The End of an Era

The only thing that keeps many if not most people from migrating away is fear and reluctance to learn. Other choices including MacOS X and Linux already offer very competitive choices when it comes to the tools most people need to get work done. There are people out there who fill the role to help people migrate, including a lot of people in the Linux user group communities who often are willing to provide those services for free.

Microsoft is big, and nobody expects they are going to disappear any time soon, however there are certain cracks starting to appear in their armor that lead to hope that over time their brutally dominant grasp of the computing industry may start to wane. History has shown us that being big and powerful isn't a guarantee of success forever in this business, or business in general. GM was once the 800lb gorilla of the auto industry and they fell so far they had to be bailed out by Uncle Sam. Chrysler has had to be bailed out twice now and is being gobbled up by Fiat of all people. Even mighty Toyota who was once thought unassailable has had their falterings recently. In the computer world, in the 1960s through the 1980s IBM had a similar stranglehold on computing as Microsoft does now, in fact Microsoft largely rode IBMs coat-tails to where they are today. If you had told people in the 1970s that IBM would have a quarter where they'd lose a billion dollars (which they did in the early 1990s) and be forced to sell off whole divisions lock stock and barrel (like they sold their PC business to Lenovo) you'd have been branded a nut. The signs are there and a lot of people think that Microsoft is now at the point where IBM was in the late 1980s. They've been lucky so far they've been able to respond just barely quickly enough to maintain control. They famously missed the Internet at first and only after the Internet boom was undeniable did they hurriedly rush to "innovate"... oops -- they didn't. IE? They didn't even write it at first. They licensed Spyglass's browser. And Spyglass didn't even write most of that -- they took the Open Source licensed NCSA Mosaic browser and closed-sourced it. And in typical fashion... Microsoft screwed Spyglass through contract terms which ensured Microsoft barely paid Spyglass anything. Then Microsoft crushed innovation by force bundling IE with Windows killing off competing browsers. Once the competition was essentially gone, they quit developing IE for several years and didn't start back at it until Firefox arose like a phoenix from the ashes of Netscape and started to threaten to push IE's market share back below 90%.

You are entirely right about NASA -- they are doing work and funding research that would probably not otherwise be done... The space program is perhaps second only to military in the number of technological offshoots that have been commercialized.

But killing MS won't affect innovation -- at least not in a bad way. If anything their demise would likely be a greatly positive thing in the long run. Microsoft has never innovated anything of importance. I like to say they are an "Immovator". What they do is 99% immitation. Virtually every significant product of theirs over the years has been a blatant rip-off of someone else's work. Then they use their de-facto monopoly powers in other areas and their massive war chest of $$$ for marketing and advertising to crush the innovators. There have been very few people who have made significant innovations and tried to partner with Microsoft over the years who haven't ended up regretting it (knife in the back) -- even IBM.

We had a very active and diverse culture in the computer industry before Microsoft cemented their monopolistic stranglehold on it. Since then we've had largely hegemony and innovation has been stifled. Where there used to be several competing computer architectures and processors, we are now down to where there is only one basic processor architecture which the vast majority of general purpose computers use (x86 family) and only two manufacturers who fab all but a tiny handful of those processors (Intel and AMD). Even Apple who is the only major mainstream non-Windows computer vendor has been forced to use processors fabbed by Intel and make concessions to their hardware in order to facilitate its ability to co-run Windows. Virtually all the other hardware makers have either been forced out or into tiny niches.

If you look at any other tech segment, it isn't that way. Look at cell phones, handhelds and embedded devices -- several competing hardware architectures, several processor choices, multiple OS choices. Unfortunately MS has their sights set on extending their iron curtain around these devices too, and are currently using their muscle to force vendors to embrace their products or pay taxes to MS even when they run other OSes.

So where will innovation come from in a post-MS era? Well, Apple is where MS has always looked first for their source of ideas... and then there's Google... and Open Source... and lots of others.

Actually, if you can, you may be better off trying to fly under their radar as long as possible. Fighting them isn't easy, but they've got a habit of doing the preying mantis thing and eating their mates... And that rarely works out well for the male...