2009-05-23: Browser Monopoly
Google polishes Chrome, Microsoft calls foul | csmonitor.com
Google has done a lot to buff its browser recently. It regularly talks up the program?s speed, helpful updates, and growing developer community. But despite plenty of buzz among early adopters, Chrome holds a measly 1 percent market share.
That statistic could skyrocket if the European Commission has its way. A recent proposal would force Microsoft to include competing Web browsers with every copy of Windows. The EC hopes the additional options would break any potential monopoly that Microsoft could leverage by bundling Windows with its own Internet Explorer, which enjoys more than 90 percent worldwide market share.
Microsoft strongly protests the measure. According to its lawyers, the EC proposal would prevent one potential monopoly by promoting another. This argument ties back into how Google got its billions.
It is a poor argument. Having a monopoly is not illegal, assuming it wasn't obtained through illegal, anti-competitive actions. What is illegal is misusing a monopoly to restrict competition or consumer choice in another area.
In this case, including the browser with the operating system that comes pre-installed on over 90% of desktop computers sold is anti-competitive, because it makes it more difficult for the makers of other browsers to compete. Adding competing browsers breaks the monopoly by creating an oligopoly instead. This is slightly better, as "NotW" said in the comments, but does not solve the market competition and consumer choice problems that are caused when the monopoly-share operating system vendor pre-installs a non-OS application.
"walterbyrd" says in the comments, "Why is it okay for msft to have a monopoly, but a disaster for anybody else to have a monolopy[sic]?" This strikes at the heart of Microsoft's objection. Microsoft's fear is that Chrome (and Firefox) both come with Google search as the default, and this may help their search engine shoot even further ahead of others, making its advertising network stronger than it already is. This neglects the way that every user on every machine gets Windows Live Search as the default now, but its inferior results drive people to pay the neighbor's 13 year-old to switch it to Google. Having a choice of browsers merely means that people won't need to pay for a switch--they can just use a browser that already gives them good results for searching.
I have said it before: Microsoft is a powerful competitor and makes some pretty good (and some pretty bad) software. Their problem is that they fear the competitive market, the level playing field, and they do whatever they can to prevent having to live in that market. Personally, I believe that Microsoft will become smaller, nimbler, and even harder to beat once it sheds its evil monopoly-monster personna and allows its pieces and products to compete openly and without choice-restricting product-tying.
The key is getting the company to drop its anti-competitive and anti-user activities and get back to building software that knocks our socks off. That is the direction that the world is moving toward, so I encourage Microsoft to join the tide of freedom that is moving forward around the world. I encourage the EU to follow NotW's suggestion. Failing that, the top five browsers (as enumerated by NotW) should be pre-packaged with Windows.
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According to a report in the Business Insider, the search scene is showing some unexpected changes.
- Yahoo! up for six consecutive months. The former leader is now carrying about 21% of all US searches.
- Google down half a point to 63% of US searches in December.
- MSN up two-tenths of a point to 8.5% of US searches in December.
No word on whether MSN's numbers include Microsoft-owned Live.com.
Over the past year, a number of people had written Yahoo! off, claiming that the company had no future apart from Microsoft. And yet, those who watch Microsoft are calling for the company to dump its failing search businesses and open source Windows. After pouring billions of dollars into search, tying its market-leading Internet Explorer browser to MSN/Live search, and even paying users to search on their sites, the company is still not even garnering 10% of domestic searches. Yahoo! is getting double that quantity, without the subsidies, the legally-questionable product-tying, or the bribes.
One would have to be a complete moron to believe that merging Microsoft's MSN/Live unit with any part of Yahoo! will result in anything other than complete dominance (possibly over 90% share) for Google. The same incompetents who couldn't make it with the backing of one of the richest companies in the world are supposed to suddenly marry a completely different culture, a completely different set of technologies, and a completely different set of search techniques into their failed company without chasing away the bright minds at Yahoo! that make it what it is? Utter foolishness, I say.
Hat tip: Jim Robertson.
