First death knell for Microsoft?

created March 5th 2007
New check below!! last updated Sunday August 19 2007

I was reading “The Art of War” the other day which is “The oldest military treatise in the world.” In it was the advice to always leave a way for your enemy to escape, never cut him off completely because if you do he will focus all his efforts on fighting you tooth and nail rather than splitting it between fighting and also trying to escape. Basically give Jack his jacket so to speak.

Microsoft in the last year has begun to corner people who use pirated copies of its software. They have made it impossible to get software updates without being verified as a genuine customer. Even if these pirate users just try to test their software to see if they might scrape through unrecognized they may end up with very annoying reminders that their software is not genuine.

For the first time ever Microsoft has left these pirates high and dry, open to all the vulnerabilities that are constantly being found in Windows. They also now cannot update their browsers to the newest version of Internet Explorer, with all the latest cool features that are already in Mozilla Firefox which is free.

I’m not condoning piracy, but many software giants, including Microsoft may not fully take into account that a lot of piracy actually helps them by increasing the number of people who, when the opportunity arises know and will buy their software legally.

With a new version of Windows coming out, the only choice for many past or present pirates may be to actually go and buy a genuine Windows CD. Given these circumstances I believe many more people will at least try out the free operating systems available such as Ubuntu and other versions of Linux, which are at least as good as Windows these days for most ordinary tasks. This may mark the beginning of the end for Windows.

The fact is that operating systems are reaching the end of their product lifecycle and becoming more and more of a commodity where one is just as good as the next.
What with Macintosh operating systems running on PCs nowadays Windows should be trying harder to please rather than giving people a reason to try out other products. They are definitely doing that with some of their other products such as Visual Web Developer and SQL 2005, by creating free versions.
In the end time will tell but I remember a quote a few years ago from then CEO of Microsoft which basically said that Microsoft was always two years away from losing out to its scariest competitor Linux and this may yet come to pass.

This article seems to suggest I'm right and gives even more reasons.

New!!

So I thought about it some more and it seemed to click. Microsoft is riding full speed ahead into a pretty big fall, probably pretty soon after the release of the next operating system that's coming after Vista. The extra reasons why that aren't included above are:

There is a ground swell of old PCs lying around that won't be able to upgrade to Vista and the operating system after that. Some can't even handle XP or Windows 2000. This is a rampant potential playground for Linux since it is much smaller and runs alot faster than Windows on any given machine.
The biggest hurdle with Linux has been that developers had so many different types of it to accomodate. Recently standards have begun to be made to allow for a one size fits all approach that looks like it will catapult Linix into the limelight.
A major stumbling block to Linux has been a lack of standardization for installing programs. This is being address recently with a lot more focus.
Dell is getting more requests from customers for Linux.