![]() ![]() R300 specs until now were not released and a substantial effort was underway to reverse-engineer the platform. R200 specs were released quite awhile ago and R200-based cards are somewhat workable with #D-accelerated desktops. Work has been underway for quite a long time. His challenge has been to keep the stock value high enough, long enough, that he doesn't collapse the price. Bill Gates is many things, but fool is not one of them. I can remember reading a magazine article around the year 2000 that Bill Gates was hiring someone to manage his investments as he slowly divested himself from Microsoft. "Here, check out this free game!", "Wow! That's the coolest thing I've ever seen on a PC!". I mean, that was how the old Doom shareware spread. You also have a much larger army of backyard enthusiasts doing installs on other people's old computers just to hear "Thanks! My computer runs so much better now! You've saved me hundreds of dollars! I can't believe it's free!?!". No malware (for now), no vendor lock-in, no crappy default applications like notepad.exe unless you pay $$$, download any software you want legally, easily, for free, and with a minimum of fear for spyware. With free software, the switching costs are approaching zero, and the benefits are immense. You get hardware drivers and specs opened immediately, with a working driver for linux/BSD the moment it hits the streets. Enough users, you get the best games being written in linux, and M$ compatibility for legacy games becomes way more profitable. The reason I think it will happen that way is that the bigger the user base, the better the software, including apps written specifically for the purposes of migration. The jump from 10% or so to 80% I'd expect to take place in 5 years or less. After that, there will be minority holdouts who have legacy apps etc. ![]() ![]() From the moment I got Ubuntu installed and working in ways that I didn't expect linux to from my previous experience (detecting stuff, opening any document I cared to throw at it, etc), I've been of the opinion that linux will take over a lot sooner than most people expect, and when it happens, it will eat into M$' market share in a flood. "Anyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire?" But it's pretty amazing that their lock-ins are weaker now than they've ever been and that they're only getting weaker, not to mention that they're trying to compete on so many fronts at once while their two profitable divisions, Office & Windows, are suffering.Īnyone else suspect that we might possibly be seeing the start of the slow decline of Microsoft's empire? Microsoft is bogged down with anti-trust suits everywhere and they're chasing Google's advertising dollars now, because growth is nearly impossible for them to find.ĭon't get me wrong: Microsoft won't just implode suddenly. Now we have the potential for good graphics drivers, not to mention major retailers selling Linux machines. Ubuntu is proving itself usable by the computer illiterate. Vista adoption is crap-moving requires a rewrite of all your business apps, anyhow, and the hardware drivers aren't stable yet, so if you're going to transition to something else, now is the time. Does anyone sense a "perfect storm" brewing? OOXML is delayed (but not quite derailed, yet) and many want to standardize on ODF.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |