Sunday, January 1st, 2006, 8:11 am
Operating System Monoculture
Filed under: With Windwoes (sic) installed on over 90% of today’s desktops and laptops, there is no homogeneity in prevalence. Windows becomes so banal that nobody wishes to explore. The system dependencies, which have been orchestrated by the vendor, make the way out rather cumbersome. These dependencies are by all means intended to neutralise any opposition, particularly LAMP or, more broadly, FOSS. Open Source initiatives suffer from their inability to negotiate over (or even exchange) closed-source solutions and secret, proprietary formats.
The hands of the monoploy stretch further to invade the world of television, albeit this seems to have suffered a setback recently. Microsoft and NBC have just drifted apart, breaking off their long-invested-in partnership.
As yet another weaponry in the arsenal of the riches, Microsoft makes use of biased and well-endowed research that is getting tremendous exposure through paid advertisements. This has been discussed several times before. A very recent example along this theme reminds us of a brutal reality in industry.
Yes, Windows is better than it used to be, but the fundamental flaws that come from an operating system that was never, ever meant to work on a network are still there.
These false benchmarks have also been named “disinformation” and “FUD” (confer Wikipedia’s explanation. Therein lies in a large page with an expanded definition of the term).
