Hardware Stagnates, Microsoft Ails, Ubuntu Wins
In an interview with linuxdevices.com, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes Linux, argues that Microsoft’s failure to anticipate the pace of hardware development over the long-term contributed substantially to the trouble that the company now finds itself in. This is an interesting insight, and adds some precision to explanations of Linux’s penetration of the desktop operating-system market.
Microsoft’s crippling failure to profit from the surge of netbooks, Zemlin asserts, can be attributed in part to its “assumption that hardware costs are decreasing, and PCs are becoming more powerful, with more memory and more CPU. And that’s not what’s happening.”
Although computers have generally come down in price over the last several years, hardware advancement has been comparatively stagnant. CPU manufacturers are focused on cramming more cores onto one chip, which presents only limited opportunities for software enhancement, or in creating virtualizaton extensions, which are not useful for desktop users. Real innovation, like the development of truly low-power processors or magnitudinal increases in the computational capacity of chips, remains theoretical.
Memory has become cheaper and thus more abundant in the average computer, but improvements in speed and power-consumption are still slow and incremental.
There have been some impressive advancements in GPUs, but these remain applicable only to niche markets like high-end gamers. If anything, the rise of netbooks has meant that displays have become smaller, and expensive video cards less marketable.
Wireless networking has yet to become as reliable, secure and ubiquitous as we were promised in the early 2000s, and most residential Internet connections are no faster than they were five or even ten years ago.
This lack of innovation on the hardware front, combined with the shallow pockets of consumers lately, has derailed Microsoft’s business model to a significant extent. When development on Vista began in 2002, Microsoft clearly expected hardware to became more powerful and cheaper at a pace that turned out to be unrealistic. This has made Vista’s adoption difficult for people who don’t have the cash to purchase high-end hardware, and has led to promises that Windows 7 will be leaner than its beastly predecessor–although the extent to which this assurance will prove true remains to be seen.
Linux and most major open-source applications, in contrast to Microsoft’s software, are developed incrementally, making a sustained equilibrium between hardware and software possible. This characteristic of free-software development is an inherent strength with which companies like Microsoft and Apple can’t compete.
The scalability of Linux also makes it easy to adapt to the specifications of a given set of hardware, like netbooks, which is generally impossible in the proprietary world.
While proprietary developers gamble on what the CPUs and displays of the future will be like, the Ubuntu community can focus on reacting to what’s real and present, not theoretical. Unless closed platforms adopt less punctuated development strategies, they will always be at a disadvantage with respect to flexibility in the relationship between hardware and software.
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The third link is broken.
Ryan: fixed. Thanks for pointing it out.
I fear that Vista was the one opportunity for Linux to gain some headway, and now that Microsoft has learned from its mistakes, it won’t happen again.
No it wasn’t. Microsoft have an app store planned for Windows 7. From what I’ve heard it offers basically the same functionality as a Linux repository or the iPhone app store. So free repositories in Linux become our best answer to Windows 7. Why pay to download from an app store when you can legally download for free.
I’m also not convinced a proper version of Windows 7 will run properly on a netbook. The talk is of a “netbook version” of Windows 7. I’m also not convinced about the performance tweaks. Windows 7 Beta is a barren wasteland there’s a lot missing from it. And it suffers application and hardware incompatibilities. Not as bad as Vista. But they are surfacing.
A finally version of Windows 7 won’t appear before November. I’m thinking it won’t actually appear before January. With Windows being more expensive than Linux and with major vendors adopting Linux to one degree or another Microsoft is going to have to pay out a lot of “Marketing Dollars”. It’s a recession. People are looking for cheaper PCs. Not the gaming rigs Windows 7 is intended for.
Linux on netbooks is getting better all the time. Just as with mobile phone’s we will surely see operating system choices in the future. Microsoft doesn’t control the market as they once did. Adoption of ODF standards by more than 16 countries is in full swing. Alot of people will be using Windows but more and more will find Linux options available.