Sunday, January 1st, 2006, 8:11 am
Operating System Monoculture
Let us look at this from a more political point-of-view. ‘Software communism’ can be easily perceived in the context of Microsoft. Their aim of every single desktop, laptop, PDA, mobile phone and server run the same operating system. This is a problematic situation that would over-power the monopoly. Moreover, it makes everything identical. Everything is strived to become the same.
Microsoft promotes software monoculture, which is dangerous. The dangers in an established monopoly include lack of choice. This is the same problem as one often uses to bash communism. It is characterised by lack of drive and innovation, which by all means must never be attributed to Open Source software, as Bill Gates once insinuated.
In this day and age, in the O/S sector in particular, we continue to overlook the falsified competition where the main sufferer is the end-user. Creating new proprietary formats to compete with standards and open formats means that more incompatibilities should be expected. These serve no-one but the companies that create them, as well as their investors that benefit financially. Money kills character. Similar patterns have emerged among IPO‘d Google as well, so the fact is hard to deny.