[PLUG] Rumors that Windows 7 will kill Linux...

[Quentin Hartman]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:12 PM, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Quentin Hartman wrote:
>> "kill" any of the others. All three of the big platforms (Windows,
>> Linux, OSX) are roughly equal when it comes to core functionality.
>
> The big exception is MS Office. My intuition is that, broadly
> speaking, MS Office addiction drives Windows sales, at least in the
> business environment. You can get Office:mac, but it's not 100%
> compatible with the Windows version.

Absolutely true.

> There are speciality applications that will always tie certain
> businesses to certain platforms -- but MS Office is the de facto
> standard for production of business documents. As long as that's the
> case, Windows sales will remain relatively level.

Also absolutely true.

> As long as internetworking is not 99.5% accessible or reliable,
> locally run applications will have a large influence on OS choice.
> Google Docs and its successors will all face the internetworking
> bottleneck. Unless my bedroom, plane seat, remote conference room, and
> all places in between have reliable, fast internetworking connections,
> I'm going to rely on local applications, not cloud apps.

Correct again.

However, I wasn't talking about "cloud apps", though those are having
a substantial "normalizing" effect on the platform wars, I think that
their full effect will not be felt until after platform has alady
become a non-issue, due to the same limitations you list. I was
talking about local apps which have effective[1] feature parity with
the incumbent. In the case of MS Office, the obvious competitors are
Open Office and iWork. All of which can exchange documents well
enough[2], making platform less and less technically relevant and more
and more preference / aesthetic relevant. Once the idea that people
have a viable alternative choice becomes more widely realized,
"aesthetic preference" will increasingly become a deciding factor.
There will always be "killer apps" for certain people / organizations
that will drive OS choice, but those apps are becoming fewer and
further between, and their niches are getting to be more and more
specialized. To extend the car metaphor, these will be the people
driving the custom lifted Suzuki Samurais with the roll cages, while
the vast majority of the world gets around in their stock
camry/civic/focus/whatever. The vast majority of consumer choices are
_not_ driven by large technical feature differences, because most
products in most categories are technically approximately equivalent.
They are driven by aesthetic differences and how well the accumulation
of minor technical differences conform to the individual consumer's
preferences. I believe that the people who choose platform X solely
because they must have application Y will become the statistical
outliers, not the norm. It's arguable that we are already there, we're
just suffering through the hangover from the days when there was only
one viable platform choice for "typical" needs.

-QH-

[1] - If you only use 10% of application's features, another
application that delivers only those features is "effectively
equivalent".
[2] - If you need perfect document portability, you need to make sure
both ends are using not only the same platform, but the same version
of the application. Most people are fine 90% conversion accuracy, as
long as the deficient 10% is easily corrected or rarely used.