On Aug 13, 3:21 pm, Linonut <lino...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> * DFS peremptorily fired off this memo:
> > Left side of your piehole: Gartner is pay for say.
> > Right side of your piehole: Gartner says Linux is 4% of the market
> > So who paid them?
> Microsoft.
Remember, it's what you say, and what you DON'T say in these
"Official" reports that is so critical. At one time, around 1999, IDC
estimated that Linux was being installed by end users on roughly 14%
of the computers sold in that year. Keep in mind that this was one
year in which only around 100 million PCs were sold, when Windows ME
was flopping, and 17 million PCs against the nearly 1 billion PCs and
internet devices globally, would have been 0.17 % of the installed
base. This was based on actual licenses shipped by actual Linux
distributors, including actual copies downloaded directly from
authorized mirrors. There was no attempt to count internal corporate
downloads of copies stored on the corporate servers, copies downloaded
from individual web sites, or from any other sources.
In their next annual report, they had been instructed by Microsoft to
ONLY compare the License ROYALTIES paid for the two systems. Since
the royalties paid for Linux were practically none, and the royalties
paid to Microsoft were in the billions, the report was appropriately
distorted in favor of Microsoft. Yet in that year, unit volumes of
Linux actually reported by Linux distributors who provided information
to IDC showed that the number of copies "officially" distributed had
more than tripled in that year.
Today, there are a number af ways to attempt to count Linux
distributions, but one of the LEAST relialble is the "as shipped"
numbers. With desktop virtualization becoming more practical, and
VMware player becoming free, and Linux "appliances" being available
for the price of a download (less than a dime US), and high speed
downloads being available at various WiFi hotspots as well as through
cable providers and the telephone companies, installing Linux as a
virtualized client is almost trivial, and almost impossible to
measure.
With VMWare converter making it a trivial task to convert your
licensed copy of Windows or Vista into a VMWare "Appliance", and more
than 95% of all PCs being "Linux Ready", it's now trivial to make
Linux the primary operating system and XP or Vista the virtualized
system.
The WinTrolls love to cite a survey which only counts Linux clients
that view a specific type of ActiveX control. The problem is that the
only way it would be counted as Linux is if the Linux user had
installed Crossover, had installed the ActiveX plug-in for FireFox,
and had disabled security features designed to protect Linux machines
from ActiveX.
Of course, if you have Virtualized Linux, or Virtualized Windows, why
would you need to use Crossover to run ActiveX on Linux? Not such a
big surprise that the counter software only found 0.6% Linux.
Yet when you look at other web sites, like W3Schools, or even the site
that shows several sites, you see that Linux is closer to around 7%,
even with Mac and Windows adding more and more PCs to the base. And
of course, these only measure IP addresses, which means that Linux
gets undercounted (because most Linux users also use NAT routers), and
Windows/Vista gets overcounted (because most Windows users use public
DHCP addresses that can change several times per month). All
Microsoft has to do to keep the Linux count down, is to keep adding
more public IP addresses to the DHCP pools like those used for MSN
access.
Microsoft has two big nightmare scenarios. The first is that one of
the major sites like Yahoo, Google, or Amazon might openly and
publicly publish the mix of Linux to Windows devices connecting using
unique authentication such as userid and password associated with
cookies. The second is that the entire Internet is switched to IPv6
and suddenly all of those NAT addresses become uniquely identified
IPv6 addresses.
Remember, one of the primary reasons for NAT was that there weren't
enough IPv4 addresses to go around. Many ISPs solved this problem by
using NAT routers, so that they could take one or two public IP
addresses rather than having to wait months or years for a class A or
class B address sufficient to handle all of their subscribers.
