Hate MSFT Windows for crashing 999 times? Read on...
Linux may be the answer to the behemoth Microsoft. Here is a recent article, and some Linux links from the same magazine including a deal with Red Hat Software, a hot upcoming IPO.
Linux's threat to Microsoft
What open source and the Internet
mean to Redmond.
By Jason Pontin
The Red Herring magazine
From the June 1999 issue
This year, we almost gave Red Hat Software
our award for best private company. Red Hat
is the biggest reseller of Linux, the operating
system whose underlying source code can be
freely modified and distributed by the public.
People give Red Hat money for something that
is free because Red Hat offers things like
installation software and technical support
that users can't get with the bare-bones Linux
they download from the Internet.
Extraordinarily, Linux sold 17 percent of
commercial server OSs in 1998, an increase
of 212 percent from 1997.
Finally, we balked. Our top
private company must be
more than the leading
representative of an
important trend. It must also
have a business model that
could make its investors rich.
Red Hat sells easily imitated
services based on a free
commodity. (We chose
Symbian in the end. To find out why, see
"Private Company Superstars.")
We weren't the only ones fretting about Linux.
Many were dumbfounded when Steve Ballmer,
Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) president, said
that the company was "thinking with great
interest" about releasing some, or all, of the
Windows OS as open-source software. To
geeks, this was like H.R. Haldeman, Richard
Nixon's chief of staff, announcing that he and
Dick had looked into the matter and were
really interested in the redistribution of
property to the proletariat.
No one really believed Mr.
Ballmer (in fact, Ed Muth,
the Windows 2000 group
product manager, told us,
"Although we never say
never, we do not think our
customers would be well
served, and it wouldn't work
with our business model as it
is now constructed"); but that
Mr. Ballmer said it at all, and that we thought
about Red Hat so hard, says a lot about the
threat that Linux poses to Microsoft.
In my first column in the Red Herring (see
"Five Scenarios for Microsoft's Future"), I
wrote, "The Internet might displace Windows
as a platform, and with it Microsoft's
business." Microsoft's challenge has been to
reproduce the strange ecology of Windows on
the Internet. For while most desktop and server
systems in local area networks (LANs) once
used Microsoft Windows, and therefore all
software developers wrote for Windows, on
the Internet most servers are not Windows,
most desktops are nonproprietary browsers,
and developers write software that can easily
find a home on any host. In order to turn the
Internet into one great Microsoft LAN, the
company requires a share of the Internet
server market similar to its share of LAN
servers. Then Internet developers would write
server applications that ran only on Windows,
and Web developers would design sites that
took advantage of specific features in
Windows.
But the success of Linux means that this will
probably never happen. In Linux, the Internet
has found an OS commensurate with its
needs. Like Unix, on which it is based, and
unlike Windows, Linux is, in the jargon of the
industry, scalable and robust. It offers the
benefits of open-source development: the
nearly continuous improvement of a program
by its most enthusiastic users. People want to
use it. Together with Unix OSs, Linux means
that Windows' share of the server market will
never be overwhelming, and developers will
write Internet applications, not Windows
applications.
The world will be very different. Microsoft will
remain among the largest software vendors,
but it will no longer be a company with
special, impregnable advantages and a
guaranteed income from the sale of Windows
and Windows software.
To argue that Microsoft is in trouble may seem
perverse. At $429 billion, it is the
best-capitalized company in the world. But
often, empires are in decline when to
contemporaries they seem strongest.
Whether Red Hat can ever make a lot of
money is a subject for another column.
Write to jason@redherring.com.
Red Hat address:http://www.redhat.com/
Red Hat and IBM team up:http://www.redherring.com/insider/1999/0218/news-linux.html
LINUX Torvolds and the beginning of the end for MSFT:http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue34/connection.html
Server software choice: not necessarily a MSFT rebellion:http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue63/news-freeware4.html
The SI link:https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=21961
Oh Yea, I really like the BNBN web site, never failed on me so far. BNBN web site is powered by the unstoppable Windows NT crash derby. |