The Federal Government of Germany [has decided] to implement use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF). According to the plan, German federal agencies will be able to receive, read, send and edit ODF documents beginning no later than 2010.Germany Joins Growing Ranks of Governments Adopting ODF | Open Document
It is encouraging to see the continued onward march of truly open standards in the face of corporate influence. I am looking forward to seeing renewed proposals to standardize on ODF here in California, in Texas, and other states.
To be sure, some issues remain to be solved. How can the government continue to make use of existing software and processes with the new formats? Which documents presently stored in older formats should be converted to the new formats? How should the conversion be accomplished? And most importantly, which copy (old format or new) is now the legal record?
Truth be told, these same issues were already ahead. Remembering that the market-leading office software changed file formats in the 2007 version, every government agency, world-wide, should be asking these very same questions about now. One does not know how long support for the former formats will be available in the market leader's products. It wasn't too long ago that a "security" update removed support for older versions of those same formats. (Which was a lot of fun for those of us who support users. Suddenly, they had documents/spreadsheets/presentations that they had been using for years, but they could no longer open. After some outcry, the vendor released a fix that rolled back the changes, but we had to manually apply it.)
The point is, government documents are the property of the people. Proprietary formatted documents, even those which are supposedly open (but really proprietary formats in drag) require citizens to purchase the proprietary product or face a loss of fidelity. In some cases, the document may be unreadable without the proprietary vendor's product.
This is why we must continue to work to spread openness throughout government.
Open source, open standards, open government. It just works better.
Tags: ODF, Open Standards, Government
I can now report that Hotmail works with Firefox and Epiphany, but not SeaMonkey, Galeon, Konqueror or Opera. I haven't tested K-Meleon, Safari, Chrome, or Camino.
As an aside, I think there is something in ASP.Net that causes non-standard markup to be emitted. Both CareerBuilder and Monster have problems with users of the standards-compliant Opera browser. Is it intentional, or is it another coding error?
With Internet Explorer continuing to lose market share (currently at 68%), the use of IE-specific extensions can only cause ASP-powered sites (such as the MSN/Live family of sites) to also lose share to their more standards-friendly and multi-browser friendly competitors. This can only be good for the Web, since it reduces the ability of any particular entity to control users' access or experience.
We salute the end of single-browser dominance and continue to announce and proclaim the free and open Web. Openness wins, in the end. We all know it, even in the halls of Redmond and Cupertino. Openness (free / libre and open source software) will be the dominant software development model. Openness (open standards) will be the dominant way to choose file formats and network protocols--and the software that uses them. Openness (user-friendly data-collection, data-retention, data-dissemination, and data-destruction policies) will be the dominant way that government agencies and Web sites operate, as well.
We consider several implications of these results including the lack of perfect compatibility between implementations, the lack of good implementations outside of Windows, and the surprisingly good overall performance of OOXML implementations. The interoperability issues are troubling and suggest the need for improved interoperability testing for document formats. The results also highlight the importance of interoperability for open standards in general. Without interoperability, governments will be locked-in to the dominant implementations for either standard and in the process lose many of the benefits that might accrue from adopting an open standard in the first instance.
I would note that there aren't really many implementations of OOXML yet. Microsoft Office 2007, plus its conversion pack for Office 2003 and earlier are one implementation. WordPerfect would be a separate implementation. AbiWord would be still another implementation, and finally the implementation that Novell brought to OpenOffice.org, which is based on the ODF-OOXML conversion plugin project. While there isn't a list in this study abstract, it would three of the five mentioned are either Microsoft code or performed with Microsoft funding and technical assistance. I would like to see how well AbiWord, WordPerfect, and ThinkFree comply with the standard and how well they interoperate with other implementations including Microsoft's.
On the other hand, ODF implementers are fully aware that they have a long way to go. I personally utilize KOffice and OpenOffice, frequently noticing that they do things differently. I used to use AbiWord, but version 2.4.6 (the one I have) crashes so often that I cannot do any work with it.
The study (or at least the abstract that is available) does emphasize the need to have multiple, interoperable implementations--working code--for any open standard before we can expect many of the benefits of such a standard.
