osnews.com — Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer had some interesting things to say yesterday about which companies Microsoft sees as its competitors in the client operating system space. You'd think Apple was their number one competitor - and you'd be wrong.
Feb 25, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountFeb 26, 2009
Ballmer has no way of knowing how many machines: (a) run pirated Windows?(b) run linux - how many have computer magazine CDs/DVDs have actually been installed? How many times has a downloaded copy of a linux distribution been installed? nor (c) are actually in use (how many have been sold, less the ones that are either shipped to Nigeria, buried in landfill, stuck in a cupboard, used to run a home server using Damn Small Linux because it won't run XP)?Guesswork.
mcjackhammerFeb 26, 2009
The problem is that the market situation is changing. Linux is right now offering consumers various choices of free legal software. So MS is bound to lose the consumer space to either/both Linux and/or OSX.
hermmunsterFeb 27, 2009
What Microsoft can count on right now is that everyone in business and home gets Windows by default bundled on their computers. These users also have the experience. What Microsoft has counted on is that this experience is often so difficult to attain that people are afraid of the time it will take to learn something else.When computers begin to be introduced with other OSes this means people are getting exposure and they are getting experience. The necessity to rely on Microsoft and the training from them is lessened or even negated, especially when products such as KDE 4.2 come out that are quite spectacular in their own right, and in many ways beyond what you could even conceive of with Windows 7.Given time, exposure, and some experience, users will adopt Linux as quickly as Windows. Given the rate of achievement that Linux holds it will take only a few more years before there's no question that everyone is paying a higher price for their computers (or even paying more just for the OS).Microsoft says "developers, developers, developers" ad nausium, and this is true. The good thing is that Microsoft can't keep up with the idea machine that open source can produce. Their ability over the long run to have their few thousand programmers even compete with ideas from Open Source which is a world-wide effort is going to be an abject failure.
banshee90Mar 2, 2009
why because apple tries to sell its over priced s**t to Americans. Windows is expanding to the little thing I call Earth. Instead just 300million consumers it has 6 billion which one is greater
turbojugend27Aug 2, 2009
no, if you buy OS x you can legally install it onto other hardware if you want.
hardeep1singhAug 5, 2009
Microsoft knows the minute Apple starts getting successful at something, it digs up a pothole and falls into it, so they don't need to worry about it. Its only linux that can become a threat.
wilhoitmAug 5, 2009
He is dead wrong! AAPL just has record earnings for the current quarter in a depressed economy, while MSFT for the same quarter had horrible earnings and also missed Analysts expectations!