[Olpc-open] [OLPC-SF] Microsoft Is Joining Low-Cost Laptop Project - New York Times

[Daniel Weinreb]

Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> I think that the whole world is war weary, and I know that I certainly don't
>> like war metaphors, but there is a fierce competition going on between
>> Microsoft and the FOSS community, and it is a zero sum game.
>>     
>
> This turns out not to be the case. Both Microsoft and the FOSS
> community are expanding the market, and creating opportunities for
> each other. Also, for Microsoft it's all about money, while for FOSS
> it's about something more valuable. Microsoft makes billions of
> dollars, and in strictly financial terms can be said to have created
> even more billions of dollars of value for customers. FOSS lives on
> donated time and rather little money, but creates trillions of dollars
> of value. Or, if you don't want to set a value on lives saved,
> incalculable value. Better than MS, in either case.
>
>   
I don't think there's any serious question that Microsoft is very 
threatened by any
non-Microsoft platform.  Microsoft has gotten rich by having a near-monopoly
on the computing platform, and they have taken advantage of this 
unfairly for
years, e.g. by having useful but secret Windows facilities that only 
Microsoft
apps can use.  The more people can run apps on desktop Linux or directly
on the Web, the less valuable Microsoft's platform near-monopoly becomes.

For a new kind of computer to appear, all over the world, in massive
quantities, running a non-Microsoft platform, is one of Microsoft's worst
nightmares.  If a certain subset of app developers start to say "Hey, we
have a much bigger potential market for our software if we design it for
Sugar/Linux than if we design it for Windows", Microsoft would be unhappy,
proportional to the size of that subset and that market.

I'll bet that at least some corporate strategists at Microsoft are 
thinking that
although the putative subset for the OLPC would be just educational 
software,
over time there will be more demand for office software and other kinds of
software, if the hardware gets distributed in large quantity.  This is 
exactly
the way Microsoft has always thought, and if you look at it from their point
of view, it makes a lot of sense.

I agree that "zero-sum game" is greatly overstating the case.  Some on 
each side
consider the other to be detracting, in various ways, but the whole 
field is indeed
growing, rapidly.

-- Dan