Robert Pogson

“Windows 8 joins a growing list of Microsoft’s failures and missed opportunities – instances where the software giant was either caught out, or where Ballmer pooh-poohed the competition and later had to eat his words and burn billions of dollars playing catch up. A gargantuan share of the technology sector, and accompanying revenue, that could have gone to Microsoft has been lost to Google, Apple and Samsung, a trio that has snapped up the online ads and search, and phone and tablet markets.”
see Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

While Ballmer fiddles, M$ burns through $billions in R&D and can’t make a new product that sells. The channel is plugged with old product and it’s not moving off retail shelves. They are even going to give away the next release, fixing the gross deficiencies of “8″. From where will future revenue come? Businesses using thin clients and Android/Linux smart thingies? Cloud services? A cloud application that requires purchasing a client application? I don’t think so. Tying everything to a sinking Windows ^TM client will pull the plug on future revenue. “7″ did save the company from the Vista fiasco when they refused to fix Vista for $0 but there’s no saving M$ from the missed opportunity to expand on ARM. Moore’s Law and Intel will not give M$ back that opportunity. By the time M$ develops a new product, the world will have moved on.

In the meantime, M$ is having to reduce prices over a shrinking share of IT. In a year or two, their revenue will plunge and the cash to placate investors, OEMs and retailers will be gone.

The balance sheets and dividends do look healthy but only if you don’t look too closely. Current liabilities come to $32billion and longer-term liabilities come to $25billion. The value of the common stock at $66billion could vanish rapidly. $2billion of their net cash from operations, $9.6billion, was previously deferred revenue. A year ago that was just a few $million. Further, deferred revenue, mostly long-term volume licensing, was down $2billion. The unearned revenue for Windows was down $800million per quarter when their “hot”, “new” product “8″ should be selling like hot cakes. It’s not. That means the gravy is product customers paid for which they may never receive. That’s not a sound business plan. That’s not a way to maintain the loyalty of customers. Discounts and give-aways may not be enough.

At the same time that Ballmer is mismanaging the store, */Linux on ARM is outselling Wintel by many units per annum and */Linux is moving onto legacy PCs in a big way. 2013 has nothing but downside for the client division. The server division is stuck between the client and the cloud. The world does not need M$ taxing IT anywhere these days, not HPC, not servers, not the cloud, not mobility and not the client.

‘The combination of ARM-based chipsets and Android has taken computing devices to new, lower price points. If Microsoft and Intel are serious about capitalizing on this exploding market, both will need to ensure that their OEMs can remain competitive on price.’
see Smart mobile device shipments exceed 300 million in Q1 2013

More than a decade ago, M$ was worried when the price of an ATX PC box was ~$1K. Well, that capability is now available for ~$100. It’s time to rethink everything. Trying to raise the price of PCs as “Ultra”-somethings won’t cut it. Even an ARMed smartphone is absolutely wonderful… Trying to spread FUD won’t cut it as even the consumers on the street and the news media can see that the emperor has no clothes. Remember, every middle-aged user on the Earth has seen enough BSODs and malware to last a lifetime. Now that they can see a price-difference between Android/Linux on ARM and Wintel, large numbers are choosing the less costly and better-performing option.

If you want an alternative to Android/Linux or M$’s OS on your PC, consider Debian GNU/Linux, “the universal operating system”.

“Given Android’s success in the mobile market, one has to wonder how long it will be until we see the operating system loaded onto PCs and go head-to-head against Windows and iOS. Given the way that buyers (consumers and enterprise alike) have embraced Android on smartphones and tablets — activations of new devices sit at 1.5 million daily, or 45 million every month — it seems logical to give consumers what they want, and put this operating system onto notebooks, convertibles, and hybrid systems.”
see Android is crushing Apple and Microsoft in the mobile device market

I’d say one or two more quarters should severely damage M$’s relationship with OEMs. Android/Linux and GNU/Linux are looking better every day.

“Bhuvan Krishna, General Secretary, Free Software Movement of India (FSMI), announced on the FOSSCOM mailing list that AICTE has finally agreed to remove the the mandatory clause from the notice on implementing Office­365. The decision comes in light of concerns raised by some eminent politicians, free software supporters and people from the academia.”
see AICTE Backtracks on its Mandate to use Microsoft Office in Colleges

Good! M$ can work for a living instead of enslaving schools to indoctrinate students in the religion of M$. Globally, schools have been providing M$ with $billions of free training each year for no compensation at all. It’s time that stopped. Let M$ and its “partners” pay the full cost of selling their product.

