2008 May 20 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for May 20th, 2008

Waterloo!

Published by Robert Pogson May 20th, 2008 in Uncategorized. Closed

M$ seems intent on buying Yahoo! Latest rumours are that the offer will be raised a few dollars per share. Over at Microsoft-watch, Joe Wilcox is offering more free advice,

Steve, if the stress doesn’t kill you, Yahoo will turn you into a real Monkey Boy, but shrilling in despair. Maybe a merger would work better if Yahoo wasn’t so unwilling. Her dowry is enormous. You’ll have to borrow money to get her, create debt Microsoft hasn’t seen in years. Do you really want to borrow $10 billion or more for her?

HeHeHe.

M$ had a plan to do a string of acquisitions. They have always done acquisitions, since DOS. Joe suggests funding startups. That could work. Get whatever talent there is working on innovation for a change. Vista is not innovation. It is not even catch-up. It is an echo of the past, “More bloat, please!” The client and server OS are becoming irrelevant in many eyes. We can do whatever we want with GNU/Linux, thank you. We do not need M$ anymore. Trying to diversify into a different monopoly may or may not work. If they fail to get a monopoly in search, ads, Web 2.0,… they have no where to go but down. No more outrageous profits. No more billionaires by the bucket. Moreover, if Yahoo! does not work for M$, they will be scrambling to stay relevant and everyone will see the emperor has no clothes. No monopoly. No easy billions. No more lock-in, eventually.

This is M$’s Waterloo. They have chosen the battleground and it is uphill and slippery in every direction. Google owns the high ground. FLOSS surrounds them in every direction out to the horizon. Ammunition, morale and leadership are running low. It does not look good for M$, but the rest of us have a bright future, a world without M$ domination. A world where energy and innitiative can make us a good living and we can keep more money at home to build local industry and feed kids is much more to my liking. M$ got away with lock-in by spreading a lot of the cash flow to OEMs but it still cost twice as much to set up a school with that other OS than with GNU/Linux. Now, we will be able to afford enough seats. Even one PC per student is possible in a world without M$’s shadow.

The latest webstats are in for April, 2008: GNU/Linux is up another tick according to NetApps to 0.67%, that’s a 20% increase since the eee PC came out in October 2007. Nice. They are the lowest number for share but showing good growth. That means GNU/Linux is on the move on the desktop everywhere. On the server, Apache is still eating M$’s lunch.

Even M$ cannot make more people click Yahoo! and fewer Google. Where are they going to get the ramp-up in revenue to return the investment? How are they going to break even any time soon? M$ does not do well in a competitive environment. They need monopoly. They need 80% margins, not 10%. The only time they beat a market leader was Netscape in the browser wars and they did that leveraging the monopoly on the desktop. That is so 20th century. Does Ballmer believe he can do that again? I would be willing to bet against them. I will invest in GNU/Linux and freedom in 2008.

I had a glitch on the site. In the interim, the offer has been withdrawn. There are those who predict Yahoo! will crash and burn, but it turns out now M$ is making a move to only acquire the search part of Yahoo! Fat chance. That is like M$ selling that other OS to anybody and trying to run the rest of the business the same old way. It will not work. Yahoo! leverages search for their whole business. Ballmer must be mad.

- Robert Pogson

Apples v Apples

Published by Robert Pogson May 20th, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The recent press release from IDC, “U.S. Growth Slips, But Worldwide PC Shipments Remain Healthy, According to IDC”, contains some interesting data we can combine with web stats to gain further insight into GNU/Linux adoption.

The US PC market is not bad with 3.5% growth Q1-2008/Q1-2007. The US is a mature market, but there is no “pop” for the pent-up demand for a new OS from M$. Apple gets 6% of this market with 25% growth and is in fourth place, after Acer and before Toshiba.
The global PC market is hot with 14.6% growth. This is a largely expanding market with many newcomers becoming consumers in China, India, Russia and South America. Here, Apple is a no show, not in the top five, presumably with fewer sales than Toshiba at 4.4%.

Combining this with Apple’s 10Q (2.289 million units sold) and knowing that MacOS is only allowed to run on Macs, we can tell pretty surely that a little more than 3% of PCs are Macs running MacOS. Web stats show that other OS has dropped below 90%, so that leaves more than 6% for GNU/Linux. QED

- Robert Pogson

Gael Duval has Another Hit.

Published by Robert Pogson May 20th, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Remember Mandrake, now Mandriva? Gael Duval was the mover and shaker. Now he has another winner, Ulteo Virtual Desktop. This is a pre-installed virtual machine with GNU/Linux. It is an executable for that other OS that a user can download and install in the usual way for that system, and it works. The user gets OpenOffice.org, FireFox, Gimp, KDE, GNU/Linux and lots more with a click or two. Think of it. No boot loader stuff, no partitioning, no cryptic Q & A, just clicks familiar to the user. What a concept! It is a further advance of GNU/Linux, probably bigger than the live CD.

On top of the ease of installation, the user gets to run both OS at once and can use the file-system of that other OS from GNU/Linux. When the user finds that that other OS is no longer needed, he doesn’t even need to do an installation, just stay in the virtual desktop. Cool.

I tried it and except for an invitation to sign up for an account with Ulteo, and pulseaudio and Xming needing a break on the firewall (possibly for this account thing), and a noticeable boot time for the VM it was very smooth. The only indication that there is a virtual machine involved afterwards is a second network connection icon. I am convinced this thing will catch the wave of GNU/Linux adoption in 2008. WOW!

I am considering putting this all over my lab: booting as a GNU/Linux thin client, that other OS, or GNU/Linux in the Virtual Desktop. Choices, choices… It is still a beta, but it looks good so far.

- Robert Pogson