This paper suggests that governments seeking the benefits of open standards need to consider the role of interoperability. Without multiple interoperable implementations, i.e., "running code", users will not gain the advantages of competition and substitutability. To highlight the issues around interoperability, we examined the interoperability issues around ODF and OOXML.
Anyway, it is great to see that the academic world too is starting to take interest in openness--open standards, open source, open access. This is a growing trend that will eventually sweep away corporate-centrism and government cronyism. The days of the corporate-government alliance holding citizens at bay is ending! And while they'll fight like they are facing doom, they will be as happy as can be once there is no more ability to use abusive tactics to lock their hands in our wallets.
2008-11-13: If Your Browser Continues Losing Share, Cheat
After Hotmail upgrade cannot send/reply messages anymore with Firefox
Since Microsoft upgraded their Windows Live Hotmail service last night (30-10-2008) I cannot write new messages or reply to messages. The message body (where I want to write) is greyed out. Restarting did not help. I assume this is a Microsoft problem but I post it here anyway.
It is not plausible that this is anything but intentional. With 1 in 5 users running Firefox (and it would probably be much higher if it weren't for corporations and their reluctance to switch), it is inexcusable not to test with Firefox and to make sure the site works.
I have a Hotmail account. I have had it for years. I kept it during the difficult transition when Hotmail moved from using FreeBSD to using Microsoft Windows servers. I kept it during the dot-bomb crash, when they were cutting size limits and requiring that you log in regularly to keep it active. The company has been known to push users to go with IE, but this goes beyond what I've seen before.
Maybe Microsoft fears that the browser share for IE is about to plummet. Whatever the reason, it is a dirty trick to pull, and one that can only cause their money-losing MSN/Live unit to fall even further behind. I wonder whether we can nominate the MSN/Live unit for a Darwin award?
A loud razz for Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail, which is chasing away its users.
2008-10-17: Microsoft's Live Search Still Has To Buy Users
When you read about Microsoft's grand plans to make their "Live Search" the default search engine on the Web, you first think they are going to develop some improved algorithm that gives better results than their competitors' engines do. Then you open up your Hotmail to find a message like this:
Earn FREE rewards for something you do every day ?
search the Web!
Xbox® 360 controllers. Music downloads. Frequent flyer miles. Because we appreciate your use of Microsoft® Live Search, we'd
like to share with you an opportunity to earn tickets towards these and other exciting prizes when you join SearchPerks! from Microsoft.
? It's rewarding: Earn tickets toward exciting prizes for the Web
searches you do on properties powered by Live Search. Whether
it's on Live.com, MSN.com, Windows Live? Hotmail®, or Windows
Live Messenger.
? It's easy: With one simple download, we count your searches
automatically and award valuable tickets for each one,
up to 25 a day.
? It's brought to you by Microsoft Live Search: So you know
you won't compromise quality while earning rewards.
MSFT's problem in search (and the Web in general) is that they are primarily a proprietary software company. They think of all other businesses as ways to extend and maintain their dominance in operating system, Web browser, and office suite software.
Who can forget visiting MSN or MSNBC and being pushed to use Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player? Of the site rejecting users of the Opera Web browser? What was this about? It was about extending and maintaining the dominance of Microsoft's proprietary software.
Microsoft has had a similar problem in the search arena: their search results appeared to be skewed toward their own products and services, with scant mention of competing software and services. Granted, this was before the unveiling of Live Search. Now, with Live Search, I see that their MSNbot is one of the more active search spiders collecting information about sites.
Their search results are getting better and becoming less biased, but still generally worse than the results obtained using either Google or Yahoo! search.
For some people, paying them to use Live Search may work for a time. But eventually, most of them will leave again--It's the results, stupid!
If Microsoft wants to be seriously competitive in search, there are a few things they must do, most of which are antithetical to their whole proprietary emphasis:
- Advertising and search results must be clearly distinguishable. We understand that your search is ad-supported. But make sure that searchers can easily tell the difference between "sponsored results" and true search results.