For much of the last year FUD has been spread about the viability of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Either the FLOSS developers are amateurs, the ecosystem is too diverse, there’s no money to be made or it’s just broken… That’s all FUD. GNU/Linux desktops are going places. You can see that on Wikipedia and other webstats. Nowhere, not in any country Wikipedia lists is Linux below 1%. Their global average is 7.55%. Some of that is Android/Linux but they haven’t sorted that out properly. For example they show Apple’s share as iPhone 16.13% + iPad 9.05% + Mac 6.71% + iOS 0.66% and total share of Windows is 55.73%. Clearly, it’s Windows that is in decline. A year ago they were 73.38%. Nowhere is GNU/Linux share declining even as the world pumps out hundreds of millions of legacy PCs and smart mobile thingies annually. In fact it’s growing. All the major OEMs produce GNU/Linux desktops/notebooks. Some retailers even sell them. Imagine what the share of GNU/Linux would be if retailers put a fraction of their advertising money to the task. The present share is achieved with almost no advertising, just what’s on the web.

The key to growing the share of GNU/Linux desktops is not in radical change in the ecosystem but getting retailers to demand GNU/Linux. That’s happening this year as ChromeBooks made a dent. Even the big box stores in North America were selling them.

Some are even selling Android/Linux on notebooks. The retail world is ripe for innovation and retailers will sell GNU/Linux globally sooner or later. I think it will be sooner as they try to move product where “8″ is floundering. No retailer wants to be paid to reserve retail shelves for a dead product. Retailers value turnover, recycling their capital multiple times with tiny margins to be competitive.

Proof that retailers can and do sell GNU/Linux can be seen in the Dell/Canonical relationship in India and China and Walmart selling tons of GNU/Linux legacy PCs in Brazil. Brazil has its own OEMs and global OEMs have to go to Brazil to play in that market.

The problems with wider usage of GNU/Linux lie not with anything in the GNU/Linux ecosystem but external forces: M$’s marketing strategies to exclude competition and retailers’ unwillingness to escape M$’s traps. In India and China most retailers and other businesses are not locked in as the market is young and growing rapidly. In Brazil government tariffs exclude most importations and the government promotes FLOSS so it happens. If governments everywhere enforced anti-competition laws, the problem would evaporate as retailers see higher margins with FLOSS.

The FUD is fuelled by web statistics that show an irrelevant ~1% share for GNU/Linux. Those are clearly wrong. One can see it in the share claimed by MacOS which is larger than what Apple claims… or the fact that in countries where GNU/Linux is flying off retail shelves there’s hardly a flicker in the statistics.

On the business side, the following link points out that businesses are not interested in M$’s marketing bling but want stuff that works and works more or less the way Lose ’95 worked. Businesses don’t want to change OS just because M$ wants more money. They are fed up with the Wintel treadmill and are ready to migrate to GNU/Linux just to avoid Wintel. A lot of mission-critical applications on servers have been migrated to FLOSS and there’s little reason to retain that other OS on clients. Businesses are using web applications, clouds and thin clients where M$ has no monopoly. That trend has been growing for years and there’s no end in sight.

For a thorough discussion of some of these issues, see Is the Linux desktop becoming extinct?

The thing that M$ feared when it started the “browser wars” has come to pass according to Simon Phipps:
“the focus on desktop applications, coupled with the idealistic expectation that Windows will be displaced, has led many to overlook or even dismiss the category where Linux actually has taken over the desktop.

That’s in the browser. Think about it: When did a new process or service you wanted to use last come as a Windows application download? When it did, what actually was that application? An increasing number of desktop applications are just containers for HTML5 Web apps. The real powerhouse behind those apps is usually Linux, accessed over the Internet, along with other elements of the modern LAMP stack.”
see The Linux desktop is already the new normal

That’s not unreasonable and with FLOSS browsers taking a good share, it is reason to celebrate, but M$ still taxes too many PCs even when folks don’t run that other OS. That’s worse than paying for M$’s OS and browser and using both. At least then the user gets something along with all the pain and restrictions. That burden is not eased much with a few FLOSS applications. No, let GNU/Linux have some retail shelf-space. Then I will celebrate. Slaves might be happier with increased rations but they would be a lot happier with proper freedom. Instead of real freedom we have that other OS on top everywhere except Western Sahara according to StatCounter… That’s just wrong considering price/performance.