Plain as the nose on one's face

Plain as the nose on one's face

Ho hum! Another link to another article that sensationally unveils the
author's latest discovery or theory of what's holding up Linux
adoption.

The obvious answer is: there's an entrenched and relatively diversified
monopoly who devotes considerable financial and personnel resources to a
variety of lock-in strategies.

MS Outlook is a big one. Contracts with hardware manufacturers at various
levels (component and VAR) to ensure that their OS is shipped with every
new system (or almost every one) are another key. A sales staff that
lavishes attention (and money) on the key purchasing staff of major
corporations, and agencies across the board. New "initiatives" (like
"Sharepoint") which aren't any significant technological feat --- just
a bundling of features and marketing (IE meets PowerPoint meets Outlook
... voila! Sharepoint). A persistent "generic term" branding strategy
that makes them the final "Word" in word processing, and helps them
"Excel" in cellular/tabular spreadsheets; and allows them to conflate
other terms so that CLI (command line interface) can no longer be used
without explicitly say that it's not .NET CLI (common language interface?)
et cetera, ad nauseum. Astroturfing and cyber-astro-turfing (in public
wikis, BBs, blogs, and message fora of all sorts). Funded "independent
studies" and essays are yet others.

For Microsoft all of these little bits are just part of the cost of doing
business. Lawsuits and anti-trust activity are treated as just another
operating expenditure.

Perhaps LWN should just keep a catalog of all the known lock-in strategies
and we can just reference them by number. Like the cons in the joke about
the prison joke book: we can link to an article as: 42! And all of us
"lifers" can get a chuckle without bothering to follow the link.

JimD