Enterprise Linux desktops are for real - are you?

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 April 2006 05:01

IT Industry - Market

Microsoft's great success came about because they were the first platform vendor who achieved API lock-in without having to build the underlying computer hardware. Through shrewd licencing of the platform and the API to essentially interchangeable 3rd-party hardware vendors, it used the initial lock-in it gained in the market to drive ever-successive waves of uptake and market capture, creating economies of scale for the hardware industry but also resulting in a relentless cost competition amongst those same hardware vendors.

This has resulted in the present reality where the API lock-in enables Microsoft to make 10 or 20 times higher margins on its platform than the hardware vendors make building computers. It has also provided Microsoft with the financing and leverage it needed to snare most of the major desktop productivity application market segments.

These apps in turn provided Microsoft with both user-interface as well as the more important document format lock-in. Users who learn on Microsoft's major applications often find it difficult to move to competitors' applications. And as Microsoft's applications churn out data and documents in formats which are almost always proprietary, they in turn make it harder and harder for the users to migrate to alternative applications in future. Applications that run on Linux, for instance. Once again, this isn't Linux's or the open source community's fault.
Proprietary formats and user interfaces are examples of lock-in provided through network effects. The more people who know how to use a particular application, the more that application gets cemented into the industry. Employers demand that new hires know that application's user interface and businesses adopt that software knowing that a larger portion of prospective hires will know that application's user interface. No one thinks about the long-term consequences of giving such monumental power and control over one's business software, to a single proprietary vendor. And all such lock-in machinations further feed the whirling accretion disk of market-share and revenue surrounding Microsoft.

This has further implications. Competition debilitating implications. Users tend to shy away from applications who compete head-on against Microsoft, as those competitors aren't likely to be around in the long haul. Because if you did buy into such applications, what would happen to all that data or documents you create in any applications from such vendors? Isn't it better to stick with the vendor which controls the platform and is most likely to cut off the air supply of the third party vendors? i.e Microsoft? This was the reality, and one by one, all of Microsoft's former competitors bit the dust, until open source reared up as a challenger. And open source changed the competitive landscape for ever. Certainly from Microsoft's perspective. You see, you can't cut open source's air supply. Users eventually come to understand that if it's a viable piece of software, an open source app can essentially live forever, even if it's up against Microsoft. This gives users wings. They increasingly buy into the mindset that there are alternatives to everything that proprietary vendors like Microsoft offer.

And what's more, because the creators of open source do not have a vested pecuniary interest in locking users into any specific platform, user interface or proprietary format, users gain through freedom and flexibility. Or in the language of business, control. Total control. Stallman talks about freedom, but if you're in business, I want you to think about control - it's the other side of the same coin.

How does open source give you control? And why is it different to Microsoft? Here's why. If you're locked into Microsoft's world-view, there is nothing except Windows. You use Outlook for email, Internet Explorer for browsing and Office for most everything else. All these are stuck on Microsoft's Windows, meaning that all your data, documents, mail, pretty much everything else, is stuck on Windows. And so are you - unless someone else can drop you an escape ladder. And that's just what the open source crowd are trying to do.....more

This article is also available here
Also see
Novell: it’s the Linux desktop user stupid – part 1
Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux