People don't want to make a choice or have to care about what they buy. The ISVs are quite happy to ship windows as they have reusable experience and it's just plugging things together.
The reason no market share destroying competition has appeared is that people are quite happy apart from a minority of users who are quite vocal.
consider that are more windows power users than there are mac users and Linux users combined.
I'm a Linux user (heavy with 15 years' experience) but i don't have a problem with the current situation.
Same as Linux in this day and age (if user has such option).
The reason no market share destroying competition has appeared is that people are quite happy apart from a minority of users who are quite vocal.
With this logic any kind of monopoly can be justified, but it doesn't make monopoly good per se. Artificial lack of competition is bad.
consider that are more windows power users than there are mac users and Linux users combined.
Network effect is part of the problem, but the bundling issue is just a method to feed it. So one way to break it - is to remove the bundling blocker to allow fair competition.
I don't get these arguments: the user has the option. In the UK, there are magazines on every shelf in every newsagent pushing Linux and in every PC related stored they are pretty much giving Ubuntu away (yes they even had a box at the checkout in PC World with free CDs - completely untouched). You can buy PC's with it preinstalled and buy PCs with no operating system so you can install it.
I know MANY "normal" non enthusiast and non power users from social housing unemployed to professionals who have used Linux distributions and just end up back with Windows. Everyone knows what Linux is or has heard of it.
I don't think Microsoft is a monopoly - they just work pretty well on the desktop for most users (well they did until Windows 8 but I'm not going there in this discussion ;-). The competition is there but it's not really competition in mindshare as people are comfortable.
If you forcibly removed the bundling, you are going to get nowhere i.e. people saying "Can I just have it with Windows on it". Also, at the sales desk, the salesperson is going to make a few extra readies for selling Windows with a PC so you're going to lose anyway.
Take a look at where IBM is now compared to the late 1980's. They monopolised and beat their competition to death and they didn't survive in that market. Microsoft's time will come if they fuck up or piss off a lot of people, but at the moment they do what people want for a price that people want to pay.
The idealisms of "Microsoft sucks" and is a "monopoly" remind me of Slashdot circa 2001 onwards where OSX and Linux were going to take over the world and destroy Microsoft.
Sorry it ain't going to happen and I'm not really that bothered myself.
Is this the same UK I live in? The newsagents I see might have one Linux magazine lurking behind the iPad magazines. And you really have to go looking for computers that come with Linux preinstalled or no OS. Dell stopped offering them online, and I haven't seen a Linux PC in a retail store since the brief wave of Linux netbooks. I found a small business that sold me a computer with my choice of distro on, but they didn't really promote the option at all.
> If you forcibly removed the bundling, you are going to get nowhere i.e. people saying "Can I just have it with Windows on it"
"Sure, that will be £20 extra" (a complete guess at the OEM Windows price)
Obviously preinstalled Linux systems aren't going to topple Windows overnight - there's a lot of network effects and familiarity there. But at the same time, it would definitely benefit Linux adoption if consumers regularly saw an option to use Ubuntu, say, with known-good hardware and without having to install it themselves. Not many would take it at first, but a few people would go home and look it up.
> Everyone knows what Linux is or has heard of it.
Many people have heard of it, certainly, but they often have some vague idea that it's a command-line interface for ultra nerdy experts. That's why Android and Ubuntu both avoid using the word 'Linux' in their public branding.
That actually is a lack of gratitude and failure to improve Linux image on their part. But I agree with the rest of the above. Removing the bundling won't magically solve all issues, but it's a huge blocker which prevents any kind of solutions from reaching the broader audience.
I don't see it quite like that. Firstly, I'm not sure that the people working on Linux (the kernel) particularly want to be a popular brand - it would mean a deluge of naive questions, apart from anything else.
Secondly, Ubuntu benefits from Linux, GNU tools, X, Gnome, Debian, and many other projects. In techie circles, they readily acknowledge that it wouldn't be possible without the work done in those upstream projects. But trying to fit them into the public branding would confuse users.
This sounds like a fairy tale, given how many problems people have with claiming the Windows refund alone, let alone getting alternative OSes preinstalled. And no OS option? Virtually non existent, except may be for corporate customers and servers.
> I don't think Microsoft is a monopoly
They formally avoid antitrust regulations by delegating the refund to OEMs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_refund), but it doesn't change the factual situation - Windows is bundled practically by all major OEMs, and you hardly can find an option of Linux preisntalled or no OS for those OEMs. Getting a refund for Windows is a burden which one has to fight through, do you think it's not an artificial restriction on the competition? I think it is, and it needs to be broken.
Office, Outlook, most AAA games, itunes. Don't tell me that because you can run them today on your machine (well maybe) that that somehow translates to what common users have experienced over the last decade.
Outlook is a rather heavy monstrosity. There are better e-mail clients out there, including those on Linux.
As for Outlook - while I've set up my home computer to not use it, for most it's just easier to use it. Convenience has a lot going for it. For non-tech-savvy people it's also a lot easier, since then calls to tech support at work will actually get you help. :)
I use Linux machines for what they do well, and pretty much all my machines sans the "main" Laptop are Linux-driven.
That said: This statement cannot be refuted enough.
Libre Office and its forks are merely bad imitations of previous versions of MS Office while offering few to no benefits once you exclude cost. They are not "decent" alternatives. They are free, but noticeably sub-par alternatives. They are in no way drop-in replacements.
If I want to take the cost of working with a low-end Office-suite which covers the bare basics and sticks to a late 90s design-paradigm, I'll go with Google's online-offering because it actually provides some benefits to weigh up for the cost.
And sometimes I do just that. But you'll never find me meddling with the desktop Linux office-suites. They're simply not worth it.
Just basic things like creating sections, chapters, tables, footers, headers and making it all look good and consistent, quickly and easily.
MS Office, since the move to the ribbon-system have really excelled at exposing the functionality required to do this. It's always there in your face, just one click away, when you need it and then it gets out of your way. It's fantastic.
Libre Office and its forks are still stuck in the last generation of UIs where you have a million toolbars, all just mediocrely capable and insufficient to your full needs, none adapted to your current context and always there taking up space and cluttering the UI wheter you need them or not.
There's just no comparison between the user experiences here. MS Office is in a league of its own.
But the reason Microsoft moved from the safe (familiar) UI to the new one was because they realized the old UI-model didn't scale well with expanded functionality.
They decided to try to improve the user experience by leaving behind what clearly did not work.
For a company which owes most of its legacy to users preferring familiarity, that's very much not a small thing. But they decided it had to be done.
More than five years later, Libre Office still haven't done anything at all to fundamentally improve UX. To me that sounds like somebody simply not caring.
For a very long time for most things casual users did Windows was a better fit then linux. Want to play games? Windows by a mile. Burn DVDs? Windows. Download music legally? Windows. Download music illegally? Windows. Word Processing? Windows. Spreadsheets? Windows. Use that new camera/scanner/printer/ipod? Windows by a mile. Read your office email? Windows. DTP? Windows. Visit flash websites? Windows.
I won't go much into the issue other than say that I find it somewhat sad that we are essentially hooking up these children and ultimately our future on the products of a private entity. Even if they are the better option out there, there is still an issue of unnecessarily power being granted to a private entity.
You might also want to checkout what kind of deals your local government/municipality made with MS.