California considers open-source shift

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The trend of the future ...

As Linux becomes more capable and user friendly, and it is getting incrementally better every day, more and more institutional users will be looking at it closely. And its low cost factor will become less and less important to these users while other factors such as perceived security advantages and user accessability to raw code and absence of vendor lockin will become more important. It is very much the trend of the future in IT and Microsoft is going to have to lower their pricing again and again to hang on to customers. And the lower pricing is driven for Windows the more painful the overhead of maintaining the Windows codebase will become for Microsoft. This gets very dicey for Microsoft. Linux vendors do not need to move a lot of product to make money because they have little ongoing overhead for the OS. They are selling hardware which you either move or you don't. Microsoft on the other hand is dealing with ongoing overhead for Windows whether it is moving or not. Once you've got your OS out there in the marketplace, a lot of man hours get eaten with each new breakin and each new virus, even if you are doing squat on the features front. And as Windows gets more and more complex and runs on more and more powerful hardware with more and more critical applications, the more the overhead of maintainance will grow. Its called a squeeze and MS is in the middle.

Posted by: George Mitchell   Posted on: 08/28/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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