Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux 428
CWmike writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols puts his thumb on what really happened to spur Microsoft's change of mind on sparing Windows XP: The smashing success of Asus and others' Linux-powered UMPCs and mini-notebooks caught Microsoft completely by surprise. It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops rather than overpriced, underpowered Vista PCs. If anyone thought this was a flash in the pan, that Asus just hit it lucky once, they haven't been paying attention. Intel is putting big bucks into its Atom family of processors, which have been designed for UMPCs, or as Intel would have it, MIDs. Intel has encouraged both the computer makers and the Linux companies in its Moblin initiative to run desktop Linux. The Linux companies have picked up on this. Canonical, Ubuntu's dad company, has come up with an UMPC-specific version of Ubuntu 8.04, the latest version of this popular Linux distribution, for Intel Atom UMPCs. At Computex, by my count, more than a dozen new UMPCs were announced both from vendors you've never heard of and from big name companies like Acer and Asus. You can also expect to see Dell releasing its 'mini-Inspiron' with Ubuntu by June's end."
EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:4, Insightful)
EEE PC already has enough horsepower to play movies and music as well as anything else. Battery life could be improved and it already is up to 7.5 hours [guardian.co.uk].
Apple dominates the high end market and GNU/Linux rules the low. Soon the ends will meet and M$ will be squeezed out. Vista is a failure and it has taken M$ down with it.
The change is permenant. Vendors have revolted, M$ won't be able to come back. Good riddance.
Re:More like a stay of execution.. (Score:3, Insightful)
media-centered (Score:3, Insightful)
well, microsoft had been moving toward a media-centered model for years now, and vista was supposed to deliver just that - a way for users to use their computers not just for computing, but for media applications, home networking, etc. None of the UMPCs would really be able to deliver that, so microsoft never paid much attention to the issue.
XP really fills that niche for people looking for an ultra-mobile but also not willing to move to a linux OS. Which really is a much larger market then those who would gladly use linux on their mobile machine. I'd be surprised if microsoft will not fight hard to regain control of that market.
Well... It was actually the "Not Windows" bit (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO what got MSFT really scared is that many of the crop of the new and cheap PCs went as far as not being bothered to be Windows compatible on release. Asus is a prime example - it could not run Windows XP as shipped without MSFT doing some work on it. Half of the UMPCs are on its heels as well.
This is not something Microsoft has ever experienced in its history since the days of DOS vs CPM - the hottest PC product on the market based on customer demand for the Christmas season to be Windows incompatible.
It is not the linux market penetration that they are worried about, it is the change of attitude in major OEMs. The entire MSFT business is based around a B&D relationship with OEMs which keeps OEMs doing exactly what MSFT wants. An OEM rebellion is what MSFT is most scared of and it will do anything and give out any candy it can to prevent it.
Windows is over. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one is going to spend $400 on an OS so they can run a $450 word processor. The Microsoft era is closed.
Those new "little" CPUs aren't so little (Score:5, Insightful)
Those new "little" CPUs coming out aren't so little. They're above 1GHz now, they're going into machines with 1 GB of memory, and some of them are superscalar. They even have GPUs. That's more than enough power for any reasonable portable system. Mail, web browsing, video playing, the occasional PowerPoint presentation - you don't need a quad-core 3 GHZ CPU part for that.
What you need is battery life. The next frontier may be less CPU power but a full day of operation or more between recharges. Note that phone battery life was a huge issue until it reached a day or two of moderate to heavy use. After that, it stopped being a major factor in buying decisions.
Great for linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Belgium I saw an ad voor an asus EEE last week, but with shiny happy 'Windows XP' logo and specification besides it.
I'm afraid too many users (and stores) over here are too lazy to try something new. It makes sense that supermarkets (the ad was from one) might try to sell XP rather than linux, so they can sell some other software that's needed.
With linux, a lot needed software is installed by default, and that does not translate in money to earn.
(The day when proprietary software wil be perfect against piracy will be a day to rejoice: Empty your wallets, or stop being lazy and try something like open source for a while, it's not that bad when you only need basic stuff done!)
Microsoft ain't over (Score:5, Insightful)
Still, it's nice to see that after 10 years or so of stagnation, the free market in software is finally healthy again and doing its job.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft ain't over (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Microsoft misses everything. They always have. What makes them who they are is their response. Vista is a big slip, but they have too much money to just fade away.
The question is, what will be the response to the ultra mini segment? Can Vista be downsized or does Windows Mobile come up? I see Windows Mobile coming up.
Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows is over. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true.
The headline (Score:3, Insightful)
I also doubt that Microsoft didn't foresee this since companies like ASUS surely talk to Microsoft about their future. The only part I think they got wrong was to tout Vista as a serious operating system for ultra portables.
Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place? (Score:4, Insightful)
While still claiming that XP is done with on june 30th, there are so many exceptions it won't even been funny.
I fully expect to be able to buy a full spec machine running a new copy of XP in 6 months.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not sustainable growth, and their customers are massively pissed. MS is going to have a really hard time ever selling anything to these customers again.