- Search results should be unbiased. Be honest: Windows Vista is a giant turd. Make sure that honest evaluations of Vista's failings show up early in search results for the operating system. I realize that this will step on some toes within Microsoft, but maybe it will motivate someone to throw out the NT codebase and build the next version of Windows on NetBSD or a similar substrate.
- People come to Live Search to search. They come to MSN for news, information, and entertainment. They do not come there specifically to see your sponsors' ads. Therefore, never allow an advertisement to obstruct or interfere with the content that draws people to your site. I would extend this to ads that distract site visitors, such as the dancing cowboys ad and others that flash and move a lot; or which attempt to confuse or deceive them, such as the one that looks like a Windows application and says something like "You are user #7513. You win! Click here!"
- The age of a single operating system, browser, or media player dominating the market are coming to a close. People use many different systems, so everything you do should work equally well in any modern, standards-compliant product, including browsers such as lynx, which doesn't have display graphics or use scripting. This includes Microsoft's Hotmail service, which tries to get me to change browsers when I use Firefox, Opera, Epiphany, Flock, Konqueror, Kazehakase, or other modern browsers.
- Stop thinking that all Live Search needs is to buy Yahoo!'s share to be competitive. Remember that Live Search is the default search in the most widely-used browser that comes with the most widely-used operating system that comes with almost every computer you buy. Even when I change the search preference, the next person logging in still has Live Search as his or her default search. No, Microsoft's search woes are not due to anything other than 1 through 4, above. The situation will only change when those points above change. Whether MSFT buys YHOO or AOL or both,
I sincerely hope that Microsoft will begin to follow the above advice, including basing the next iteration of their software on NetBSD or a similar OS, especially if they release the resulting product under licensing that is compatible with free / libre and open source software. It would be nice to have real competition in search again. But this will not happen if search is subverted to support the agenda of a maker of proprietary software. Maybe then, Live Search will be a contender, part of a group of five to ten search engines with significant market share.
2008-08-31: Minor Comfort Is Still Comfort
August 2008 Web Server Survey - Netcraft
In the August 2008 survey we received responses from 176,748,506 sites. This month's overall growth of 1.3 million sites reflects Apache's growth of 1.2 million and Google's gain of half a million sites, but a loss of 760 thousand sites using Microsoft IIS.
Aside from Apache's and Google's leading growth, Igor Sysoev's nginx shows the next largest gain, climbing by 170 thousand sites to a new total of 2.4 million and retaining its position as the 5th largest web server vendor.
It is good to see Apache's dominance reduced from where it was a couple of years back, but it is still good to see that the growth of the leading proprietary (closed source) Web server's market share stalling and even reversing a little bit. It was somewhat disappointing to see lighttpd's share dropping, however, because it is the leading alternative FLOSS server. It would be good to have four or five different non-proprietary Web servers leading the pack, with closed-source proprietary software bringing up the rear.
The best news, of course, is that proprietary software is soon to be pushed to the edges of the market--to become niche products, instead of general-use products--but we cannot see it yet, not even in this market. There is still some growth in some proprietary products, and some proprietary products continue to have distinct advantages over some of their more open competitors. The power of community is erasing that advantage in most places it exists, but there is also corporate inertia to overcome. I would like to see most proprietary products pushed almost completely into special-purpose niches of server-side markets over the next ten or twenty years.
There will always be small, special-purpose areas where there is enough potential revenue to attract specialists who can sustain an advantage over their community-developed competitors for some long period of time. In the general market, however, the power of community-based development is so much that I cannot expect proprietary products to remain competitive much longer. Also, there are some smaller niche areas that are not able to support specialized proprietary developers, but may be able to support community-based development.
2008-08-17: "Mojave Experiment" Cannot Hide Vista's Failings
A Taste Of Vista II « Opportunity Knocks
So I went down to a retail store and picked up an HP something-or-other with 3GB of RAM.
Unfortunately, it came with Vista pre-installed. Fair enough. It has been a year since I last struggled with with it. Perhaps SP1 has fixed some of the most glaring issues.
