Microsoft May Be Targeting the Ubuntu Desktop 583
mjasay writes "Microsoft is advertising for a new director of open source strategy, but this one has a specific purpose: fight the Linux desktop. 'The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.' For a variety of reasons, this move is almost certainly targeted at Ubuntu Linux's desktop success. With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
Reader christian.einfeldt notes Microsoft's acknowledgment of the FOSS threat to their business model within SEC filings, and suggests that this job posting could instead be about maintaining Internet Explorer's market share lead against Firefox.
Re:woo (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but if the growth goes exponential, it could be bad news for Redmond in a short amount of time. With other big vendors starting to use Ubuntu on their equipment (see HP and Dell), Microsoft had better be careful.
Personally, I think in the next 5-10 years, the market is going to go through a big equalization. Microsoft will still be important but not the huge Monopoly like they are now. The current recession is a good way to get the ball rolling on that. A lot of places are interested in switching to Linux-based OSes, but they don't want to deal with the costs associated and their current Windows stuff works.
But with Vista and Windows 7 being lackluster, it makes good business sense to start looking at migrating to other solutions. Linux is really the only other game in town. You can't "upgrade" to Mac OS X like you can upgrade any machine to Ubuntu and have it just work. And Ubuntu has made the GNU and Linux systems easy to use for anyone from Grandma to business drones.
What is it about desktop Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?"
Mac OS X doesn't run natively on all PCs, so Microsoft doesn't have anything to be afraid of. Plus Microsoft has software already developed for the Mac, so they could still make money even if Macs dominate PC sales.
Microsoft doesn't have that with Ubuntu, not only does it run on the same hardware as Windows, but it's being offered as an alternative to Windows by a major player in the PC market.
Exponentiation fears (Score:4, Interesting)
No, Microsoft is being proactive. They sat around during the early days of the internet while we struggled with Trumpet WinSock (remember this, guys?)
I kid you not, but I am responsible for three people switching to Linux this week alone, running XP in virtualbox. Their PCs got so slow they wanted to wipe everything and install Vista, but they liked XP, so this is the perfect solution.
If these people convert a few more people, the whole computing shift will change extremely rapidly. In a few years, people will potentially shift quickly and not look back. Windows 95 took hold pretty quickly. Only somewhat related, but look at hardware shifts, which also happen quickly (PATA to SATA in 2004 or so, birth of 3D cards in 1995 or so.)
It is logical for them to do this, and they are smart to be scared. In a way, I wish they would just sit on their hands.
Re:woo (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but you forget that decent desktop environments have only been around since the early 2000's or so.
Look at what Nextstep did. They took BSD and made their OS built on that foundation. For a decade they sold it only to a select technical user base. During this time, they worked on improving the interface. Then Apple bought them used that as a base for Mac OSX. A little bit of polish and you have a very nice Operating System.
As you can see, there are many parallels there with Ubuntu and other nice Linux-based distros.
I'll tell you what scares them (Score:5, Interesting)
That Ubuntu is not only well supported, but secure...something they themselves have not been able to manage.
A friend is bringing his system over today for me to install Ubuntu on. Why? Because he is just sick to death of the malware.
You know what? Sick to death is one thing, but sick to death with a good alternative...Microsoft can't have that now, can they?
Re:woo (Score:5, Interesting)
lol... (Score:4, Interesting)
just a day or two ago I was reading right here on slashdot about how MS will be adopting OSS; that the main OS was a loss and they would focus on making all their software for OSS.... ... and now MS is gonna strategize against it. Seems to me like people writing these articles actually have no effin idea what is going on.
the acorn becomes the mighty oak...yeah yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
:)
But seriously, I installed Ubuntu last night. I've been a diehard RHEL/CentOS user for years. It just plain worked out of the box for me on a relatively new laptop. It found the Wifi,sound, my bluetooth mouse, asked me if I wanted the "non free" binary accelerated Radeon X1600 video driver, etc. Pretty slick.
I realize that I'm not a typical clueless windows user, but I think this is downright easy to migrate to for a Windows user, especially when Firefox 3.x and Openoffice are bundled along with it. That's enough to satisfy a huge swath of userbase and it's completely free. The entire install only took about 10 minutes too.
Kudos to the Ubuntu team.
Why not Apple? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not Apple? Because Apple isn't selling generic OS X that competes head to head against Windows on generic PCs.
If Apple changed that, you can bet Microsoft would be on to them in a flash.