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Pair of Glasses (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether you like MS or not, clearly Vista was not the big deal it was supposed to be, and has failed to live up to expectations of even many MS fanbois. With users and businesses requesting XP be installed on new machines, and requests for longer lifecycle for XP added to the growth in GNU/Linux marketshare plus GNU/Linux shipping on some big name OEM machines. The trend here is not a positive one for MS. MSN is not making money, Zune is not making money, XBox isn't making any real money, XP is not causing the finance group to be all smiles either. Clearly the bid for Yahoo was a sign to everyone that MS does not plan to innovate it's way out of the maelstrom they find themselves in right now. When you get caught bluffing at poker, your hand is played out.
MS will have to do something rather extraordinary to turn the current trend around. Trying to do that in the midst of a recession might be difficult. There are very large organizations (whole countries even) that have decided to dump MS Windows products for various reasons. It really doesn't matter how good XP was or is, MS marketshare is leaching away in many areas. Wii helped with that. Ubuntu et al have helped with it. Dell et al helped too. In a recession Free sounds a lot better than 350 bucks, especially when it runs better on your old hardware than Vista does on brand new hardware. Of course there is the whole DRM thing to think of also. Then there is the iPod halo effect bringing more Mac customers.
There are plenty of reasons for NOT choosing Vista or MS products. Linux is one alternative, and it does deserve some of the lime light in this situation. If Linux wasn't working so good, MS would be making money off of Vista de facto.
The fact that there is only a very minute chance that you managed to post your message without relying on some version of Linux sort of technically means that Linux *IS* related and germane to a whole lot of things in the world today.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupidest os release? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article
I think that honor belongs to Microsoft Bob http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob [wikipedia.org]
How much longer can Windows really stick around? (Score:4, Insightful)
The market is going to things like these UMPCs. It's going to tablets and other exotic hardware. Windows is losing one of the two things here. Vista doesn't run at all on them. Microsoft's only answer is keep putting out XP. On these systems, even XP doesn't run on the hardware as well as Linux.
Next up is software. These aren't gaming PCs. Linux is running the software people want to run. Firefox, Pidgin for IMs, It plays media without hassles. It has an office suite. Toss wine on there, and it will even run Office. Look at all the solutions that mac users use to run a couple Windows programs on OSX. The market is coming around to just using emulation for that last 5% of Windows software they want or need to run.
If Windows loses the only two reasons people put up with it, why would they continue to run it? OEMs are seeing this as well, and are just putting out Linux machines. Dell is going "If people buying Apple machines will use Parallels to run Windows stuff they can't in OSX, why can't they just use Crossover to run them on Linux"? In a market like PC, that $20 they spend on that Windows license is $20 they can't lower the price to compete with others. That $20 is a difference in someone buying a Dell, and going elsewhere.
Windows may end up being a niche market, with business that just need native Windows for one reason or another. But considering they are losing the two reasons home users RUN Windows, and then the added headaches associated to running it, why are they going to continue to bother?
Yeah right. (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, the person who blogged this has been reading too many internet blogs surrounding these products.
Intel's ATOM CPU was not aimed at the "UMPC" market, though most certainly can be used in this fashion. Intel's Atom is aimed at the ARM market. They targetted it for the mobile phone/handheld device market.
Sure, your random IT geek bloggers are going to talk about the latest "smallest mobile gadget" and everything like that because that's what they do. That's their job. They're not going to talk up how Dell rolls out a new line of high end laptops because guess what? It doesn't sell their blog. These people are "gadget geeks" and not IT nerds.
Microsoft's spurred change on XP has a lot to do with the fact that companies rolling out desktops want to continue rolling out desktops that they know will work with their existing infrastructure. Why move to Vista, for example, when all of your servers are running Server 2003?
Having the option there is certainly not a bad thing, and it's by no means an admittance by Microsoft that "Vista sucks". Software-wise, Vista and Server 2008 are light years beyond the Server 2003/XP combination and continue to grow.
Where Microsoft is going to grow their market, however, is through a more "peer to peer" "social" computing concept, which they are experimenting with the Live Mesh project.
The biggest problem facing very large IT environments today is how to find data that you've got stored? You can have Z:\shares\commonshares\departments\finance\finance documents\marys finance documents\2008\march\monthly sheet for April.xls (multiply this by 1000000x and this is what most IT environments have) and be completely unable to find it.
So they're working on improved searching features, and again, things like Live Mesh are going to help this even more. They're also working on Sharepoint to provide even easier management of such items.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere, Linux and Apple aren't going to squeeze them out, and the EEE PC is just a fad. As soon as the "average joe" gets his hands on one and realize it won't play his video games, he's going to take it back and that's that.
Re:Microsoft ain't over (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:4, Insightful)
You might also beat Vista sales if you only count retail boxes of Vista vs sales of Linux
BTW
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com]
They will ship you a Linux CD for free.
So no download, no compile, and if you really don't want to you don't even have to install it to use it. It will work as a live-CD.
Should be as easy to install as Vista if not more so.
