Forced Upgrade Strategies - Re: Why We Insist On Linux On The Desktop

On Wednesday, February 2, 2011 10:51:24 PM UTC-5, amicus_curious wrote:

"JEDIDIAH" <jedi@nomad.mishnet> wrote in message
news:slrnikjue5.f91.jedi@nomad.mishnet...
> On 2011-02-02, amicus_curious <ac...@sti.net> wrote:

>> Say for example that you purchased Microsoft Office Home and Student
>> Edition some 5 years ago and are now looking for a new computer.

You have a WindowsXP computer that that has been running for 5 years? Didn't you know that since about 2005, Windows XP computers were supposed to be "Disposable" because it cost more to fix them after a virus hit that it did to just replace it with a brand new computer?

To be fair, this was for corporate users and assumed that the computer would be fixed "desk-side" with the PC user waiting until the service person had re-imaged the computer for about 8 hours, then the user would spend up to 40 hours getting the computer configured back to the way he had it before it crashed. All this in addition to the "down-time" from when the attack was first discovered to the time when the desk-side support staff could actually get to the computer and fix it - up to 3 business days. Total lost productivity could be as high as 80 staff hours, at a productivity rate of about $100 an hour (which is actually very low for most IT workers). So to fix the computer would cost you $8,0000 to $10,000, while replacing it could cost as little as $500. Of course this presumed that the new computer would not need any additional information.

Especially with laptops, most companies now buy enough spares so that they can overnight a new laptop with a new image - then the user can send back the old machine. Most corporate users also purchase external USB drives, so they can back up ALL of their important information, including downloaded software, personal and work-related files, e-mail, and chat transcripts.

If you bought Microsoft Office 5 years ago, that would have been Office 2003 aka Office XP, which is still in widespread use throughout most corporations, who are also still holding on to Windows XP, largely because they DON'T want to buy new software for everything.

In 1992, IBM had a financial crisis when they assumed "if we build it they will buy". In 1991, they announced MVS 4.0 and OS/2 2.0, and assumed that most customers would complete the upgrade by the end of 1992.

Unfortunately, upgrading MVS 4.0 also meant that you had to pay for hardware upgrades (new processors and memory), upgrades to CICS, run-time software libraries, applications, and utilities. It could cost as much as $5 million in upgrades to upgrade a $4 million dollar machine that had been depreciating for 2-3 years - to MVS 4.0. So corporate customers began looking for alternatives so that they could reduce the number of machines that had to be upgraded. There was a surge of sales of UNIX systems, especially Sun/6 servers with 6 processors in SMP, or Pyramid servers, with up to 12 processors in NUMA configuration.

OS/2 2.0 had a similar fate. To get OS/2 2.0, you had to buy a MicroChannel machine, and IBM refused to document a number of pins on the bus, most of which would eventually be needed to provide 32 bit memory addressing (expanding from a few megabytes to up to 4 gigabytes. And there was no commitment from IBM to license these additional pins in a timely manner. As a result, corporate IT managers decided that they would be better off with Windows 3.1, even though it was notoriously unstable. Windows 3.0 had a reputation for crashing 2-3 times per hour. The problem was so bad that Microsoft put an "Auto-save" feature in Word and Excel to save the memory to file every 5 minutes. Windows 3.1 was a little better, it only crashed 4-5 times a day. OS/2 1.2 was very reliable, but OS/2 2.0 had a race condition that was triggered when you turned on disk caching. Recovery could take up to 4 hours. Running without caching made the performance very poor, especially on the early machines which often had only 2-4 megabytes of memory.

IBM revenues began to fall, enough to cause the stock price to drop rapidly in 1991, and even more in 1992. John Akers was fired, and for the first time, an outsider, Lou Gerstner, was hired. It took Gerstner about a year to "Teach the elephant to dance" - sales reps were told to "shut up and listen", and to sell the customers what THEY wanted, including AIX systems. The shift went from sales to consulting. The consultants were supposed to be "technology agnostic" and were told NOT to try and switch people from their existing products or desired products to IBM's proprietary products.

> If you had done that, you would still need to buy new software.

Not necessarily. Microsoft WINDOWS licenses are not transferrable, but the Microsoft Office licenses are transferrable - all you have to do is remove Office from the machine on which it is currently installed.

Why? It will continue to work just as it had been working all along.
> Commercial software gets deprecated and desupported.

IBM got stung by this in 1991-1992, and Microsoft began to feel the pain in 2003, when they tried to tell corporate customers that they MUST upgrade their NT 4.0 systems to Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. Again, there was a problem with this. The pricing model of Windows NT 4.0 was very low, to try and capture as many new server projects as possible. Microsoft had campaigned to replace UNIX and Novell servers with NT 4.0 servers. But Windows 2003 pricing was radically higher. Concurrent users had been redefined so that an NT 4.0 computer that might only need 10 concurrent user licenses, as a Windows 2003 server might need thousands of Client Access Licenses - at around $60 each.

Microsoft also offered "Enterprise Edition" which let you run an unlimited number of users, but cost $20,000 per CPU in license fees. Corporations who had switched some of their applications from UNIX to Windows had found that it took as many as 50 quad-processor NT 4 servers to replace 2 quad-processor Solaris servers. When faced with the prospect of paying $2 million for Windows licenses, many corporations began to start putting Linux on as many of those servers as they could. The applications that could ONLY run on Windows were put on the newest and fastest machines - making it look like all of the machines were sold with Windows, but the older machines were converted to Linux. It created a huge opening for Linux. Microsoft notices the shift, and tried to broker a deal where Daryl McBride would attempt to sue some big-name Linux users, like IBM, GM, and so on, in an attempt to scare people away from using Linux.

> That's the nature of the beast.

There's only so much that customers are willing to pay. When a monopolist attempts to get more than that, even if it was the same overall revenue and profit margins, customers will begin to explore alternatives. Railroads replaced barges, trucks, buses, and trolleys and replaced trains, and cars replaced buses and trolleys.

Windows XP was introduced in 2000, and has been through 3 major "service packs". Many corporations, paying annual support costs based on promised upgrades to "Longhorn" which turned into the Vista Nightmare, now OWN their XP licenses, as well as their Office 2003 licenses. They can't be revoked.

Microsoft's strategy for "forced upgrades" in the past has been to make sure that there were no hardware drivers for the newer machines being produced. As a result, when the company started to replace the oldest machines with newer machines, they would HAVE to upgrade to the new hardware and software.

Why would you even need support after years of using the product, silly?
You seem to be unfamiliar with how computers are used.

The problem, in the past, was that Microsoft could stop supporting new hardware, which would force users to upgrade to the new OS which didn't support the older applications, which would force upgrades of software like Office, Visio, and Project.

The problem is that there is a LOT of 3rd party software running on PCs that can't be upgraded to Windows 7. As a result, many corporations are exploring the option of isolating the hardware from the operating system. Using Linux as the native operating system on a machine licensed for Windows 7 makes it possible to run Windows XP on these newer machines as a Linux application.

In many cases, Windows runs faster than it does in native mode. As an added bonus, applications that run on both Windows XP and Linux often run faster on Linux, including most Java applications, OpenOffice, and FireFox. And Linux applications for common functions based on industry standards, such as e-mail, chat, and media players, as well as third party applications like Adobe Acrobat and Flash, and Real Media's players, run as fast or faster on Linux. The improved speed has mostly to do with how Linux manages memory and hard drive buffering, including L1, L2, and L3 cache, as well as MMU.

Microsoft seems to be aware of all this, and is doing everything they can to keep Linux off the retail shelves, especially on high-performance PCs.

Microsoft has already lost the battle with UNIX. Apple based OS/X on the BSD operating system, added a really nice graphical interface, and has completely exploded the myth that UNIX is "Too complicated for mere mortals". These days, most reviewers of Vista and Windows 7 conclude with "I'd rather have a Mac".

Apple had to be really extraordinary to break that Microsoft monopoly. They had to open thousands of their own stores in the biggest shopping centers, train people to sell the Mac, and they also introduced other devices based on the BSD based iOS, which was optimized for hand-held devices like media players and cell phones. Ironically, many of the features of the iPhone 4 and the iPod touch were available in the Sharp Zaurus - but Sharp couldn't get retailers to risk the wrath of Microsoft to put the Zaurus on public display in a usable form. On the Zaurus, the cell phone feature came on a CompactFlash memory chip, along with additional memory. There was even a WiFi capability.

But as Retailers have begun to see that UNIX and Linux have resulted in some very profitable devices, such as iPods, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Nooks, Cruz, and other Linux and Android based tablets, Microsoft is beginning to lose that grip on retailers.

Several companies are already looking at ways to provide NetBook style technology that will NOT permit piracy installation of Windows - mostly by using the ARM chips. Microsoft has countered by attempting to sue for patent infringement - risking their rights to those patents, as well as liability for patents filed by GNU and the Linux Foundation as well as Open Patents. Microsoft has also tried to produce Windows 7 for the ARM chips, but the ARM chips normally use Linux directly to the hardware - eliminating the delays of initializing the BIOS then probing for hardware - since most of the hardware is "On Chip" on ARM based devices.

Linux on ARM has been around for over a decade, in devices such as Linksys Routers initially, and now on a wide variety of other Linux "Appliances". In all cases, the companies don't have to display the Linux logo, but somewhere in the user's manual, they have to provide a URL where the user can find the links to the Linux and GNU source code. It's the only clue that the device is using Linux in most cases.

With ARM providing better support for graphical devices, including video chips, HDMI support, and flat-panel screen display management, Linux on ARM has begun to show up on media players, flat panel monitors, and HDTV systems. Some have opted for BSD based systems, and other UNIX based Real Time Operating systems, making Linux/UNIX almost ubiquitous. It's also very profitable. Many companies donate 1/10th of 1% of their revenue after the first $million in profit - to OSS organizations. Microsoft usually wants 25% off the top, or half the corporate profits if the company is really profitable.

There is a good chance that most people in North America now have more Linux and BSD devices than Windows devices.