I disagree with you in your evaluation of Microsoft. But that's fine - you have your Open Office; I'll stick to MS Office. That's what makes it all work: Choice.
Google employes the best and brightest engineers on the planet. They've got Vint-friggin-cert working for them! (if you don't know who he is, just give up this silly argument). Their interface design is intentional, and it clearly works (which is why both MSN and Yahoo have blatently ripped it off; search.msn.com and search.yahoo.com, anyone?) I was referring to desktop users, of course. That's why MS fears Google & Yahoo (along with salesforce.com and other web service vendors). They make the OS irrelevant. Once the OS is irrelevant, Dell & Co. begin looking more critically at what it's costing them to deploy windows. That's the death knell. In terms of what matters right now (search, web services, and advertising-based revenue streams), Microsoft is in a distant 3rd behind google and yahoo. They have a lot of money, of course, but they're fighting Sony + Nintendo on one front, Apple on another, and Google + Yahoo on a third (not to mention Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM, etc. on the database end, PHP, Java, Ruby, and Coldfusion on the web programming level, and myriad other fronts). MS will probably be around for a while, but they're going to have to make a decision in the near future about which battles they want to continue to fight. Fighting off 1 $100bn+ company is relatively easy, but how do you compete against 10 or 20 of them (plus the literally dozens of OS projects that are destroying them in critical markets; Linux on the server, MySQL & PostgreSQL on small-mid range DB, and PHP and Ruby in web development). BEEP! Wrong answer. Microsoft is a publicly traded company. Their billions are entirely dependent on the whims of their investors. If they go into money-losing mode (to "wipe the floor" with Google), they're deader than Microsoft Bob. American brands do just fine in Japan, actually. The XBox failed there because microsoft was clueless when it came to making the kinds of games that appealed to a japanese audience, not because they were American. I can say with 100% certainty that the average business would not have any issue migrating to OO from a compatability perspective. Some of the more esoteric (read: rarely, if ever used) features of Word, like embedded ActiveX controls, might cause problems, but the number of business environments where this is actually an issue are so insignificant to not be worth mentioning. Excel, yes. Nobody actually uses Access that has a clue, and powerpoint is almost always a 'read-only' type of scenerio. You might need a small percentage of your employees to have it installed, but that's about it (and those employees would probably be better served with Keynote, anyway). If only that were true! I've encountered more than my fair share of problems with old format documents not loading correctly in newer versions of office. Pure myth. IE comes installed with every copy of windows sold. Firefox does not. Despite that, Firefox has managed to get 10% of users to download. Nobody cared about IE until microsoft began shipping it with windows (for "free". Everyone ignored the fact that they were actually being charged more for windows itself). Most people keep the factory stereos in their cars, too. That doesn't make them superior to the offerings of pionerr, sony, etc. Microsoft has burned far too many bridges at this point in time. They've pissed off everyone from hardware vendors to advertisers and all levels in-between. It's their IMAGE that they need to fix first, not their products.
That may be so, and while I agree with most of your other points I feel it's a little misleading to use the word "download" to imply that 10% of users are actually USING firefox..
Good point, kkibak. I have downloaded the last three or four versions of Firefox for testing web pages - I wouldn't call myself a firefox user though. I've also downloaded numerous trial copies of programs and hated and uninstalled them within 24 hours (some within 10 minutes) - obviously, I wouldn't count myself among the users of those programs either.
I use Firefox, but I'm still a very pro-Microsoft person (MSN messenger, Xbox Live subscriber, etc.) P.S. Microsoft's new secret weapon... I mean, search engine, "Windows Live" is in the beta stage, and you can still find it at www.live.com
What's the point of that? It just seems to redirect to search.msn.com and serve up the same old results...
I think he's talking about http://www.ideas.live.com/mainpage.aspx (You need to login with your microsoft Password account if you have one to see the page proper.)
Downloads are actually significantly higher. I chose poor terms. Current statistics for the web in general indicate that firefox has a 10% market share (and it's around 15% total for all gecko-based browsers; IE has fallen to a mesely 80%).
