Corfy's Corner My little corner of the web.

Around December of 2006, I was asked a very simple question. "If Linux is so good, why isn't it used by more people?" At the time, I summed up a very lengthy response with one word... "Microsoft".

I later responded with this more detailed response.

First off, people who argue that "Microsoft is everywhere and must be a good software company otherwise it wouldn't be everywhere" seem to conveniently overlook the fact that Microsoft is a convicted Monopoly in the United States and the European Union (and possibly others, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head).

I read a quote once (I don't remember who said it, and I don't remember the exact wording) that said something to the effect of "There is nothing wrong with becoming a monopoly, it is trying to keep that monopoly when the problems start." My problem with Microsoft isn't so much that they have grown into a Monopoly (which could go back to the better products idea), but that they have done everything in their considerable power to keep that monopoly alive, justified or not.

Examples are everywhere. After jumping onto the Internet bandwagon a tad late, it decided, rather than compete head-to-head with Netscape (which typically charged people for the browser), Microsoft swayed the playing field by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. (This is after buying the software from Spyglass with the promise of giving them a high percentage of the profits from sales, and then turning around and giving the program away for free.)

Then there is Java, designed to be cross-platform, which Microsoft at first bundled with Windows but tried to make "improvements" to so that programs written for their Java would only work on Windows. A court ruled that Microsoft couldn't do that, so Microsoft responded by not providing Java at all (of course, Java is still available for Windows through Sun).

If you want more examples, I will be happy to provide them for you.

Then there is file formats. You touched on this a tad on Saturday. The Microsoft Office file format standards are not released by Microsoft unless you pay Microsoft for them. Other companies have gotten pretty good at reverse engineering the Microsoft file format, which is why every version of Microsoft Office introduces changes to the Microsoft Office file formats (you were commenting about opening Microsoft files in other programs... I run into problems swapping files back and forth between Microsoft Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003, so the problems I see with OpenOffice.org opening a Microsoft file is minimal compared to problems of opening a Microsoft Word 2003 file in Microsoft Word 97). But as long as Microsoft can keep people using Microsoft Office file formats, then they have a large corner of the market.

Last year (well, almost 2 years ago now), the OASIS international business standards board announced the creation of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an office file format that is open for anyone to use for the free exchanging of files. The idea being that the standard is free to use by any software program, and that files created in the ODF format can be opened and edited by every software program that supports it, so it won't matter what software operating system the file was created on or what program was used, if the program that creates the file can save as OpenDocument Format, and the program that opens it can open OpenDocument format, then the file can be transferred successfully. They have file formats for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and other types of files.

Shortly after that announcement, Microsoft announced it was creating it's own OpenXML format. Although the two file formats are similar (both are compressed XML files), they are not compatible, and many people question whether Microsoft's OpenXML is truly open, and others question why Microsoft just doesn't use ODF instead. In the meantime, ODF has gotten approval not only by OASIS, but also by ISO (the International Organization for Standardization).

Currently, programs that use ODF (either to open or save or both) include OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, IBM Workplace, NeoOffice, AbiWord, KWord, Google Docs, phpMyAdmin, Scribus, KSpread, and many others (mostly smaller programs). In addition, Corel has stated that their next Office suite will support ODF.

The last I heard, the only programs that open or save OpenXML are Microsoft Office 2007 programs, and that isn't available to the general public yet. Corel has also stated that their next Office suite will also support OpenXML.

There are more than just Microsoft Office file formats, though. HTML, CSS, XML, and various other web-based technologies are all standards controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium. Microsoft decided to add it's own proprietary programming techniques to the web to ensure that only Internet Explorer will be able to open (or open properly) some pages, and further ignoring the existing web standards, forcing web programmers to often double-program everything, one for IE and one for everyone else. And when someone gets lazy and only programs it for IE because that is what 80% of the world uses, then when someone comes across that page with another browser and it doesn't work/look right, the other browser is blamed when the fault really lies with Microsoft. And I'm not even going into the fiasco that is ActiveX.

And then there is the fact that Microsoft offers discounts to computer manufacturer's for advertising Microsoft Windows. These discounts have gotten a little fairer since 2002 when this issue came up in court, but it still encourages computer manufacturers to sell as few non-Windows computers as possible. And even those few large companies that do sell Linux computers (like Dell and HP) make their Linux selection hard to find. It may be cheaper for the customer to buy a Linux computer, but the computer companies don't make as much profit that way.

Then, of course, there is marketing. Microsoft has an extremely large marketing budget, free software typically doesn't.

An example, let's do some pricing (ignoring small business server, bulk discounts and OEM discounts). If you had to go out and buy full (i.e., non-upgrade) software, Microsoft Windows XP Professional costs $300, and Microsoft Office 2003 Professional costs $500. So that is $800 per computer, multiplied by however many computers, but for our sake, let's say 20, so that is 16,000. Then, I think Microsoft 2003 Server is another $700, and Microsoft Exchange 2003 is another $3,700. Now, we need licenses. According to my last figures, licenses for the server are $27 each, and licenses for Exchange are $61 each. That is an additional $88 per computer, or $1,760. So that is $22,160 for just software to set up 20 computers and one server.

Oh, no wait. I'm sorry. Please forgive me.

I forgot about Microsoft SQL server. How silly of me. A Standard edition of Microsoft SQL Server is $900, and licenses cost $162 each. So that is an additional $4,140 for these 20 desktops and one server, bringing the total for just software up to $26,300, or $1,252 per computer.

Now, how much of that $26,400 goes toward paying programmers, how much of that goes to pay lawyers defending anti-trust and patent-infringement lawsuits, how much of that goes to paying the Microsoft Administration staff (what does Steve Ballmer really do?), and how much of that goes to pay for marketing and advertisements?

Now, it is my (limited) experience that a lot of that same functionality can be done using two CDs from Ubuntu (one for the server, one for the desktops), which can be freely downloaded off the Internet and burned onto two CD-Rs costing about $0.10 each for a grand total of $0.20. Or, let's say we wanted one CD for each desktop. That pushes our price up to $2.10. You can add another buck if you want to cover the cost of labels and CD envelopes.

So that is software for 20 desktops and one server for less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks, compared to software for 20 desktops and one server for the price of a new pickup truck.

At least a portion of the $26,000 goes to pay for flashy, scare-tactic commercials on radio and television, while none of the $2.10 gets back to Ubuntu to pay for anything more than word-of-mouth advertising.

You ask why Linux isn't more popular? Most people I have talked to have never even heard of Linux, and most of the people who have heard of it only know the name but don't know what it is beyond that. But everyone knows Microsoft. They may not be particularly happy with it, but they stick with it because that is all they know, or they believe that Microsoft is better than everyone else because everyone uses it, or they don't like change, or they believe Microsoft's FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), or they are stuck with Microsoft because they can't convert their information due to it being saved only in proprietary formats that nothing else supports.

Now, I realize that we can probably drop the price of the Microsoft products through some bulk-pricing and/or OEM pricing or by picking up SmallBuisness Server. Of course, you can drop the cost of the Ubuntu desktop CDs by ordering them through Ubuntu, since they will ship the CDs free of charge (they don't even charge shipping). Or if you don't like Ubuntu, then there is always Fedora or openSUSE or various other alternatives.

But a large number of the alternatives are free, which means goes back to having very little advertising budget, whereas Microsoft is thrown around all over the place.

Anyway, that goes a small way toward explaining why I think a) why more people use Microsoft and b) why more people shouldn't use Microsoft.