Germany sours on Microsoft again, launches antitrust review Microsoft is the latest US tech giant under investigation by Germany's competition watchdog. On Tuesday, Germany's Bundeskartellamt — which translates to federal cartel office — announced it was evaluating whether Microsoft qualified as a company of "paramount significance." Or put another way, whether it's large enough to …
They tend to squash the competition. This is bad. What can be done about it ? Break them up - maybe. Stop them getting larger by gobbling up other companies - almost certainly.
I can see that some will not like this, complain that it will lead to inefficiencies ... but unless constraints are put on them we will have less & less choice and innovation will slow.
-> but unless constraints are put on them we will have less & less choice and innovation will slow.
I tend to agree with a big caveat. In the Linux world where there is endless choice, but where is the real innovation? Server side, Linux is just a reimplementation of what has already been done before on UNIX and mainframes, and often with less complication. The "standard" Linux is Redhat. I am not sure that end users or customers developers want hundreds or even dozens of versions of Linux to consider. Desktop innovation? We get the horrors of Gnome 3. I would say "enough said" but I won't. We get bazillions of new themes and icon sets. We get hot news about yet another Linux distro, which is oh so different from n other distros because it does or doesn't use Snap.
Maybe MS should be broken up. Maybe there should be an OS company (maybe with a choice of desktops), and applications moved to another company. Cloud services could also be completely separate.
There is plenty of innovation in the Linux market place. This is what causes what you complain about, too much choice.
With desktop innovation there is much more than just Gnome3. There's plenty of alternatives, with KDE, LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Unity and many, many older or more niche desktop environments.
The problem as you've pointed out, is twofold. Only the major desktops are picked up by the dominant distros (with Gnome being pushed quite hard by Red Hat). If you are trying to manage a Linux desktop rollout, you will almost certainy decide on a major distro, and probably accept the desktop they include by default, maintaining the momentum of the establishment (this is analogous to Windows dominating the desktop).
The second aspect of the problem is that the more innovative tools and environments are normally small projects, and it is very difficult for them to break into the mainstream to be noticed.
I experienced this from personal experience. IBM has (well, had, it's slowly being wound down in preference to Apple) an internal set of tools that implemented what they called their "Open Client" environment for IBMers who wanted to use Linux on their corporate systems. Initially it could be layered on top of Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat Enterprise and a couple of more niche distros (they've now decided on just Red Hat, can't understand why), but they shipped a heavily customised version of Gnome 3 as the standard environment.
I found this even less usable than the standard Gnome 3, so I found the options to switch back to normal Gnome. But I then had cause to call the helpdesk, which at the time would accept calls on the Open Desktop environment (although now help is only available from the internal community). But all their guides assumed the modified desktop that was shipped. They were confused, and I was so fed up that I worked out how to fix the problem myself from the pointers they gave.
So large companies need standards, just to allow them to operate. Giving users in an organization choice can never work, unless the users are self-supporting.
I agree there are lots of distros and desktops - I've tried many of them. I picked on Gnome because, as you say, it comes with Redhat, slotting in with my "standard" Linux point.
-> So large companies need standards, just to allow them to operate.
This is the crux of the argument I made about too many distros. Companies may not like Windows, having seen it get worse with each new version. But they know it is a "standard". The same can't easily be said for desktop Linux.
What say you about breaking up MS into OS, apps, and cloud?
Gnome 3 is terrible. And Windows 11's UI (whatever it's called - I don't actually care) is also terrible. Ergo, I use neither.
I'll grant Redhat has quite the install base, not least because it is one of the few distributions out there that has "certification" of certain varieties. But those kinds of installations tend also to be server installations, often with no need for a GUI at all. Shunting them elsewhere is dependent on a commercial linux offering picking up the relevant certifications itself. (Unsurprisingly, SUSE is one of them - being so close to Redhat in the first place).
Desktop linux is obviously not even vaguely standardised, but who is the userbase? Beyond a minority of business deployments, it tends to be a very individual thing. If applications work, it doesn't matter that desktop development efforts are fragmented. If spit-and-polish on your user interface is what you want, well, maybe Apple is where you should be looking? KDE Plasma is pretty damn good and does me fine.
As for MS breakup, well, on that front I can't see that happening. The regulators are looking like they are going to let the merger with Activision go ahead. Germany is more likely to have success having a whinge about embedded applications "cornering the market" - as they did a few years ago resulting in Windows distributions sans Windows Media Player. If they were to target the adverts being embedded onto start menus, or MS Account subscription nag for nothing more than pressing the F1 for help? Those would be good things to happen.
It's not like any regulator elsewhere is doing anything else about the dogshit quality of the end product enforced onto (most) consumers. Does the average drone buying a laptop from PC world even know that installing another OS is a thing, or why they might want to do it?
One could ask where the real innovation is with MS.
Outlook - not written by MS. Ditto Visio.
Many MS products are third party bits where they'e gobbled up the smaller party to get the products, then applied a bit of lipstickUI tweaking, and glued them into the O365 suite. And some are where they've more or less taken some existing stuff and given it a fresh coat of lipstick - I'd include Teams in that, take Skype and Sharepoint, mix well, add a layer of lipstick, and you have something "new" (but IMO, significantly inferior, especially to Skype (another product bought in and lipsticked)).
What really holds back innovation is where you have a dominant player and de-facto standards that are closed. So MS can push "average" products out on the basis that there's a lot of pain in choosing something else. So you can use the "tool X" built into O365 and it mostly works; or you can choose "tool X" from someone else, which performs much better, but just can't integrate into O365 and hence is a PITA for everyone. This is why MS puts so much effort into not using open standards, even to the point of pushing it's shills into national standards bodies to rubber stamp it's "open by name but closed in detail" document standard through - it's all about excluding competition, and with that, innovation.
It was the same thing with it's networking protocols. Once you had a choice between MS, Novell, someone else, and Samba. Samba survived thanks to some clever reverse engineering on the part of the dev team, the rest withered and disappeared. yes, there was a reason MS made it so that Windows on the desktop would not talk well to anything but Windows as a server (and vice versa). The whole idea was to make it painful enough to "mix and match" that few would choose to - and hence the competition would disappear. This is not opinion, this is fact - MS lost the legal case and were forced by a court to provide documentation on their network protocols to third parties, and including a clause to prevent them pricing out the FOSS Samba project.
None of this should be any surprise to anyone. It's well known that if a business has no competition then it will just keep churning out the same products as it has always done - why spend cash on innovation when you don't have to. Back in the 90s we could see it with browsers - for the period between MS killing off Netscape and some competition (IIRC, Firefox) came along, IE4 (with an effective monopoly) got hardly any development. I suppose that was actually a good thing in that it allowed the competition to be a big step ahead and gain some traction when it did appear.
I think you're heading down the right road here, unlike some of the other posters.
The key is interoperability or possibly fungiblity in todays modern world.
Using the good old car style comparisons, I can buy tyres anywhere and if they're the right size I can fit them on my car's rims. Doesn't matter how big or small the manufacturer is. Same goes for fuel any old diesel / petrol will do depending on engine type. There are lots of third party manufacturers for various bits of the car. Some like the engine are a bit more difficult (as a youngster I did see a 3.5 V8 stuffed into a Morris Minor) but with the software world "impossible" is often a good comment.
I'm not entirely sure you have an accurate view of Linux if you think Redhat is "standard".
The corporate culture of certain large US owned corporations is not the same as the rest of the world.
Having choice leads to innovation - different systems offer different things to different people.
Again. You're focusing on a specific type of business I'd say.
In reality, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux OS in enterprise, followed by Debian, CentOS and then RHEL. This is based on the yearly survey and report by OpenLogic and OSI in 2022, spanning 2600 organisations around the world.
What is popular in your industry and country does not mean it is everywhere else.
-> I'm not entirely sure you have an accurate view of Linux if you think Redhat is "standard".
It is for exactly the corporate reason you describe.
-> Having choice leads to innovation
What we get is yet another desktop theme. Making more themes is not innovation.
Except, it isn't. The numbers do not agree with the statement that Redhat is "standard". It is 4th most popular within enterprise according to OpenLogic and OSI's annual survey/report.
And if you think Linux distros only differ by theme, then your experience certainly doesn't match reality.
They're not the bad boys they used to be. After a brief period of apparent altruism (which was almost certainly just them changing their focus), they've adopted a whole new aspect to their 'badness'.
The problem is not really Microsoft, but more like the American capitalist system where not chasing a market dominant position can lead to the board of a company being sued by the shareholders. It almost appears to be a crime to be satisfied with having enough of the market.
It is just because they were unable to exercise their monopoly to extend their reach into search, social media, online sales and smartphones, allowing for the rise of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, respectively, during the quarter century or so since they were being pressed about their monopolistic abuses on the PC desktop.
Whether they were unable to exercise their monopoly to reach into those new areas due to all the attention they were drawing from regulators for past abuses which limited their room to maneuver, or because they simply tried and failed is an interesting question though.
Interoperability and genuine open standards. Perhaps unbundling too.
If for example governments were to notice that Microsoft uses transitional rather than strict ISO 29500 despite all the rhetoric at the time and so insist on ISO 26300, a genuine open standard then over time it would cause something to change.
It's cheaper and more effective to enable interoperability and as a consequence prevent lock-in and enable choice.
Anti trust takes years and achieves nothing fundamental, it does provide a living for lawyers and economists.
You cannot legally run VDI infrastructure ( with Office 365 installed) or install Office on servers to support application integration requirements on any major cloud other than Azure. This strikes me as being extremely dubious from a completion perspective. Leveraged their almost total domination in the desktop productivity apps space to drive Azure adoption. Very shady indeed.
They could start internally asking why Munich had to revert back from Linux back then. It wasn't because of non-competition.
Germany is free to use alternative services like Linux or Hertzner for hosting. The latter is the top attacked VM hoster on shodan.io and one "might wonder why".
With a Windows 7 VM, and WINE, for those programs I cannot do without, I have been using Linux as a daily desktop for years. I use Win10 at work, and find no trouble in switching back and forth.
MS's recent efforts to turn Windows and Office into a subscription based ad server have completely soured me on ever again running Windows on a personal machine. I dislike the company intensely. Linux may not be perfect, but at least it doesn't suck any worse than Windows, and changes are at my discretion, not some company with its own agenda.
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