MS market share

Posted Jan 12, 2005 11:59 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Well, you make a good point, but keep in mind who it was that /made/ it a
"free as in beer" market, the investment they've sunk, and the integration
they've achieved. If there's one thing we know about MS, it's that it did
NOT do all this "out of the goodness of their heart"! What do /they/
think about the browser?

1) It might not be MS Office, but keep in mind how much elements of MS
Office depend on IE and that integration.

2) Wean users of that integration, and you've already gone a good way to
prying them out of MS' grasp, OOo may be next, then it becomes
increasingly easy to jump off the platform altogether, particularly for
those many corporates where the browser/internet and Office suite are
really all that functionally matter on 90% of their desktops. At that
point, the increased stability and security of Linux (plus the multiple
vendor sources = no lock-in thing) begin to loom ever larger in their
sights, because the functionality of the apps is no longer locked onto one
platform, and they /can/ look elsewhere. Employees take OOo and FF home
with them, first to use on their own MSWormOS desktops, then eventually
they too consider the switch to Linux not that big a deal, after they see
that it too has a nice point and click interface, unlike the command line
they were scared of years before when they first heard the term "Linux".

BTW, it seems some mainline sites are quoting Firefox in the 20s percent
now and still rising, with IE 70s and dropping. When I first posted, FF
was in the teens and the IE drop was still single digits, just barely out
of the 5%-ish margin of error, with its share still in the 80s. The FF
share has doubled since then, nearly all of it coming from IE. It's not
coming from the others (like the Konqueror/KHTML rendering I use, I'm not
just a FF zealot by any means) as they've hardly budged.

Duncan