Saturday, December 6, 2008

Sign of the times: Windows Devolution

A few days ago, something extremely important happened. An Israeli citizen became the first person in the whole world to achieve two things at the same time.

1) Devolution of the money paid for a Windows license included inside the price of a computer, after taking Windows off his computer in favor of Linux.

2) He was not forced to sign a NDA (non disclosure agreement), so he's free to talk about it.

There are several people that already took Windows of their computers, so this development will surely make the request the refund of the license money. This is the main reason why, until now, Microsoft requested those NDAs while refunding money.

It's curious that this can be linked to another news, in which we are informed that Windows has fallen below the 90% figure in the PC market. I want to state something very clearly. A little below 90% is still a good figure, but it isn't quite as good when you had 99% of the market before. Microsoft is loosing share, and that little change in the Ten's figure it's a really significant break point.

We aren't the only ones that think like this. In several sites across the web I've seen us Linux Users being accused of magnifying this kind of news. In truth, we see this news and simply write about them adding our insight into it, we write about what we see with the only point of view we have, ourselves. But we aren't alone.

Until now, in every Wall Street misstep or fall, Microsoft was one of the big companies that fell a lot less that the rest. This meant that investors (people who trust a company and it's way of doing business to the point of translating that trust into invested money) didn't sell because the still trusted in Redmond's capacity of continuing to produce record earnings, even inside a crisis.

But this last fall, Microsoft fell as much as the average of the market, showing to the world that Linux Users aren't alone in thinking that we see something working a little wrong in the giant corporation.

In this comment about reality, from this page of Too Much Information, I want to express the wish that Microsoft doesn't disappear, that they start producing real quality software, and can maintain a reasonable market share. It's just that I'm not opposed to Microsoft making business. I'm opposed to Microsoft making business with me.

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