Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win?

I think that a universal sign such as the big grin icon , be used to indicate satire, irony or other rhetorical devices for the "hard of hearing" so to speak.

 

Who will win?!

All of us-the users. We all end up having better and improved softwares and application each time.

Ubuntu, for example, is getting better and better, and getting more user-friendly, plus community support is great, each time at that. The OSS community is providing good alternatives to what MS has to offer.
On the other hand, Microsoft, whether we admit it or not, keeps on improving their softwares. For developers, for example, the Visual Studio Express editions and SQL Server Express are provided free for all. And these tools also keeps getting better each release.

At the end of day, we all win!

 

@Beto:
Go read his post again (The "I had a good laugh with this one" part) and then tell me why it's so obvious he's being ironic. Questioning whether users can qualify as coders that are able to modify software that way rather suggests he was unaware of the open source scene (which is confirmed later on), and that he thought he'd spotted a typo.

I'm convinced that the open source concept isn't obvious to everyone.

regards,
T

 

There are several things wrong with that article. First, it is not clearly differentiating between market segments. In some parts of the article, you do not know whether they are talking about consumer desktop OS or enterprise desktop or server OS. These are very different markets and they need to be specific when they are talking about them. Second, it does not even consider Apple, which has a much larger consumer market share than Linux does. Third, the article is three years old and some of the points need to be reconsidered. Like the fact that people are not adapting Vista as much as Microsoft would like, instead choosing XP first, Leopard second, and Linux last (even though it is free). And in those three years, what kind of market gains has Linux made? Right now, Linux is at .61%, up only .18% from a year ago. According to these guys, Linux should have konquered the the world by now. The friggin iPhone is going to pass that any month now!

One fact that they got wrong that personally irked me was when they referred to Novell as an operating system. Novell is a COMPANY! Not an operating system. And Netware did not fail because of Open Source Software. It failed because it could not compete with Microsoft. It is Novell's adoption of OSS that has kept it alive (buh bye SCO).

 

LOL

 

Look at the abstract...