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Under Bill Gates, everybody's favorite geek-with-the-soul-of-Mammon, lovable Microsoft has driven out of business more companies and killed more products than the Black Plague ever did. He's strangled or bought out his competition wherever he could, and until Netscape, had his own way. (Netscape, unfortunately, fell to the temptation of the Dark Side without Bill's influence.) Now, though, there's Linux to worry about; but Bill's put out his latest demon child, XBox. So what do you think? Will he continue to rule the world, forcing companies to ship Windows with all the Microsoft applications forever? Will he take over gaming as he has the apps and OS side? Will his stranglehold break, and if so, what would cause that?

Well, my crystal ball is cloudy today, so I couldn't say... but you did remind me of a great line from Jason X, which I saw last night (set in 2455)...
"You should have been around during the Microsoft Wars. We were beating each other with our own severed limbs..."

I for one doubt the X-Box will get the monopoly that Microsoft has over then rest of the computing world atm.

I would like to see some viable competiton come to the fore, as monopolies in any business means bad news for consumers, but I doubt it'll happen anytime soon.

What will be most importent for microsoft will be there .Net (dot Net) productline.
If this takes control we will see a whole new computer era, one that I might fear a bit.
The general overview of the .Net is that the computerowner would lease software over the internet (thus the "dot Net" ) and not own copies themselves.
ei. you wanna work with Word, you lease a license and gets the use of the program over the interent, thus you "pay per use" instead.

While this might help to eleminate software-piracy, and could possible decreese the cost for small buisness that only use some software sometime, it will also increase Microsofts grip in the consumers, and make it even harder to have a choice over what goes on, on ones own computer.
There was even a "fault" (well - it wasn't a fault untill people actually found it and complanied massivle) in the first released EULA for the .Net that stated Microsoft owned all documents that was made with the .Net software, this way Microsoft would have access to any and all scientific, corporate etc. documents written in .Net-Word (for instance)
This has afterwards been changed, but shows a glimse of the future.

I don't think Microsoft will dominate in the console business. At least not unless they sign the rights to a lot of the more popular series of games away from the competition. I have layed the X-box, and I think it's a good system, but I would definatly choose something like Playstation2 over it, simply because there are games I can get on it that I have loved the series for years.

Grrrrr....
I have also heard that microsoft is planning to begin charging for the use of MSN.....
IMO, compared to icq (which for those who don't know...is free), msn is a very primitive chat system.....how they can possibly think they'll get away with charging...I don't know.

Honestlly....talk about greed....

Originally posted by dragon wench
<snip>
Honestlly....talk about greed....

Okay !
*Looks up greed in the dictonary - only to find a picture of himself - dough*

Actually what Microsoft is doing with charging for MSN is quite a nifty little corperate trick even drug-pushers use it.
Give people a taste of something, many start to use it - charge for it.

Well - I can't actually speak of the quality of MSN, cause I've never used it - I don't even use ICQ (yeah - I know I have an account but I don't use it).

I use MSN, and I wouldn't pay for it. You get the same thing with Yahoo Messenger, only better in my opinion. I can see your point Xan, people may not want to lose their contact lists, but I'd just switch everything over to Yahoo.


*thanks for reminding me, I still haven't re-installed my ICQ*

I only hope your sentiments are echoed by most MSN users. Microsoft long ago passed over the border from being a service provider to being a high-handed monopoly, IMO.

Ah, but the dark side is so much quicker, more seductive. We all know that It all ends in suffering for, and usually at the expense of, the consumers.

One of the key problems with M$ dominance is that companies buy and upgrade as a matter of course. There is no reflection on whether you actually need to upgrade to the new version of M$ Word/Excel/etc. This mindless mentality has started to receed ever so slightly, which of course has resulted in M$ marketing divisions latest scheme - .net. You need to lock down the customers, preferrably for an indefinite time period. When they're sitting there, leasing Word from M$, they will keep paying until the end of time (or at least that's what M$ is banking on). Moving software from the "investment" to "running cost" accounts in the company bookkeeping is also a clever move, since many companies don't like investment costs (Im no accountant, but I believe it might have something to do with tax deductions).

So, if M$ manage to get this scheme running, they'll be in more control than before...

On the other hand, the companies that got off the bandwagon have received a lot of publicity. The German governmental services and agencies have decided to use Linux for all their client systems. Linux is also getting backed by M$ worst enemies, including among others IBM and Sun Microsystems. Mac OS X is winning a lot of computer nerds over, since it's heavily based on unix. I've actually considered it myself...

On the server side, unix is again winning ground, mostly thanks to M$ sloppy security policies. Even though M$ has thrown huge amounts of money on getting a better security image, no one really believes this "sinners repent" to anyway be reflected in M$ coding practices. The old jokes about Win98 have poped up again - I particularly like the one about the unknown code in Win98 that no one can figure out what it does but the system stops working without it - don't know if it's actually true but the impact is the same regardless.

This being on the downside for M$, we can only hope it outweights the M$ market fluff.

In the gamesystem market, I doubt if M$ are able to gain domination. Nintendo has dominated the younger audience and Sony the older for a long time and both have a number of golden games unique to their systems. I don't own any of these systems, but like @Ode I would go for a Playstation 2 just to be able to play outrun.

Sorry for the long post...

I personally don't see the Xbox doing that well for several reasons.
Firstly as has been said, Sony and Nintendo are quite well entrenched as leaders in the console market. Microsoft aren't following their ususal approach to a new market or product of "buy the competiton out and market it as ours", but by putting a product out and trying to market it to existing console gamers.
Secondly, the design. NVidia have done a remarkable job with the hardware design, but it is still essentially a PC running an embedded windows OS, making it (in my view at least) inherently unstable. Anyone remember the first release of Windows CE? I may like MS software and OS's, but I also accept and understand their faults too. The majority of people don't.

As for the desktop side of things, Linux is definitely causing MS a few headaches. All I will say about this is: Good.

I don't think that Microsoft will remain at the top of the heap forever. That said, I don't see anyone coming along in the near future and taking a large market share away from them, much less supplanting Windows as the dominant OS.

Apple had the best shot in the early 90s; a lot of kids (myself included) grew up at middle and high schools using Macs and were poised to welcome a Mac world until Apple shot themselves in the foot. They're recovering, having carved out a nice niche in the A/V production and CAD markets, but Apple still has a long ways to go before they can ever be considered competition.

Same thing for Linux, especially since now there's a version called Lindows which is being sold on dirt-cheap bargain machines at Wal-Marts around the nation. However, until Linux sheds it reputation as a business-only OS, they're not going to be much competition for Microsoft.

I would agree that the console market is the least likely to be taken over by Bill Gates's machine, but with Sega about to go belly-up and Nintendo without a new product (with both being prime targets for a MS takeover, hostile or otherwise), the only real competition out there is Sony. I have no doubt that they won't be getting out of the console market and they won't be taken over by Microsoft, but I think they're looking at a reduced market share because they don't have the easy PC tie-ins that Xbox games enjoy.

I've just downloaded Trillian, will see how that works. MSN is remarkably basic IMO.

As far as consoles go, I'm just going to buy an old Super Nintendo, which thankfully came out before Nintendo went overly cutesy. The standard of games on Nintendo systems has rapidly gone down since the Super Nintendo IMO.
This way I don't have to keep buying new games, too, and the games are cheap, though hard to find.

Originally posted by dragon wench
Honestlly....talk about greed....

Greed was trying to buy out Java for exclusive use on Windows applications only, a bold but ultimately bad move by Microsoft. The US court system won that day

Why doesn't Microsoft make its own Linux OS. The source code to the Linux kernel is free and open-source, and Microsoft has enough money to add hardware and game support that Linux lacks, add an intuitive interface, and spend some money to market it. This way MS can get casual users to use its own Linux. The way I see it, it couldn't hurt MS at least to try. If MS Linux actually does get some market share, then MS will be happy. If it doesn't, what's some million dollars to MS?

Originally posted by humanflyz
Why doesn't Microsoft make its own Linux OS. The source code to the Linux kernel is free and open-source, and Microsoft has enough money to add hardware and game support that Linux lacks, add an intuitive interface, and spend some money to market it. This way MS can get casual users to use its own Linux. The way I see it, it couldn't hurt MS at least to try. If MS Linux actually does get some market share, then MS will be happy. If it doesn't, what's some million dollars to MS?

Well, the thing is that Linux is available from someone other than M$, which means that if M$ were to endorse it in any way and fail, they would have undermined themselves. Therefore, M$ will never give out M$ Office on Linux...

Unfortunately, linux is shooting itself in the foot, since the different distributions are deviating so fast from each other that soon they will have serious compatibility problems (as opposed to todays just minor compatibility problems...). Since M$ can't buy Linux, perhaps they're somehow promoting the sundering of the Linux comunity. I keep hearing echos from a time past - Windows! vs Macintosh! has turned into Redhat! vs Suse! vs Slackware! vs... Makes you loose faith in humanity, doesn't it?

Originally posted by Tamerlane
Greed was trying to buy out Java for exclusive use on Windows applications only, a bold but ultimately bad move by Microsoft. The US court system won that day

Trust Sun Microsystems to blow themselves out of the water after winning against M$... But then, I'm a Java(tm) sceptic, since I can C.

The way I see it, Linux is just not geared toward the commercial markets, it's not for the casual users, and they make up a huge share of the OS market right now. If Linux doesn't add extensive hardware support or games support, I know I won't be using it.