Robert Pogson

M$’s fans rightly point out that M$ has a lock on business computers but…“The GOH market category, typified by Nintendo’s 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Vita, has recently been overshadowed by gaming-capable smartphones and tablets and this trend is likely to continue. IDC research shows, for example, that the number of paying smartphone and tablet gamers will surpass the number of paying GOH gamers worldwide in 2013 and rise at a rapid rate through 2017. The number of GOH bundles shipped, meanwhile, should fall at an average of nearly 7% per year over the next five years. The installed base of GOH’s is being overwhelmed by smartphones and tablets that are used for (primarily casual) gaming.”
see IDC Mobile/Portable Gaming Forecast Finds That Paying Smartphone and Tablet Gamers Will Surpass the Number of Paying Gaming-Optimized Handheld Gamers This Year

and, further,
“The worldwide mobile phone market grew 4% year over year in the seasonally slow first quarter of 2013 (1Q13) as smartphones outshipped feature phones for the first time. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 418.6 million mobile phones in 1Q13 compared to 402.4 million units in the first quarter of 2012 and 483.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012.

In the worldwide smartphone market, vendors shipped 216.2 million units in 1Q13, which marked the first time more than half (51.6%) the total phone shipments in a quarter were smartphones. The market grew 41.6% compared to the 152.7 million units shipped in 1Q12, but 5.1% lower than the 227.8 million units shipped in 4Q12.”
see More Smartphones Were Shipped in Q1 2013 Than Feature Phones, An Industry First According to IDC

and

“The Middle East and Africa PC market experienced a significant decline of 14.1% year on year during the first quarter of 2013, according to preliminary results released by International Data Corporation (IDC), the premier global market intelligence and advisory firm for the information technology and telecommunications markets. Total PC shipments in the region slowed down to 5.3 million units, with desktops declining 18.4% year on year to 2 million units, while notebook shipments declined 11.2% year on year to total 3.3 million units.”
see IDC Reports Steepest PC Market Decline Yet For the Middle East and Africa Region as Microsoft Windows 8 Is Unable to Spur Incremental PC Demand

So, the monopoly is momentarily OK, teetering on the brink of a chasm of great depth, but where’s the up-side? Their gaming niche is shrinking. Their mobile effort is relatively feeble. Their lock on business is being eroded by BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), Google’s cloud apps, and LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. Their lock on retail shelves is busted wide open with the small cheap computers running */Linux being everywhere. Is there any doubt that retailers will give space to GNU/Linux now, in the face of all the other weakness?

Erosion starts at the edges. It can be very gradual but it can also open gaps in the dike, sponsoring a flood. 2013 seems to be the year that a flood swept away the Wintel monopoly. M$ and Intel still have huge revenue but M$ is relying more than ever upon it’s last pillar, business, and Intel is selling more Atoms and fewer hair-driers. Intel is adapting by moving to 14-22nm technology which lowers the cost of its products both to buy and to operate. M$ is adapting by advertising and litigating more…

In the end it seems to me that Intel will be able to thrive in any environment as Moore’s Law reduces the energy-cost of operating Intel’s chips but M$ is doomed to destruction or much lower prices. Both will have to compete on price/performance and M$ cannot beat the performance of FLOSS. The advent of thin client and web applications/cloud services means the lock-in that holds business close to M$ is loosening at the same time that FLOSS keeps improving on client and server.

From the user’s point of view the small cheap computers have huge advantages like price, performance, portability, and running FLOSS operating systems. Underneath that, in the chip itself is a magical combination that used to fill an ATX box with components. For x86/amd64 all of those components were managed well except the graphics which were closely guarded secret places where FLOSS was often second best because the manufacturers did not produce FLOSS drivers and were often not cooperative.

With the ARMed CPUs and integrated graphics on the chip in small cheap computers a FLOSS OS was often running on Day One. It no longer takes a year or so to “catch up” by reverse-engineering after release to market. The chip-makers are mostly members of the Linux Foundation and contribute “binary blobs” to load proper software for the Linux kernel and the particular GPUs. Combine that with devices like Raspberry Pi and Beagle Boards that are very accessible for all and the passions of developers to find out how things work and this happens:
“First off, after the RadeonHD project, it was clear that i did not want to waste further time on the x86 linux desktop. It’s a political swamp, where correct insights, hard labour, and actual results are all irrelevant if you do not belong to the right political group. And the lengths this group would go to to affirm their own supposed awesomeness shocked even me. The consolidation that happened in the x86 desktop graphics market, with the few remaining players now sticking hard to their respective position towards open source software, gives little option to do real work and achieve results outside of what is dictated by corporate politics. It was time to move to something new, and the completely level and open playing field of ARM GPUs was exactly that.

Finally, while I have covered most sides of graphics driver development in the meantime, I had not done any real 3D driver development before. When I was the only person who cared about boring modesetting, I often had to hear how difficult 3D graphics hardware is. Some part of me always knew that that was an excuse to not deal with the boring but highly important bits, but now I got to prove that this is not the case. If the hardware is sane, a 3D driver is sane as well, but even when the hardware is sane, the sheer number of combinations possible make display driver development impossible to get absolutely right for everyone. A few FPS less is not the end of the world, a display that does not show any image means that the user will turn and walk away. And it indeed was an excuse for not dealing with what people really needed at the time.”
see The SoC GPU driver interview – Architecture Logicielle & Développement

The result is we are on the verge of having complete access to graphics on the small cheap computers for every purpose, HPC, servery, auxilliary computing, and, oh yes, graphics in 3D. Since the graphics unit does most of the work in this, the ARM processor is out of the way entirely. Some of these units actually use the GPU to boot the SoC. How refreshing. Because of FLOSS users will now have all the performance of their hardware without limits by hardware manufacturers or “partners” of M$, small cheap computers have rapidly evolved to be on the forefront of innovation rather than being auxiliary computing devices.

From my point of view, that IT is best done without any involvement by M$, this is the best opportunity to escape bondage that we have seen in many decades. The world can make its own software cooperatively without any “help” from the slave-masters.

That didn’t take long. Being first to market with a good product does not guarantee monopoly as some suggest. Apple’s monopoly lasted only a few years.
“Despite retaining the lion’s share of the UK tablet market, Apple has seen its share of ownership drop 10 percentage points in the last year, falling from 73% in Q1 2012 to 63% in Q1 2013. This decline in market share comes despite the recent releases of its 4th generation iPad and iPad Mini.” 
see Quality Android tablets make big inroads into Apple’s market share

Of course, Apple doesn’t have to pay huge premiums to M$ so it may stay relevant for years to come. Android/Linux is being taxed by M$ but only to a tiny amount. Consumers will win in the price/performance war as long as Wintel stays in the shade.

Nathan Myhrvold wrote, while comparing software to video tapes (US DOJ v M$, exhibit 994), “The computer industry as we know it today is full of examples of positive feedback. The value of a computer to its user depends on the quality and variety of the application software available for it. The incentive to create such software for a particular computer depends on the number of users. since they are the potential customers for the application developer. This creates a similar situation to the video store – the best software is attracted to the most popular platform. making it more popular still.

A more familiar way to say this is compatability – the laws of positive feedback govern any system where compatibility with other users is either directly or indirectly a key factor in the utility of a product or service. This value is usually instantiated and made tangible by a separate product whose availability or quality depends on the installed base, such as the rental tapes in the ease of VHS or software in the case of computers.”

He conveniently skipped that instead of superior product M$ used a bunch of exclusive deals to get the snowball rolling. Well, now, things are going the opposite way. New products found their way onto the market despite all M$’s best efforts and now consumers are choosing */Linux and ISVs are writing tons of software for */Linux and retailers and OEMs are having a hard time shipping product that doesn’t work for consumers…

The interesting thing about positive feedback is that it accelerates change. All the lock-in and dependency M$ has built into the whole IT industry is now causing a stampede away from M$’s products and the shift is accelerating rapidly. One factor has changed everything since the rise of Wintel, the size of the installed base of Wintel machines. There is virtually an infinite supply of them so that anyone who needs one can just buy a used one cast off by the previous owner. Meanwhile the new PC, small, cheap, smart computers are selling like hot cakes because they are able to be produced in greater numbers, lower prices and more formats than that other stuff… There are many factors piled up to accelerate this shift.

It could be two or three years before everyone wakes up to realize it was all a dream and they never needed M$ for anything but youth, women, mobile people are liking what they see in Android/Linux. By the time it comes to replace existing desktop/notebook PCs with something else consumers and businesses will have lots of choices besides M$’s stuff: Android/Linux, GNU/Linux, web applications, thin clients, … M$’s share of the shipments could drop to ~25% and they had damned well better be prepared to play well with everyone else with open standards or they will be shunned and disappear from the face of Earth. OEMs have to ship competing products and retailers have to offer them to consumers if they want to survive. Times have changed quickly.

