Monopoly.Or differently put – Windows XP. We were all happy with XP and still are – it’s good, proven OS and we’ve somehow learned to live with it’s shortcomings. As an admin giving support to all sorts of users I see that lots of people still aren’t and won’t be ever apt to using a computer. To them Windows is a computer, like OS X is a Mac. These users can be of course very resistant to change of the way they work – and I agree with them to a certain extent. Why fix things that aren’t broken? Afterall, OS is just an OS – you’ll still move files around and kill processes with Task Manager in Vista (or even Ubuntu) like you did in Win 95. W7 will be welcomed out of necesity (64-bit transition, better-than-Vista, newer-than-XP), not because of some really new revolutionary feature set to change the way we look at computers.

W7 is only so good because Vista was so bad. Eventhough the crew at Microsoft really pushed hard to make this system work like a breeze in contrast with bloated and crashing Vista, I can’t help myself thinking that W7 is just what Vista was supposed to be – 2 years too late (I’ll come to that later on). The snappier feeling that W7 got over Vista could also be helped by the fact that when Vista came out, many users upgraded their systems in order to run it properly. No wonder if W7 feels faster? And more importantly, would W7 even be so speed-oriented if Microsoft didn’t get ambushed by the netbook phenomenon? And so we get to the next argument.

Hi, I’am a Mac. And I’m here to scare the shit out of you. Mac was always a high end machine that had its’ niche market, but the perfection of the whole product that Jobs knows how to get there surely startled people at Microsoft. And probably gave them wrong focus on the Longhorn (Vista today). After Apple transitioned their computer hardware to Intel processors and virtualization enabled users to break from Windows. Things were getting worse, but did not yet translate to lost market share. So they’ve tried to get the “cool” halo OS X had in Vista and utterly failed. Say byebye to high end consumer market, Microsoft (and there it went). I don’t believe W7 would get those customers back easily, OS X being a garden with even higher walls. The focus that Microsoft gave to Apple in years from 2004 to 2006 enabled Google to sneak past them unnoticed, which will hurt Microsoft for quite a long time.

The netbook (and Linux). While Microsoft was in the middle of firefighting with bad Vista reception, Asus set even a bigger fire with their EEE PC netbook, which was loaded with Linux to keep the costs down. Unable to properly run Vista on these devices, Microsoft (again) used it’s good ole, (though aged and battered) XP to cover the rear while going back to the drawing boards, planning an OS which should help them win on both fronts. Although it seemed promising at first, there are now signs of trouble appearing on the horizon with an uncertain outcome. First one is Google with Android, second ARM processor, third is W7 itself and fourth is the combination of the first three. Internet is where the users spend most of their time and there Google reigns supreme. Android seems to be the first Linux platform that OEM really are warming up to, especially on ARM plaftorm, which looks more and more promising because of the low power consumption. Microsoft is meanwhile redefining the term netbook in terms of specs in order for W7 to run properly, flip-flopping on maximum of open apps on a netbook and charging OEMs 3 times the prices they were paying for XP Home for netbook.

That's W7 on the right staircase, entering the netbook market...

Of course, we better don’t even try to think about porting W7 to ARM. Thus is the company left with less and less room to manuever in the rapidly evolving market which has all the potential to take away a great share of desktop with it, which was already unprofitable for Microsoft last year. And the “cloudy” forecasts of the future surely don’t look too bright for diminishing importance of OS that Bill Gates built his empire upon. Say goodbye to low end market, Microsoft…

The internet. The monopoly that Microsoft created, enabled the world easily connect – but that’s just a part of the story, and mostly a consumer one. Here Linux once again springs to mind – the recession turned out to be profitable for free/open source software (although it was profitable for MS server software too). The infrastructure of the web is mostly laid out with this software because it’s free and at hand to use – just take a look at Facebook, Youtube or Google, and these are the companies that are already more than 5 years old. With the advent of cloud computing and netbooks that rely on free (in both terms) software, Microsoft is facing a two-pronged uphill battle that wasn’t used to do for quite a while. The most widespreadly used web services are predominantly being created with free software, while on the desktop side Microsoft is also loosing to Firefox which spearheaded the assault on browser marketshare and enforced web standards on which better services can be builts for as many customers possible. Microsoft can fight against single waves of competition, but won’t be able to fight off the tide of free/opensource way of producing software (and is slowly admitting that in its’ own manner). So where in this picture does fit Windows 7? You’ve got that right – nowhere.

