Before reading this blurb, please understand that I am not a Linux zealot. There are many people out there who cross their index fingers at the sight of Microsoft products. I have used many of their products over the years and have generally found Linux annoying as a desktop and cannot foresee myself ever using it. Recently I have made the switch to Apple and continue to program for Linux servers and Windows desktops. My theory is that I will use the best product for the job at hand. So with this in mind…
I had a problem and that problem is that around a year ago my father bought an underpowered Acer machine with Vista on it. Even with the crappy Acer software removed and the trial of Norton AV removed the computer was a total dog. New, it booted in around 3 minutes and opening things like a browser or a word processor took so long you almost forgot what you were planning on doing when it finally got around to opening. So I was going to dumb it down to Windows XP when I thought I would try the latest Ubuntu….
I set up my father’s desktop with Ubuntu and it rocks. He can boot up and be in his email or on the web it a tad over a minute. I put the icons for Skype, Firefox, Word from openoffice and Email on his desktop so he probably won’t notice anything is odd at all. What is important about all that is that his computer now functions far better than it did with Vista and with no compromises as far as he is concerned. He now has no Microsoft software running on his computer.
I would say the worst risk that he runs with Linux is that he will buy a new printer that won’t have the linux drivers. Most of the mainstream printers will be fine though.
The security on the system is basically off the scale. As the person who gets called with every problem I don’t anticipate getting any calls.
Microsoft is in big trouble. Even if their new Windows 7 is reliable and not too demanding they will still be losing to free Linuxes. The only way for Microsoft to pull ahead will be to have some feature that has the status of Killer. Basically they need monkeys to fly out of their butts.
For the average user Linux would be a perfect set up. But there are two big holes. Games won’t work and once you step outside of the word processing, surfing, and emailing basics you are basically screwed. No software you buy at staples will work and any extra device you buy such as a web cam will not probably be installable by your average user.
So I would say that right now Linux is ideal for servers and old people. Microsoft’s other problem is that younger people want Apple products. So the main group of people who will continue to use Microsoft products will be the corporate world. That might be big but Microsoft will lose the hearts and minds of people at home and those same people will be quick to drag Linux and Apple into the workplace as fast as they can.
So as I have mentioned before, my long term forecast for Microsoft is a long slow slide into obscurity. This will take forever and a day due to their lack of debt and a captive market that will be slow to change; but like companies of the Sun and Novell types once the necrosis sets in the company has little chance to ever thrive again.
What stock advice comes from this? Well Linux is not really a company. A few companies like RedHat nibble at the corners of Linux for a few crumbs of profit but since the core product is free I don’t see this as a huge success business model. At best other companies that provide services that leverage linux will do a tiny bit better as their server costs will continue to drop. Microsoft’s fall from grace will be so slow as to be useless to bet against unless you are into 10 year short sided bets. Microsoft will occasionally announce that a Monkey has flown out of their butt but I suspect that these monkeys will turn out to be the stuff that usually comes out of people’s butts. So except for day traders I would say to just put Microsoft thoughts aside unless somehow they get their fire back. To test to see if that fire is real; look at your desktop and see if that firey product is rocking your world. If not then ignore the hype.
Lastly there is a path for Microsoft to be successful. It is a contradictory path. First is that the new Operating system must be stripped way down. Get rid of all the bits that are there to sell customers all the other products that Microsoft makes. Toss .net, sharepoint, database connectors, Active Directory stuff and everything. Make the operating system completely bare. I want an operating system that takes up less than 100M of drive space and uses a less than 50M when freshly booted. But make the OS very modular. If you want sharepoint interaction then you can add it. But when you add something to the OS don’t integrate it, keep it very separate. No more registry, windows, or system directories all piled up with crap. Right now most operating systems have a security model that will ask when the user tries to do something fundamental. Well make it so that these fundamental modifications are not required by newly installing software. Hard drives are basically free so if every application needs to have its own .dll files that is fine. Make the computer boot in like 5 seconds.
But next, and this is the near opposite of what I just wrote, make your OS do something with all those computers in the office. I could go into huge and complicated details about a solution, but Microsoft has the opportunity to do something really cool that they won’t be able to do in just a few years. Something that would cement their place in the computer world and blow Linux back a decade in their progress to win desktops.
Tags: AAPL, Apple, Java, Linux, Microsoft, Microsoft's sinking ship, MSFT, Novell, RedHat, Sun, Ubuntu