I think any one of us trying to market anything at all would be pretty happy with "a measly 80%" share
Well said etnu in your previous posts.. As for Mozilla Firefox market share, it definitely is somewhere around 10% and growing. We can never know the *exact* percentage, but I don't think that 10% would be an off estimate. It is true, minstrel, that occasionally using firefox doesn't make you a firefox user (as in using it primarily), but the same can be said for alot of IE statistics. Not everyone who occasionally jumps to IE is an IE user. There are alot of webmasters who preffer Firefox, but still have IE around to check if their sites look good in that still most-used web browser. I think that statistics are made not out of number of downloads, but in hits on websites (as identified by user agent) so it doesn't matter if you download it only once or three times, that wont affect these market share stats as you're still only one user and one visitor. Well, yeah of course.. but that doesn't mean MS will have that forever and that then they don't care. The fact is that their market share, however big, is declining. People think that MS, being so big and rich is somehow immortal, but the thing is that exactly this size can be a weakness. Mistakes that they make will surely resonate much worse then they would in a much smaller company. Their obligations are also much higher, their burden so to speak is the biggest. Size brings all sorts of unique problems. And these days, the pressure is the heaviest on them, heavier then ever..
Yeah. You can just hear them sweating... As for the market share, 80% is a minimum for IE and that isn't based on downloads but on published stats that look at visitors to common websites. Typically, this ranges from 80-87% lately. Admittedly, that used to be 90-95% so I'm not denying that Firefox has made some inroads, even if that has been based more on hype and fear-mongering than actual increased security.
Yes I can. I spy on them. Just kidding. Well, it is doubtful that anything can save security on windows swiss cheese. ;-) But really, I am using Firefox all the time on a GNU/Linux box (Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger now) that I can't even imagine going back to windows and IE. Infact, it is so outrageous to me that I can't understand how people can still bare it. You may not think and agree that security or anything for that matter is improved in Firefox as compared to IE, but you're gonna have a very hard time convincing me to that. FF does have security flaws, but they're discovered and fixed much faster than in IE simply because of the open development, peer review factor and great community around willing to go through the code (something you can't see in IE). I don't even have to mention extensions and themes.. Oh god.. if I had time for that I could spend hours sifting through them and trying them out (don't get me started on GNU/Linux window managers, their themes and mass of cool apps and widgets) I'm starting to sound like a zealot so I'll just stop.. I expressed myself and my position well enough already. Cheers Daniel
I have no interest in doing that. I just wish you and others like you would stop spreading the propaganda that Firefox and Linux are inherently more secure. It puts the naive at greater risk, for reasons I've outlined earlier in this thread. More than a few of which have proven to be security risks in themselves... Look - it's great to have choice. I don't fault you for preferring Linux and Firefox. I don't have anything against open source software - I even use some of it myself. I am just mighty tired of hearing the same old lame claims trotted out pro open source and anti anything Microsoft. It's just nonsense. And it doesn't help open source developers or their fans to have people making false claims about the software.
Well, alright... I don't want to be annoying, but I do believe what I say. One thing you seem to miss is that what many FOSS users say isn't just out of zealotry, but because they have been convinced that it is so. When I say that GNU/Linux and Firefox are inherently, yes inherently, more secure then I mean it. It's no propaganda, it's saying what you think. If you've come to think of it as propaganda, then it could be just that alot of people have came to the same conclusions as I did. But I know we wont be agreeing on this anytime soon so let's just drop it. Thanks Daniel
In the end Google will still exist, MSN will be the percieved winner and the two will form a beautiful synergistic partnership (controlled by microsoft ofcourse) whos goal is to make the web a more beautiful place. Don't laugh cause thats whats going to happen. The end result of all this competition (which really hasnt started yet) will be a completely different type of web (basically were entering the second evolution of the web, the first being in the 90's when it was just taking off) The second evolution involves 1) content owners - which is anyone that has content to share. Think about the war being raged within the publishing sphere or the music sphere. Its a bloody battle people! 2) content aggregators - search engine wars (currently being battled) they aggregate all the content out there whilst at the same time trying to logically order it for retrieval 3) content consumers - webmasters, portals and device manufactures - like apple. This 2nd evolution of the web is a three sided triangle and i guarantee you that in 2 years time we'll see the signs of the first set of leaders of which im sure microsoft will be amoungst!