What they're saying about Microsoft's XP situation .. and what I'm saying about technological freedom

Storage Bits blogger Robin Harris of ZDNet thinks it's Microsoft in full retreat mode:

Today’s mid-range Vista PC is tomorrow’s ULCPC. The reasons vendors
and customers balk at Microsoft’s $50 Vista tax today won’t change.
Consumers will pay $50 on a $600 machine. But $50 on a $200 machine? No
way.

People are realizing that for much of what they do - web surfing,
email, online video - can be handled by much smaller and cheaper
systems. As Linux continue to refine the GUI and simplify its distros,
the Windows advantage continues to fade.

The Storage Bits take

First time users who learn Linux will have no reason to ever pay for
Windows. Just as I deciphered the Apple II’s CLI 30 years ago, today’s
eager, but poor, first timers will figure Linux out.

Microsoft’s Vista is a slow-motion disaster. Bloated and inflexible,
expensive and late, Vista is a continuing drag on Microsoft’s business
flexibility.

For another view from ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says it's time to pull the plug on Windows XP:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t like XP, but that time
has passed.  Long passed.  The last few XP installs that I’ve carried
out have shown me how painful the process is compared to Vista.  First,
the install process demands that you stand around the system for an
extended period of time to answer a variety of questions.  With Vista
the process has been cut down to a few choices at the beginning of the
installations process and afterwards I can walk away and leave it to
finish on its own.  Then there’s finding all the necessary drivers.  A
system that needs me to find half a dozen or so drivers with XP
installed doesn’t need any with Vista.  That’s a hassle I’m happy not
to have any more

Also, as I increasingly move over from 32-bit to 64-bit, with
Vista I finally have a 64-bit platform that works reliably and allows
me to break the 4GB barrier without having to suffer much in the way of
downsides.  XP Pro 64-bit couldn’t deliver me that no matter how often
I tried.

...

Maybe SP3 will rejuvenate XP a bit, maybe it won’t.  Either way, I
doubt that the service pack will change the fact that XP is long in the
tooth on a number of fronts.  It’s time for me to put my XP CDs into
the drawer of doom.

And what would an analysis of a Microsoft vs. Linux issue be without Rob Enderle, as quoted by eWeek, on the continuing availability of Windows XP Home for ultra-portable machines like the Asus Eee that are currently shipping with Linux:

But to Rob Enderle, the
principal analyst for The Enderle Group, Vista just is too heavy for
many of these devices and likely would not have been sold on them.

"For Microsoft, it was a choice of letting Linux go unchallenged in
this segment or block it using XP, which provides a slightly better
user experience and has some software compatibility advantages over
most of the Linux implementations I’ve seen so far," he said. "They
wisely chose not to hand this market to Linux on a silver platter, but
Linux will improve while XP won’t, and some of the Linux stuff I’ve
seen lately is actually competitive with Apple."

And there's always Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols of Desktop Linux playing up the problems with Vista in another eWeek story:

Goodbye Vista. It has not been fun knowing you.

I predicted that Microsoft was giving up on Vista in January. It seems I was right. Microsoft's own top brass had hated Vista when it first came out, why should they expect anyone else to like it?

Vista SP1 has proven to be a painful upgrade and its performance still lags behind XP SP2 and, the still unreleased XP SP3. Worse still, from a Microsoft executive's viewpoint, Windows is actually losing desktop market share to Mac OS X and Linux. Microsoft never loses desktop market share. But with Vista Microsoft is finally losing customers.

So where do I stand on all of this? My opinion of Windows XP was a whole lot higher a few years ago when I first got my main work box, a Dell with a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. I don't thing anybody's eager to run Vista on this kind of hardware, and for the great majority of us, the OS stays the same throughout the life of the box -- there ain't gonna be no upgrading in this office, that I can tell you.

Among the things I'm not happy with are IE 7, which looks better than IE 6 but is dog-slow and doesn't allow me to use it as a full FTP client (which I can still do by opening a "My Computer" window from XP itself, thankfully).

And much of the speed I enjoyed overall when running a fresh XP box has evaporated over the years -- and I have neither the administrator's access nor anybody in tech support who will do anything but wipe the whole box without backing up any of my data (our main publishing system has remote servers, and so our local boxes have no other network storage or backups aside from CD-R discs).

One thing I can tell you is that my 2003-era iBook G4 with OS X 10.3.9 is runniing just as well today as it did when we got it five years ago. Wish I could say the same for XP.

As far as my own boxes, I have one Windows 2000 install left that I never turn on. I'll probably pull the drive at some point and run OpenBSD or Debian on it. I haven't done a Windows install in over a year -- I do have a Win 2000 disc if I need to do it.

I got tired of not wanting to pay for software like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop -- and not wanting to steal it, either, like most of the people out there.

That's why free, open-source software like Linux, the various BSDs and the thousands of applications that run with them are a complete godsend. Why let a couple of very powerful, very rich corporations have such a stranglehold over our technological lives? And no, you're not sticking it to the man by stealing his software either. Two wrongs do not make any kind of right. They shouldn't charge so much, but you shouldn't pirate it either. And with things like Linux, you don't have to.

Yeah, there are quite a few hardware vendors who, like Microsoft and Apple, don't provide open-source drivers for non-proprietary systems and also don't open up their hardware and software specs so others can create those drivers. But there are many vendors who do, who want to create a whole lot of goodwill with the techy-geeky types who run Linux or BSD, because they know these are the kind of people who help others -- both individuals and companies large and small -- make decisions on what kind of hardware and software to use.

And while you can safely run Mac's OS X without a cadre of antivirus and third-party utility products, you can't do that with any version of Windows. Once you pay, you've got to keep on paying to safeguard your system, and even then you can run into plenty of problems.

Don't get me wrong -- Linux, as it exists in today's distributions, is not perfect. But it's getting better all the damn time. And it remains free. And not just free of cost, but free as in freedom.

I'm not saying the world of nonfree software should go away, but for the great majority of users out there, free is what works the most -- and the best.

Free software exists because people want it that way. Most of the developers working on the Linux kernel don't work for free, though many do. Companies that stand to gain from open-source software pay these coders to work on projects that matter to their business. And we all benefit.

I'm not one of those people who say it's Linux or bust. That's why I've done quite a bit of work with OpenBSD especially, as well as NetBSD and FreeBSD. The now open (see, it's in the name) OpenSolaris is going through a rocky patch with its community, but it's yet another alternative, especially for servers. I'm also rooting for projects like Haiku to add more diversity to the desktop.

You see, it's not about free vs. nonfree (although it kind of is). It's about choice, avoiding vendor lock-in and the abuse that comes from that, and about the innovation that comes only from competition. Do you think Microsoft would be working on a next-generation operating system if all these free alternatives weren't holding its feet to the fire? I don't think so.

To sum up, I wholeheartedly believe that freedom on our computers and other devices (be they phones, music players, e-book readers, video devices or just about anything else) is vital to our freedom as a collective people and more importantly as individuals.

So I started with XP's swan song and ended with a "free as in freedom" diatribe. Until next week, that's it from me.