“Windows 7, after five months of public availability, had captured 10.5% of the market. Even the much-maligned Windows Vista did better than Windows 8 at release — and in fact, to this day, still has a larger share of the market than Windows 8 (5%). Manufacturers aren’t celebratorily cutting the price of Windows RT tablets; they’re discounting the devices in a desperate attempt to shift unwanted stock.”
see Five months in: Windows 8′s market share finally surpasses desktop Linux

In previous waves of good and bad products, the Wintel monopoly has gotten by with severe lock-in. People were forced to buy the bad and ugly stuff because they did not know they had a choice, FLOSS and GNU/Linux. Today, everyone knows they have choices: Android/Linux, GNU/Linux and even Apple’s stuff. Thus, “8″ is plugging the channels and OEMs and retailers are mad as Hell. They don’t blame the economy, the weather, politicians… They blame M$ and rightly so.

OEMs and retailers have been willing slaves of M$ for decades because of that lock-in. Now that it’s gone, it doesn’t pay to be a slave. New OEMs are emerging with no shackles and trouncing the old guard. The OEMs are having to adapt by shipping what the world wants, small cheap computers, not what M$ wants, bloated stuff which hides their “tax”. Retailers have always taken the risk and the flack from users who wanted to buy a PC but not M$’s OS. Now they can’t even move the stuff except into the dumpster. They can’t even convert the machines to GNU/Linux due to “secure boot”…

Governments have tolerated Wintel because it seemed to be necessary for industry/the economy. Now that */Linux is widely known to be a good alternative, governments are questioning their relationship to Wintel and many are adopting FLOSS themselves. Many are finally able to see the anti-competitive features of Wintel are harming their economies and providing a genuine disadvantage with respect to economies which do not cater to M$.

End users have tolerated Wintel because they took what was on retail shelves and were not computer-literate. Now they have friends running small cheap computers often with nothing from Intel or M$ and they have a choice. Why put up with constant re-re-reboots, slowing down, higher prices, and restrictions on what they can do with PCs when the small cheap computers free them forever from that?

Sand is made of hard particles, harder than the gears. As time passes those gears will wear themselves down until the teeth are gone or the axles wobble. There’s just no repairing Wintel without destroying the monopoly. Even Intel has had to adapt by tweaking Atom at the cutting edge of Moore’s Law and still they can’t compete on price/performance with ARM.

Good riddance to monopoly in IT. It was never a good idea and will eventually be seen as a crime against humanity. Information should be free. Information processing should be a commodity available at a fair price and under fair terms. M$’s EULA was not fair. Locking in consumers, retailers and OEMs was not fair. Governments and courts blinking at the obvious damage to the consumers and the economy was wrong.

He who lives by the sword will die by it and Wintel has locked itself into a high-cost mode of operation that is the ultimate cause of its decline. M$ and Wintel may survive but they will never be monopolists again. The world will not allow them to buy out ARM and they cannot buy out FLOSS for any money. Good-bye, monopoly.

I have been playing around with my little woman’s cast off smart phone and getting great use of it as a small cheap computer. It is in every way a personal computer. I can use it at home on the LAN or out and about hiking, hunting, gardening…

I have a raft of “apps” that work for me,

• GPS functions
• rangefinders
• camera
• web browser
• FTP client
• ballistics calculator, etc.

Anyone who claims a smartphone is not a personal computer is a fool. Such gadgets are displacing legacy PCs because they are small, cheap portable and extremely useful. They do all kinds of stuff that a Wintel PC cannot and there are few things the Wintel PC can do that these gadgets cannot. They are not great for entering text but a keyboard can be added by USB or Bluetooth. They may not have the peak throughput video coding may require but then it still does the job of recording video, stills and audio.

I can tweak all the web-applications on my big machine or out on the web using this tiny gadget.

What this means is that Wintel is no longer mainstream at least for consumers. By the time consumers feel the need to replace their old legacy PC, some other small cheap computer will have the throughput to do anything anywhere and it will have the option to anchor it with huge displays and other input devices including voice. M$ has no longer a monopoly on IT for personal user. M$ knows that. That’s why “8″ happened but Android/Linux is so far ahead that M$ has not the manpower nor money enough to catch up. The world can and does make great software cooperatively and OEMs and retailers know it. It’s just a matter of time before retail shelf-space for Wintel shrinks while the rest of the world gets more space to present products to consumers including GNU/Linux on tiny boxes.