Microsoft is doing everything they can to keep any numbers that would
show Linux as being installed on a substantial share of clients as
quiet as possible. But they themselves have knowledge of huge
percentages of clients through people who go to CNBC as referrals from
their brokers (including a unique ID for each account), or go to
Expedia, or CarPoint, or even MSNBC. In addition, SSL certificates
are authenticated using unique keys on the client, which helps
Verisign, Thawte, and other Certificate authorities identify the type
of OS the client is using. Microsoft owns 25% of Verisign, and
Verisign owns at least 25% of Thawte group. This gives them enough
control to get access to detailed records of the survey.
And what does Steve Ballmer, who actually has access to these highly
confidential numbers, consider to be the NUMBER ONE THREAT to
Microsoft, based on this very accurate and very detailed information?
LINUX.
Ballmer has been having some real problems with even the funded
surveys, because it's getting harder and harder to hide that Vista was
a flop, and that Linux is growing a lot faster than Microsoft would
like to admit publicly.
On the other hand, as long as Ballmer gets his pound of flesh every
year from his major customers including OEMs, CIOs, and Institutions,
the revenue picture can be kept somewhat rosier than it really is.
Bill Gates was a master at deceit. His game wasn't chess, or poker.
His favorite game was RISK, the game where you take over the world by
forming alliances with other players, get them to blow all of their
resources on invading other countries, then beating them into
submission so that you can invade their countries.
I've heard that he was such a master at the game, that it got to the
point where no one would play with him, because they knew he would
win, especially Ballmer.
Ballmer has been more like a "Used Car Salesman". You knew you
couldn't trust him, but you needed a car, and so you took the car for
a test drive, to a mechanic you could trust, who would figure out
whether the used car dealer had drained the oil so you wouldn't know
that the rings were shot, or that it was a really good car, and
actually worth the price you were going to pay.
These days, corporate and institutional customers are treating Ballmer
like that used car salesman. They are taking that PC for a "test
drive" and installing Linux on it (using their own hard drive) just to
make sure that it will run with Linux, rather than only running on
Vista. They are doing their own productivity measurements by having
small projects done using Vista, rather than doing a "Mass Migration".
And the news isn't good for Vista and Office 2007. It seems that
folks using Vista are LESS productive than with XP, and even LESS
productive than with Linux, even though the Vista machine should be
twice as fast.
Meanwhile, the Office 2007, Office XP, and OpenOffice/Symphony ODF
suite war is REALLY bad news for Microsoft. Office 2007 gives no
increase in productivity, but ODF doesn't give a decrease in
productivity. In fact, many of the complex VBA macros that take so
long to create in MS-Office are trivial with Open Office Base. A
variety of other features, plus a very small footprint, and much lower
disk thrashing, seems to have yielded a slight increase in
productivity. And since the cost of upgrading to Open Office is
simply a corporate policy permitting users to install it, and possibly
an install image on the corporate web site, it's becoming quite
popular. As Microsoft's corporate "support contracts" for Office and
XP expire, more and more companies are now scaling down their support
contracts. In many cases, recession, higher fuel costs, and other
pressures have resulted in "cost cutting measures", and for the first
time in almost 20 years, Microsoft is right at the top of the cost
cutting list.
One of the biggest reasons, is the costs of spam, bots, viruses, and
other Windows/Vista security problems. And now that it's confirmed
that Vista is no more secure than XP (has even more back doors), it's
become "unwelcome" at most corporations and institutions.
Furthermore, Microsoft's attempts to "Force Feed" upgrades is also
backfiring. Now that the OEMs can't sell machines with XP
preinstalled, there are already indications that corporate PC orders
are pretty much "On Hold" until the OEMs can offer the institutions
something they actually want. Much of the surge in PC orders since
the release of Vista was Corporations and Institutions trying to get
PCs with XP while they were still available.
This pretty much leaves Microsoft looking to the "Gamer" market, and
that pretty much means that they have to compete with their own X-Box/
360. Even parents are pretty much looking for the $300 desktop for
the kids. Or even better, a $300 notebook like one of those ASUS
Linux jobs.
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