Imagine that your football team wins the championship the last years and it has completely crashed all competition. Would you be happy with the way your team played with no competition at all? It would surely play crappy, because it wouldn't need to try any harder. Now imagine that your opponents got stronger by bringing talented players, accomplished coaches and investing in their infrastructure (academies, training grounds, etc). Your team would be hard pressed and improved to keep ahead of its opponents.
The same thing happened with windows.
Having more than 90% market share for years, they got slower, more bloated and less innovative.
Since the fall of Netscape, Internet Explorer stayed the same for 5 years. 5 years!! This amount of time is considered like an eon in IT. And then, with the advent of Firefox, Microsoft was forced to release IE 7, which incorporated some features of Firefox, like tabbed browsing for example. Now they even try to create publicity for the beta versions of IE 8, which in turn tries to catch up to Firefox in terms of speed.
Another great example is the end of XP lifecycle. Many users preferred XP over Vista and they even made an online petition to Microsoft to keep supporting XP. The result after 200.000 signatures? Microsoft insisted on terminating XP. But... But when EeePC came out, with this Celeron processor that could not load Vista, Microsoft was forced to extend the life of XP Home to avoid losing 100% market share to Linux netbooks.(And with this move it only lost 30-40%. I am talking only about netbooks here.)
Microsoft also finally implemented user rights on Vista, -badly though-, and started "discouraging" users to be administrators, when they shouldn't.
So even if you don't like or don't plan to use Linux, you should be happy if it keeps getting market share and attention from companies, because it is you that will be benefitted in the end. YOUR TEAM, Microsoft, will have to play better ball to stay on top and you will enjoy following that team more than you do now.
OK, you convinced me! How can i help windows, IE and office become better??
The easiest way is to add buttons or banners to download Ubuntu, Firefox or OpenOffice in your site or blog.
There are many buttons/banners and they can look like this:
2 comments:
Totally agree. I've stated this when IE 7 came out and Vista.
At first, they fall prone to falling behind due to not realizing that the world is changing,.. then they have to figure out what's going on.. then they have to come up with a plan and implement it... that's when Microsoft becomes viable again.
Time to wake up the sleeping giant (and then the fun begins.. an awakened giant verses strapping, innovative Linux.. what a show!)
For cutting edge Hardware, the new Windows can be a useful tool for users with such hardware. From what I have read, Windows is pretty much gearing up for just that.
But for the new mini laptop sector only running 512mb to 1gig of ram, the new Windows will not be a viable option.
Then there are the people like me that run older hardware, where only unsupported Windows versions are an option or Supported versions of Linux.
I don't know if Windows is thinking about coming up with a Mini Version of their new operating system or if they even care about that market but it would be nice to see.
Probably couldn't afford the price though, and the constant monitoring of Microsoft on their users with their new operating systems kinda makes my skin crawl. That and there high handed way of killing your operating system when you make a hardware change. I know they are protecting their investment. But to the little guy, that excuse is pretty irrevelent.
All that said, I agree that Windows users should cheer for Linux because when Windows decides that your install is invalid, (which is what drove me to linux in the 1st place) and disables your laptop or desktop. Thank Linus Torvalds for giving me the option to get my hardware up and going again. Minus the 150 dollars for another XP CD.
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