Microsoft need not worry for now (Score:4, Interesting)
This is because there is trouble in the Linux space. We can't agree on a way forward. Look, the other day, our benevolent leader Linus stated: "Multiple Distributions "Absolutely Required..," as if that would help in stemming Microsoft's progress.
Let me say this: There will always be multiple distributions of "Linux" but what we need is a fully functional desktop with a single supported desktop environment. Nobody...I repeat, nobody is saying there should be *one* Linux desktop or server. Nobody! Other distros can continue to exist but this particular desktop should get the bulk of resources to succeed.
On the desktop now, KDE 4.2 is good and it has always shown promise. By the way, I am a die hard GNOME user who contributes to the project from time to time, but I must say the truth. What troubles me is that folks sing "Linux is great" and so on then they go ahead to dedicate resources to other projects. This approach does not help.
Then we have those who I would say are almost bigots. Why? Because users tell them "...we need a single accepted API so that apps will install across Linux distros..." What happens is that these folks' ideas are shot down but these bigots.
Microsoft need not worry for now. Look at what Apple did. They broke compatibility...took another direction but because they have a single platform with unique names at every incarnation, they own more of the desktop then all the Linux combined.
We can beat Apple because we are open. Then we have folks that create multimedia files in Flash before putting up our very own .ogg files. These folks should at least put files up at the same time. We should at least be seen to eat our own food.
Folks. Let's listen to what the ordinary user is saying.
Does one ever wonder why we who use Linux still command a tiny percentage of the desktop despite having been around for almost a decade now?
Microsoft need not worry for now.
Re:Alternate summary (Score:3, Interesting)
We'll arbitarily assume Microsft is targeting Ubuntu specifically...
Hardly an arbitrary assumption. Erosion to Apple has been on-going for a decade or more, and I'm sure that Microsoft has that fully analyzed and has a multitude of strategies and tactics all ready to roll out to counter any conceivable move from Apple. But Ubuntu has arrived by a comet's orbit out of what had looked like empty space: there really was not much in the other Linux distros to attract Microsoft's core markets. Creation of this position is more likely a response to Ubuntu than to any of the known threats to Redmond's hegemony.
...what is it about Ubuntu that's making Microsoft target them specifically?
As mentioned above, the speed and brightness with which Ubuntu has emerged on the scene is definitely part of the reason.
A bigger part is that the Ubuntu distro provides, for free, with its standard 7-click installation that even a cave man can manage, not only an alternative to Windows, but also an alternative to MS Office, MSIE, FrontPage, Access, and even MS Outlook. Oh yeah, also MS Server. Ubuntu undercuts many of the few profitable products that Microsoft has left to sell.
Microsoft should be afraid. It should be very afraid. It will be interesting to see how it responds, because its jungle model of killing the competition does not look very effective against the Ubuntu tsunami.
Maybe they will make an offer to buy Canonical?
Re:Ubuntu needs to stop being racist first (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone should move you to marketing, Sir. "X is so great that everyone will want it!" is the standard cry of any corporation (when they want your money) and cult (when they want your love).
Also, I "bothered to write so much" because, unlike the average Linux geek, I am aware of the power of good and bad marketing. Anything that patronises black men by making sure to "token black" every page is likely to discourage them from using it.
To put it bluntly, you don't appeal to someone of a particular race/gender by making sure to display a smiling photo of that race/gender in artificial proportions that would never have come from chance.
See how Apple does it? See how their efforts are more advanced than I'd-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke groups of smiling twenty-somethings (I guess Ubuntu's not for anyone not 18 to 30)? Good. Now learn. Because for all the supposed technical appeal of Linux, it's doing really badly at targetting the average desktop user, and you're not going to get anywhere by blaming people who try to offer constructive criticism.
Re:What is it about desktop Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?,/i>
Mac OS X doesn't run natively on all PCs, so Microsoft doesn't have anything to be afraid of. Plus Microsoft has software already developed for the Mac, so they could still make money even if Macs dominate PC sales.
Yes, and it's Linux, not OS X, that is the current most-viable legal option to Windows for both OEM customers (new machine builders) and the upgrade-what-I-have PC market.
Ubuntu would certainly meet the OS needs of many, spare them the time/cost of dealing with most malware, and provide an impressive array of bundled or trivial to load applications.
No doubt some would also appreciate that Ubuntu is essentially free too!
OS X and Apple machines are great and will continue to get a growing share, but it's Linux that could suddenly convert a big share if OEMs defected in a major way and got behind Ubuntu with some marketing. Perhaps some OEMs could even show some ability to innovate and do some development for Ubuntu...
Evolution of Linux is one way (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft views Ubuntu migration as one way. Once someone starts using Ubuntu, chances are they'll never buy Windows again.
This is because Linux can only get better. The idea behind open source is that quality never digresses, because if something sucks, it just gets changed or forked. So, the evolution of Linux is one way. It will always be better and better. This means it's users will always be more and more. It may be slow at times, but it's inevitable. Microsoft is beginning to realize that Linux's market share will always be increasing, and eventually that share will be larger than theirs.
I think they can fight all they want, but unless they can figure out a way to nullify the GPL, the progress will continue.
Re:What is it about desktop Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish everyone who cried "Apple is stupid for not allowing OS X to run on PCs!" would read your post.
Why in the world would Apple set themselves up as a direct market competitor to a company known to squash competition?
Maybe later, when they reach a point that even Microsoft gets worried... then, and only then, would I expect Apple to consider licensing OS X to run on all PCs.
Re:woo (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the acorn becomes the mighty oak...yeah yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
My second point was that Apple did the linux world a ton of good with the misleading "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials. That was a nice introduction to the masses regarding the fact that there is more than one platform, and that they are not alike, nor are they interchangeable. I questioned how a similarly misleading "I'm Linux, and I'm like a free version of OSX that will run on your slow/infected/broken PC" set of commercials would help the linux world out.
Re:woo (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has been actively fighting FLOSS since at least 1998. Just read Halloween documents or internal documents regarding EDGI group from Iowa case (dated 2002 IIRC) with ist infamous "under NO circumstances lose to Linux" quote.
You may also read Bill Gates' concernes about how they can cripple ACPI so Linux won't be able to use it (they have made their own DSDT compiler which allows for much more errors than industry-standard intel compiler Linux uses).
They were afraid back then and fought tooth and nails, they continue to do it now. And if you read the documents I mention, you'll see that they have understood that the relative success of Linux on servers was due to open standards. What we have now is that main reasons which hinder Linux' adoption has nothing to do with Linux itself. Office formats, Exchange, DirectX, ActiveX -- all of the above are closed standards and technologies not to mention crippled HTML. Combine that with iron grip on OEM's and you'll get some more reasons for relatively slow growth.
Ultra-cheap netbooks and falling hardware prices have changed the landscape though. Now MS isn't able to threat OEM's with raising per-CPU lincense costs if they sell something else pre-installed. They have prolonged XP's live and give it away for a bargain price instead. They will be able to maintain their grip for some time but this time they'll have to lower the prices. Sure, they remain profitable as all they sell is hot air, but they'll raise much less money than expected.
Re:Exponentiation fears (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux must be fought abroad. (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it, most (by far) Americans are not going to fiddle with Linux, even if they're told it's free and superior, merely because they don't want to relearn anything that was hard enough to learn the first time, and they just want to use whatever is on their computer (Windows).
Microsoft's problems start when
- Windows is not what is on people's computer by default
- People click on the firefox icon, notice that it firefox works just like on windows, and their wlan works. And there is nothing else they need to care about.
Basic consumer desktop is a commodity and the "added value" microsoft is providing is meaningless.
Re:woo (Score:5, Interesting)
I cannot believe that a company with [Microsoft's] resources cannot come up with great new ideas in computing.
Microsoft employees come up with all sorts of new ideas, but the company they work for consistently fails to execute.
I sometimes wonder if it's because the smartest people (those who have the luxury of ethics) usually choose to work elsewhere, and if they don't, their brilliance is stifled by the fools around (and especially above) them.
I think Microsoft will make an intriguing case study for years to come.
Microsoft is NOT single-threaded (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is everyone assuming that Microsoft can do only one thing at a time? Microsoft is a damned big company and, you know what? They can do multiple things at once.
Right now, Microsoft's operating system units are focusing their energies on overcoming the bad press from Vista (Mojave Experiment), shunting the effectiveness of the Mac v. PC ads, and putting oil in the hype machine for the release Windows 6.1 --- err 7. The fact that Microsoft is hiring a single guy -- ONE GUY -- to look the open source competition stuff, is hardly "ditching what is most likely one of the biggest competitors".
Fact is, Microsoft is looking at ALL their competitors, which is *exactly* what they should be doing. Linux might not be a Desktop threat today. What about in 5 years? What about 10? Microsoft is smart enough to think that far ahead.
Re:woo (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're a big company, you've got a lot of recorded history that you legally must keep. The bigger you are, the more this is true.
If you've got a legacy of MS documents that you can't easily move, you're kind of stuck with MS.
This represents an increasing amount of costs that you must pay before you make or sell anything whatsoever, just to be allowed to operate.
Meanwhile, new companies who do not have that legacy can use free software to handle their administration, and they don't have to pay the "MS tax." This means that they can be less efficient, have lower economy of scale, but still be more competitive than the established businesses.
MS is never going to open up their technology. Financially, it's better for their investors to watch it waste away to meaninglessness and gain tax benefits from the depreciation than to do so.
Personally, I think the final legacy of Microsoft will be the death of a multitude of business enterprises that have stood for decades. In the end, the decision to participate in Bill's little scheme is going to kill businesses, and the bigger and more firmly established they are, the more they are at risk.
In a way, it might even make the whole Microsoft experience worthwhile in the end, like yucky medicine that makes your whole body convulse with disgust but poisons the cancers in you and causes them to die...
Re:I'm not sure that either of you are correct... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's actions and strategy is based on their philosophy which is fairly Machiavellian. The problem is they have to compete, and work like crazy to try and convince/control people, that will believe what they want anyway.
It's the difference between blue ocean strategy [wikipedia.org] or red ocean strategy. Nintendo recently took on the blue ocean strategy [forbes.com] (red ocean because it runs red with blood from competition). And you can see [purenintendo.com] that it's not really [arstechnica.com] working for them. [penny-arcade.com]
MS ais probably not worried about Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Natural selection (Score:1, Interesting)
> Who said that we 'have to beat Microsoft'?
Linux has not 'said' that, but Microsoft has said that they do _have_ to beat everything else.
FOSS and Linux are the result of 'natural selection'. Microsoft has managed to kill off everything else. It paid OEMs to not install BeOS, it bought companies that might compete, where there was a market taking sufficient revenue MS bought one competitor and gave away the product to kill off the others or brought out their own product to do so.
MS wants a complete monoculture and all the revenue for everything computer, it puts up with sharing revenue (ie OEM hardware) only as long as it can't take it for itself.
FOSS has been around for decades. The only reason that it shows up in market share is that it is the only thing left after MS has laid waste all the others (leaving Apple only due to anti-trust issues).
Cost... (Score:3, Interesting)
What has MS spooked about Linux and not Apple, is that Apple is a traditional competitor who they know how to deal with...
Linux on the other hand, represents an evolution which renders their business model obsolete. If linux attains sufficient market share, then it will entirely break their lockin and show users that they don't need to pay for software.
Re:People don't think that way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, your analogy falls down. When you install an operating system ON YOUR COMPUTER, your friends are still allowed to borrow it and check their e-mail. You can even make user accounts for them if you so desire.
Hmmm ... If you were around in the 1980s, you might know that there were a lot of systems that were sold with builtin limits to the number of accounts and/or simultaneous logins allowed. This was true of the Sys/V unix systems, for example. The OEMs would charge you a significant fee for an "unlimited logins" version of the system, and one of the things that got a lot of us really annoyed was that what you got for this extra charge was a change in a single byte somewhere in some system file. In a few releases, the position and value of this byte was published, so one could write a program to change its value. It was sorta like the reports from the 70s about features in IBM hardware that were enabled by cutting a jumper on a circuit board, but it could cost you a lot of money to hire a CS guy to come in and cut that jumper.
Anyway, this sort of silly programmed-in "Pay us to change the byte that enables this feature" limitation was likely one of the things that killed off Sys/V and several other systems. The *BSD and linux systems never did this to you.
It's possible that I may have contributed in a minor way to ending this practice in the unix/linux world. Due to problems with diagnosing login problems (typically caused by the insanity of modems and other comm hardware), I wrote a program that functioned like the getty(1) program, but it had lots and lots of debug features. Its purpose was to document in detail what happened during a login attempt, so that I could diagnose and (usually) fix the problems. It was a drop-in replacement for getty, and I got lots of nice email from people who downloaded it. In several mailing-list discussions of the topic, I explained that I hadn't implemented the usual login limits for the simple reason that I didn't know where the limit was stored. I commented that if the folks at AT&T and various OEMs didn't like the fact that my getty clone defeated their login limit, they should just reply to this message and tell me where the limit was stored. I'd then add it to a feature to my program.
For some reason, they never replied to my invitation. Perhaps they figured out that if they did that, then everyone (on the list at least) would know how to defeat the login limit. And, of course, I'd implement it as I did other features, via an explicit command-line or config-file option, which users could change as they liked.
Anyway, eventually this "feature" was dropped from Sys/V, and it seems to have also disappeared from MS Windows (or maybe I just haven't heard about it biting anyone lately). Something convinced the proprietary guys that this was a bad idea.
