Your future with Microsoft is restricted, expensive, and uncertain. The sooner you make the switch to GNU/Linux and open source software, the easier — and cheaper — your life will be over the next decade.
Businesses are always trimming costs. IT is a necessity, and often a bare one, not a luxury to be entertained. Much like advertising, what businesses can trade for free, they will find a way to do so. Open source is and will always be free. (Note, I’m not talking about services.) Microsoft, however, has never and will never be free. They’re so duplicitous that Microsoft even hedges its own “open” specification promise in the same vagueness as its highly vilified Vista EULA that only Microsoft contortionists and fanatics like Ed Bott can justify to themselves at the cost of their own reputations within the industry.
Further, what you will never have with open source is lock-in, because its very nature belies proprietary solutions. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent the past decade to its detriment — and to Google’s delight — defending its shrinking monopoly and continuously forcing customers into proprietary lock-in strategies with their software through file formats, EULAs, driver model, developer tool giveaways, built-in DRM, and trusted computing, among other nasties.
With open source, your choices are expansive; with Microsoft, they shrink until you can only use a Microsoft product to access a Microsoft file (try opening an MS-OOXML file and saving it in anything other than Office 2007 — it cannot be done). Compare that sad state to all the things you can do with an ODF file.
Same reasoning goes for the desktop. Webware is not only real, but getting better every month. Microsoft’s limited webware — Live! — is a joke with deep ties to its proprietary office software. Don’t use MS Office? Tough shit, says Microsoft. Where’s the value for consumers in that? There is no value there, since other companies like Google, Zoho, Thinkfree, Ubuntu, et al. already have better software on the market… for free. They even offer premium and secure services to businesses for a small annual fee. And GNU/Linux enables a webcentric desktop far more easily than Windows ever could (ask those 200,000 people who bought $190 gOS computers last November).
To sustain itself, Microsoft must offer something the consumer wants that is worth paying for, an advantage it cannot get from open source. With exception to DirectX for gaming, Microsoft’s OS platform offers no other advantage over GNU/Linux. In fact, Vista-SP1 loses in all but one way to GNU/Linux: font rendering. Essentially, that’s all that’s left to conquer on the GNU/Linux side to fully equal Windows on the desktop, and most Linux users don’t see the real difference, its fonts being equivalent to that of Apple. As for gaming, buy a Wii and have some fun.
For two years now, businesses have strongly gravitated toward open source solutions, sinking lots of money into them. Google is doing its part by directly enabling Linux on its new mobile platform, Android. Microsoft, meanwhile, can’t even get Vista-SP1 ready for delivery, which brings you more TCO, stricter licensing, a confusing, unusable file format, no interoperability (ask Apple users about this one!), and a lifetime data lock-in and financial dependency on the Microsoft Corporation for access to your own data.
If that’s what you’re paying for, where’s the advantage?
(Time for someone like Ed Bott to tell me to get a new computer because my Penryn sucks at running Vista-SP1.)
Tags: software, tech, linux-open source // 1 Comment »