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[school-discuss] M$ Bloatware &c



Micheal Cooper wrote:

>What I was trying (unsuccessfully) to convey is
>that the FOSS community should not rely on MS
>hanging itself... as appealing as that idea may
>be. There are too many people who have too much
>invested in MS to allow it to go under easily.

But this was precisely the issue with the Vista fiasco:
M$ itself was undermining that huge investment.
Converting from M$ Windows to Linux or anything else
will never be a perfectly easy process, but if M$
offers new versions of Windows so unfriendly that they
make an OS conversion look good by comparison, the
customers are going to follow whatever the path of
least resistance happens to be.

>Supposedly, MS is learning from its competitors,
>making developers work with "MinWin," a minimal
>version of Win7 that comes in at only approx 500 MB
>or so (can't remember, so don't hold me to that).
>If this were true, it would move them away from
>bloatware and improve Windows considerably.

There are two closely intertwined problems for M$ here:

1. The whole business model for M$ is built around
trying to persuade everyone to go out and buy a bigger
and fancier pile of software every couple of years.
Specialized products like Windows CE and Windows Mobile,
I think, tend to prove this more than they disprove it.
Ever-expanding bloatware *is* what M$ sells; without
it, the firm's very reason for being disappears.

2. In any kind of competition based upon a premise of
"leaner and meaner," M$ can't even begin to compete with
the FLOSS community in general and the Linux community
in particular--the latter especially being light-years
ahead of M$ in squeezing better results out of older
hardware. Small wonder, since M$ devotes its efforts to
trying to convince everyone that "older" automatically
means "obsolete" and that they have to regularly replace
everything (see point 1 above).

We may disagree as to whether and when M$ will ever "hang
itself"--only time will tell for sure. I think we do agree
that the best course of action to insure an eventual FLOSS
victory is for the FLOSS community to continue doing what
it does best: writing superior software; ruthlessly testing
and debugging it; slowly and steadily spreading the word by
example. The increasingly desperate antics of M$ just make
FLOSS look better and better by contrast.

Joel



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