Re:Microsoft ain't over (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I knew it (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't the desktop. It's the micro-laptop. But it's a beginning.
We had one of the women from upstairs come down to the IT dungeon a couple of weeks ago. Wanted to get her (personal) laptop set up so she could read email while on the road, which meant configuring it to connect through a 3G USB stick, then bookmarking the company's webmail in the browser.
She'd bought it, having done without laptops in the past, because it was small and cute and pink and cheap and fit in her handbag. Yep, it's an Eee.
In case anyone's wondering, yes, they work perfectly, at least with the Vodafone sticks; there's a free download of the necessary software, with a version especially for the Eee that adds an icon in the Internet pane, and Vodafone even run an apt repository for it. I was expecting to get to play the Unix guru, but this was simpler than it is on the bloody Windows boxes!
So: someone wholly clueless bought this machine because of its size and price and cute factor. She wouldn't know what Linux was if you beat her about the head with a plump contented well-fed penguin. Wouldn't know an operating system from a hole in the ground. But she'd been playing happily with it for days and loving the damn thing. Best of all, the usual question of 'what happens when they try to install [INSERT DUMB USER PROGRAM HERE]' doesn't arise: Eee's got no disk drives :-)
These machines are going to produce an army of users who are used to Firefox and OpenOffice.org and all the rest of our beloved open-source applications. Once they've found that they can do everything they expect of a computer with these systems... well, Joe Public isn't tech-savvy, but he'll notice the price premium for Windows, remember how their geeky nephew Timmy said it was because those ones go to pay Bill Gates The Richest Man In The World even more money but these don't, and make the obvious decision.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:3, Insightful)
i thought not.
Re:Not even close, try in 8 hours as many as Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't try to confuse anyone into believing that Vista is a real product in it's
own right. It's just another version of Windows. So what if the latest version of
MonopolyOS sells as many copies of the latest version of MonopolyOS.
Even the current version of MacOS selling as many copies as the last wouldn't be
terribly exciting.
Pointing out the fact that Vista is the latest iteration of a monopoly that
stretches back to DOS doesn't alter the fact that alternative(S) are growing.
Re:The market did wake up. M$ is Over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Novell is doing pretty well by way of SLES.
AOL is the same sort of dinosaur as Microsoft. Microsoft never eliminated them. The internet
made them both look foolish. Although AOL was enough of a success based on it's own merits
before to linger on for awhile anyways.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:4, Insightful)
May I remind all of you that windows mobile is a smartphone OS. Not middle to low phone market. It is a "niche" OS. "Everybody else" just landed 18.5m Symbian mobile phones shipped to consumers. That is 73% market share.
On what phones will Android be shipped? Only on Motorola? If that is the case, Android is dead before it was born.
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:5, Insightful)
On my Ubuntu box, I just install the OS pull up Add/Remove software, click a few boxes for the stuff I want, hit apply and I'm done.
Anybody who uses Linux on a regular basis I'm sure can identify with the groan inducing tediousness you prepare yourself to put up with when a friend or family member asks you to help them install Windows.
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Now, it seems like you don't ever "own" any of your devices, your phone is somehow tied into your cell provider, your computer is the *AA's if you don't use Linux, the makers of game consoles constantly try to brick you if you use a modchip, and all your media you haven't pirated or downloaded off of a DRM-Free site is tied to your account. So no, it isn't the greatest time, because now, you don't own a single thing.
Re:Stupidest os release? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More like a stay of execution.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which makes me think of another theory as the cause for this phenomenon. People are satisfied with existing software. I think the majority of people would be ok if operating systems and major applications stayed exactly the same as they are. So as technology gets better the only thing about a computer that should change is the hardware. But since it's already good enough to run existing software, then it should just get cheaper and more reliable. I think this is what consumers expect nowadays, not the hardware treadmill of the past.
Re:Thing is, Vista sells more in a day than linux (Score:5, Insightful)
did you not read the article summary above?
"It turned out people wanted inexpensive, hard-working Linux laptops"
The entire story is about XP being kept alive simply because people are BUYING a PC (er, laptop) with Linux. So yes, people are buying Linux PCs, enough so that M$ is scared.
Re:Caught between a rock and a hard place? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is total tripe and pessimism! One of the defining characteristics of a geek in this age is that they are able to discern what a load of garbage this stuff is. They use unlocked GSM phones, they avoid DRM like they've been born to do so, and they do all these things with the full knowledge of what makes Quality.
And this wonderful Internet that lets us discuss this, allows them to share their ideas and feelings with similar-minded people from around the globe!
How is this not a golden age?!
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:EEEPC already does that. M$ is over. (Score:5, Insightful)
I happen to disagree with you both, it's always good time to be a geek. It was when my father brought home a Sharp MZ whatever. It was a good time when he was soldering in his first transistor radio. It was when my grandfather bought his first motorcycle in the 1920s and crossed the Alps with it. It was when one of my ancestors got his first water driven hammer mill. It probably was when the first person was tinkering with steam, gun powder, paper or fire.