Re: Delphi for .NET and Win32
From: Eyal (eyal_at_bikoret-bona.com)
Date: 10/09/03
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Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 06:35:47 +0200
Ray Glaze wrote:
>>b) .Net may bring about the demise of M$ control over the
>>desktop - if any app can run on Linux why buy Windoze?
>
>
> Lost me on that one... Doesn't MicroSoft have a significant interest in
> .Net? Or are you saying they will trade their cash cows (.NET for Windows?)
>
.Net (or most of it) is cracked up to be an open standard. I don't care
about .Net so admittedly I don't follow it closely and things may have
changed since I last checked. However let's assume for a moment that
most of .Net is indeed an open standard.
Already there is at least one implementation of .Net for Linux/Unix -
the Mono project that (again I don't follow closely) seems to progress
rather well.
So in 1-2 years from now .Net applications will run (natively!) on both
Windows and Linux. In that case I see no reason to pay for an operating
system when you can get another one for free or for much lower cost,
that runs the same apps.
The big selling point for Windows over Linux is that there's a huge base
of applications available for Windows compared to Linux. But with .Net
this advantage will no longer exist.
Why would M$ go this way? I can only guess.
M$ is threatened by open source and free software. For most users the
open vs. closed source point isn't important. They want the thing to
work and that's it.
Price is always important but especially so to individual (private)
users. For business and corporations, software expenses are tax
deductible, so they are less sensitive to the license price. Also, for
such organizational users license price is only a part of the TCO (Total
Cost of Ownership), that includes support staff, ease of deployment, etc.
It's hard to find an objective TCO comparison between Windows and Linux.
There are several "analyst studies" funded by M$ that not surprisingly
find Windows TCO to be lower. Linux supporters are regarded by many as
"zealots" and so their conclusions are also discarded. However reading
data from both sides it seems that overall the TCO difference, mainly
for big organizations, isn't significant either way.
So if open vs. closed and TCO issues aren't that big of a difference for
M$ biggest customers, what is?
It seems that increasingly customers require open standard for the data.
Governments around the world are legally bound to provide free access to
legal records. Governments and companies alike are afraid of vendor
lock-in so they want to avoid proprietary data formats.
This puts a lot of pressure on M$ to either maintain compatability with
published standards, or try to certify their own creations as standards
(but then they must be open).
The recent version of M$ Office, for example, can save files in XML,
something M$ has tried to avoid for a long time. True, it's far from
perfect (the scema information is still hidden), but at least customers
can access the data (text) using any XML capable tool.
I think that the same happened with .Net. M$ wanted to "play nice" with
everyone and not seem to just change the OS API in order to lock out
competitors. They also wanted their C language enhancements (ie. the #
in C#) to become standard, so other companies (eg. Intel) will make
compatible tools. One way or another they decided to make C# and many of
the .Net services a standard and submitted it to ECMA for certification.
Maybe they didn't think that someone is going to implement the whole
thing on Linux. Maybe they don't care because they have a few tricks up
their sleeve that will give them advantage. Maybe they just don't care
because they think their future revenue is applications or services, not OS.
That's all just a theory. I have no concrete knowledge and as I
mentioned I don't even care much about .Net so I don't follow the
developments.
Eyal.
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