score:5, Insightful)
This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".
At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".
In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?
100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".
Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".
Re:Simplicity does not mean usability (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect that given the choice, most users would opt for the simplicity of something like XFCE over the ever-intrusive, incredibly annoying, and totally persistent Windows popups.
I'm still waiting for outlook to pop up with a "You got your latest installement of pr0n" email over a powerpoint presentation. I don't know how the h*ll people get anything done with the constant annoying whining that windows does about *everything* it does.
See, you got email.
See, I checked for viruses.
See, I'm going to upgrade your system.
See, I'm gonna annoy the sh*t out of you.
Re:Clear for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s.
I have to totally agree. Several months ago I was recovering data from my old C64/128 disks. The word processor of the time was really good by the standards of the time (80 columns? WOW!). In 2008 however it was a total piece of garbage. Forget about data sharing of export, those things didn't really exist. As far as features, one decent programmer could pretty easily recode the thing with the features it included in maybe a month.
Re:Eee isn't "better" than Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Failure of Moore's law is more of a threat to M (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Clear for a long time (Score:2, Insightful)
Amigas had a full multitasking OS with windowing GUI in 512kB of RAM (in fact, the first one, the Amiga 1000 had only 256kB).
With a 7MHz CPU (M68k), they were comparable in speed to XP running on a 500 MHz Intel CPU with a basic graphics card and 128MB of RAM (256 times more).
Re:The Year of Linux on the Ultraportable? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I had any mod points left you would have a couple headed in your direction right now, for ou have touched upon one of the biggest roadblocks in the adaptation of linux and other alternative OS's. Before we went to 100% FOSS in our office I had to convince our president that linux wasn't some sort of "virus" or "hacker's tool". Not that I could blame her though; between the copious amounts of FUD coming out of Redmond, and the natural human aversion toward anything not in our "comfort zone", it's no wonder that people have been hesitant to even so much as give another OS a fair shot.
On the other hand, another problem I've run into in trying to convince even my more computer-literate associates to switch is that most of these guys have cut their collective teeth on Windows OS's. They know every nut, bolt, registry and DLL hack of that system, and they kind of like their view from the top. They'll never admit it but their perception is that trying on an unfamiliar OS would force them to swallow some pride and put them back at the bottom of the learning curve. I guess some people's egos just can't bear to take that kind of hit.
Re:Clear for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
I could dial into the big computer, download and compile code as fast as as any modern machine.
My video game consoles started immediately, and game play was real time.
Many computers started up rather quickly. Many applications started up rather quickly. MS did not.
I am not saying things did not suck, but it was more a matter of available resources and the state of the art. comparatively not that the code was bad. It is clear that code today is worse, and the good practices we were taught are no longer valid. At some point, programmers became more expensive than memory or cycles. At that point it no longer made economic sense to spend money writing something that would fit in 8K or ram, or run on the cheapest CPU, or avoid the need for a GPU. It would be cheaper for the consumer to go out and buy these things rather than pay the person-hours it would take to write. The end result is that we live in an age of clearly bloated framework, that require huge resources for even the simplest jobs, simply because it is cheaper for 1000 people to buy an extra gig of memory than to pay a person to write an efficient program. Who today would write a GUI(I have written parts of one, it is not the hardest thing to do) when there are so many available, even if one has to suffer with the bloat and silly API>
Re:Familiarity isn't worth that much (Score:2, Insightful)
The secret to being a financial genius ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference between geniuses who made a bundle in the dot com bubble and the fools who were left holding the bag?
Timing.
It's been clear for a long time that sooner or later Microsoft's license based business model is going to be seriously undermined, especially at the low end. It goes without saying that somebody is going to be making money off this development (possibly including Microsoft itself, if it is smart). The problem is nobody knows for certain which it is: sooner or later? There's really only one way to find out: to give it a try.
The Asus approach is quite interesting; they've tried to define a new niche. This makes is much more likely that they'll have a modest success even if the time is not ripe for the Microsoft model to crumble, while getting a toe over the line if it turns out that the land rush is about to start.
Re:Yes? Is this a question? (Score:3, Insightful)
so let's see you can get a $600 'windows' laptop that has $400 worth of hardware that BARELY runs windows XP acceptably, and you can forget vista compatibility... or you can get a laptop with $150 worth of hardware that runs a specific variant of linux that is streamlined for the 'cheap' system hardware.
this is why sub $200 laptop projects are so dependent on Linux. If you streamline it and skip the modern Linux bloatware, you can probably make an even cheaper Linux laptop. India is focusing on trying to get a sub $20 piece of hardware that can be used as a 'school' computer, at that price point they're looking at little more than a cell phone, redesigned to run educational software, but that's not like it's missions impossible.
if you know what feature set you want to implement, it's really much easier to fix linux to work within your constraints, than to try to make everything work in 'windows ce'
so basically the only competitor to linux on the 'cheap laptop platform' is to make a windows ce device into a laptop... and i have to wonder if the WinCE license lets you run it on a laptop style device at all.
besides which, windows ce is only available from Microsoft (end users can't buy it) so you can't convert say a super cheap linux laptop into a win ce laptop unless you're the company selling it.
windows ce is popular for a windows based thin client (pda's aren't as popular as they once were) and some cell phones run CE, and you definitely could run ce on a stripped-down (hardware wise) windows based laptop, but then you loose all the advantages of open source software.
but realistically if these 'ultra cheap' laptops start coming out in mass quantities, windows CE is the only weapon Microsoft has to try to compete.
Re:Familiarity isn't worth that much (Score:3, Insightful)
I've met a few of these people... set up a network with an Active Directory domain at a church about 4 years ago, and the secretary still can't grasp the concept of a user account being the same anywhere on the network, and occasionally sends an e-mail asking for the password for another computer. In this case, she couldn't handle the difference between the Win95/NT/2k style taskbar and the Playskool-looking one in XP, so even apart from issues of taste (avoiding the tacky blue and green), running anything other than the "Classic" look and feel would be too much of an adjustment for her. More typically, the color schemes are something that people seem to be able to handle changes in, so long as the layout is the same. There are millions of these people out there - they're the masses of regular users for whom Microsoft does massive market research towards designing a UI that will work for them as well as the rest of us.
It's not that they couldn't have learned the Gnome or Nautilus (or MacOS) UIs, but that they've now learned how to do what they need in the Windows Explorer UI by rote and are too intimidated to try anything else. From their perspectives, it's a completely different system to memorize, and there's little (if any) incentive to do so.
yeah, right (Score:3, Insightful)
No, thanks.
I would rather use OO, not because it is cheaper, but because it is more familiar.