But back then, it was entirely likely that you couldn't give your friends logins to your system, or if you did, they might not be able to log in until you first logged out. I had this problem in a lot of situtations, where I was trying to diagnose a remote system's problems, but I couldn't log in because the system had hit its login limit. So we had to have someone at the remote site walk over and try to log someone out, or if that didn't work, they could reboot it. But if they did a reboot, the problem would go away, killing our attempts to diagnose it and fix it.
There's a long history of vendors doing things that make life difficult for their customers, all in an attempt to get customers to pay more for permission to use the computer for what they'd bought it for. Blocking multi-user access is just one of the more annoying such things.
No money for Microsoft. I only buy Linux hardware (Score:1, Interesting)
The purchaser has all the power. With up-front research on the web, you can find out which manufacturers support Linux and make your purchases according to your level of support for Linux. This is the most important action you can do in order to support Linux. The other actions to encourage Linux is simply mentioning if they have computers that support Linux when you walk into the computer store. If they know nothing, then walk out of the store. They will figure out they've done something wrong by losing you as a customer.
I assure you my next PC purchase will be an AMD 790GX motherboard with a AMD Phenom IIx4. I'll get the 3D. I'm going window shopping today with the Ubuntu USB key. If the PC boots it and supports the 3D environment, I'll consider it when the time comes to buy a new PC. If it can't boot off the UBUNTU USB key, I will request the salespeople to update the BIOS for booting off of USB in order to use the LINUX USB KEY. If it still doesn't boot off the LINUX USB KEY, then I'm not going to consider the PC when the time comes for a purchase.
I recently bought an HP Deskjet D2468 because I was aware of HP supporting Linux well. This time however I literally plugged it in, UBUNTU detected the model right away and it was printing perfectly without touching a CD or installing any software. HP ROCKS! UBUNTU ROCKS! I'll certainly be trying HP computers with the UBUNTU USB key today.
Microsoft certainly has a great deal to worry about. I have no intentions in purchasing any Microsoft software. I feel a sense of ownership towards the open-source community and I support it by taking the time to demonstrate Linux to any open-spirited people willing to listen and willing to let me boot Linux on their computer.
With regards to trying UBUNTU, it has never been easier to try it. If you have new hardware that allows you to boot from USB, then trying any Linux from a thumb drive is awesome. It is certainly snappier to run than on a CD/DVD.
BUT for older machines having to try any Linux from a CD/DVD, it is still painfully slow. You need to install Linux on a hard drive for it to perform without losing patience. Unfortunately my hands are tied. Most of the time, I'm not allowed to put anything on the hard drive so the new WUBI tool for starting the Linux CD from the only existing windows file system on the hard drive still doesn't apply. Unfortunately, I've tried the USB Key on some machines that had USB ports but the BIOS didn't have the capability to boot from USB. That was disappointing for me. I personally don't try to run/install Linux on any machine that has less than 512MB. It's simply a waste of time for everyone concerned.
Re:It's about free software (Score:3, Interesting)
Regarding the low rate of Linux adoption, I don't get what you mean. It is used everywhere, and the world would literally grind to a halt if a small percentage of devices running GNU/Linux were shut down.
Actually, the business world's (and Microsoft's) problem is that linux only has a low rate of sales That's what people are measuring when they say that linux is under 1% of the market. But if you measure installed systems, linux's adoption is much higher than that. How much higher is difficult to determine, because business data is mostly based on sales figures. The difference is that the overwhelming majority of linux installations are on machines that didn't come with linux installed. Most of the linux installations are tallied as Windows machines, because that's what they were sold with. Thus they get tallied as sales of Microsoft products, when that's not what the computers are actually running.
I wonder if there are any reliable figures measuring the actual installations? I've seen some figures, but I'm not convinced that any of them are reliable. I have three computers running in this room right now. One is a Mac, running OS X. The other two are Intel systems. One was bought several years ago with Windows XP, but it became inadequate for its job due to the software bloat, so a bigger Windows box was bought, and the old machine became a linux server. The other was bought recently with linux installed, but the vendor mostly sells Windows boxes, and this one was likely reported to Microsoft as a Windows sale. So I have either one or two linux systems that are counted in the sales statistics as Microsoft Windows systems. One did run Windows for a while; the other has only run linux.
So my personal experience says that sales and installation figures for MS Windows and linux are highly likely to be wrong. I'm not aware of anyone trying to collect the data in a way that would convince a curious but rational skeptic that the figures are correct.