To make long story short – Microsoft IMHO won’t gain anything with W7 but repair some of its’ reputation. The monopoly they created, had proved to be their greatest competitor and a treacherous illusion that they could handle the market by the sheer weight they represent in the industry, anywhere they wanted. That cost them focus on predicting and setting the trends and that is now desperatly trying to catch up with – and it’s probably alerady too late.

Where’s the “land of the free, home of the brave” I used to know?

www.ubuntu.com

What actually bothers me are people who think that only the best software fits their needs. And since software can, unlike physical goods, be very easily stolen (e.g. pirated), it is not uncommon that everybody uses that “the-one-and-only” application. Thus the room for competition narrows because of monopoly of the pirated software and as a consequence hurts a real innovation among the competing products.

Since everybody is using the same thing, the competition must actually become the software that is constantly, although incrementally raising the bar. For example: most of the Linux newcomers from  Windows userland complain about the command line and want everything GUI-fied. Is command line really that complicated or unpractical or is the real complaint behind the ex-Windows newbies that they actually want Windows that isn’t of Microsoft’s origin?

It seems interesting to me how Mac fans argue that OS X is better than Windows and Linux, how the GUI is more practical and consistent than Windows (not to mention Linux guys who still have to use CLI). But as far as I remember my Windows to Linux migration I think that at learning at a new OS I might have become more cautious of all the options and learn a lot of the tricks about Ubuntu that I might have also done in Windows but I didn’t. I actually learned quite a lot about Windows too, when I released some of my curiosity back from Linux. That’s why I think that Mac fans falsely assume that other OS are less consistent (although I would agree that Windows is quite inconsistent concerning the keyboard shortcuts).

So, when switching between apples, windows or penguins, please, consider that you must switch your mindset and habits too. And that doesn’t happen overnight.

Link to video ad

We’re planning to have a release party for Intrepid but there has been a dilemma about time and place of the event. No one seems to be ready to take the lead (even the founders of the community).

I’d really like to make this community work and eventually become approved, but I’m fairly new to it and I don’t want to look like a newbie intruder. Does anybody have any idea how to fix this?

Example A: Friends computer had big performance issues because Windows caching on an old hard drive (you could hear it all over the house, they told me) and it was crashing. I put a new HD in the box, but couldn’t install Windows because of unexplainable compatibility issues.

Because my friend needed computer very soon I installed Ubuntu as a temporary solution. Trouble began to arise when she was exchanging spreadsheet files with a client. First one was obvious one (eventhough I set OO.org to save in MS formats by default) – she sent the client ods file, but we solved that easily with saving the file in xls.

A bigger workaround was needed when the client wanted to edit graphs in OO.org created xls – they were pictures, not graphs that could be edited. So I sent the client link to download OO.org and told my friend to send the spreadsheet in ods.

Example B: My best friend rolled back to pirated MS Office after using OpenOffice.org for a couple of years. Reason – garbled complex doc files.

It an uphill battle for interoperability that doesn’t seem it will ever get won. It isn’t about OO.org vs. MS Office as much it is about having choice and peace of mind. In Example A my friend doesn’t know much about different formats, in Example B he does, but doesn’t seem to care about that much. Giving someone OO.org is also giving him/her a lesson about different formats. While I consider this good, I have a feeling that common users actually don’t want to be exposed to this knowledge, or shall we say truth.