First impression: All sorts of unwanted stuff is automatically starting, from first-run licensing wizards to ?update your software? wizards, to the ?welcome center?. Control-Alt-Delete will still let you bring up the task manager, which you can use to kill the wonderful tell-you-about-your-computer video. Now to turn off the welcome center?s run-at-startup function. Huh? Where is it? Oh, there it is, in the control panel. I realize that every application on the system (in addition to the operating system) needs to have someone accept the license. However, having them all pop up at once (modal dialog boxes, the most user-unfriendly thing on the planet) when you turn the computer on is not a good first impression.
My experience is not unique. Indeed, so many people dislike Vista that Microsoft has had to resort to "Pepsi challenge" type marketing to shore up its sagging sales. And it may even boost their sales, but it isn't the non-users of Vista they need to worry about--they should fear those who have used Windows XP, or Mac OS X, or any recent Linux distribution, who then get stuck with a Vista-powered computer. In particular, any "power user" who expects to have control of his or her computer will be disappointed in the tightly-restrictive "security nanny" nature of Vista.
Behind the glossy "Aero" interface (which many Vista computers, including mine, cannot display), Vista has little improvement in what it does for the end-user. Certainly nothing that was worth the several years of work that went into making Vista. Vista does improve its security posture (by ending the practice of defaulting to giving all system users full admin rights), which breaks many software programs--before, one could store user data and preferences in the program's folder, because most users had "write" privileges there. Still, "User Account Control" (UAC) is invasive and intrusive with its constant prompting. At the same time, those constant pop-ups teach users to ignore the message and just click "Allow". Apple was right with the "cancel or allow" advertisement last year.
Another area where many users have yet to discover Vista's built-in flaws is its technological usage restrictions (TUR, often euphemized as DRM). Without specific anti-theft technologies built into a connected device, playing high-quality audio or video through that device is not possible. There are already occasional anecdotes about not being able to play home-made video at high resolution because of this. It may take another year or two before this rises high enough in consumer consciousness to become a major obstacle to sales of Vista. Perhaps it will be too late by the time people become aware of the usage restrictions deeply embedded in the operating system.
Even with all of this built in, Vista is still susceptible to the "Antivirus XP 2008" malware. This means that as soon as someone figures out how to hijack the Windows Geniune Advantage snoopware to surreptitiously collect banking and identity information for the scammers, Vista will become a very fruitful field for them. To be honest, this malware also afflicts WinXP, as does the WGA snoopware, so rolling back to XP offers no protection against this threat.
Many people with Vista computers are replacing it with WinXP, with Linux, or buying Macs to replace the Vista. A tech guy at work was recently so disappointed with his new Vista laptop that he ordered a Mac and persuaded another person who was going to buy a laptop to go with a Mac as well. And I made no secret of my feelings toward my own Vista computer.
In fact, after playing around with Ubuntu on my HP laptop, I have now completely replaced all other operating systems with Ubuntu 8.04 AMD-64 desktop edition. I originally had the 32-bit x86 version, with less than half the hard drive. However, in the time since I installed Ubuntu, I booted into Windows three times, two of which were unsuccessful searches for a specific file, and the third was to burn the restore partition to DVD in case I transfer the computer to someone who really wants Windows Vista.
2008-08-08: 3% Of UK PCs Sold With Linux
LINUX HAS MADE headway in Microsoft's UK heartland, the PC sales channel. The number of machines shipped with Linux preloaded on them has multiplied a whopping 28 times since Microsoft launched its Vista operating system in January 2007
...
The Linux share of this route to market has edged up ever since the Vista launch. Then it broke the two per cent barrier in May after the latest release of Ubuntu, the strain of Linux most capable of kicking Microsoft in the shins.
Linux is just one of the operating systems of the future, along with NetBSD, FreeBSD, and maybe Syllable and ReactOS in the open camp along with MacOS X and SkyOS in the proprietary camp.
While it will be years before we can really see it, Microsoft is in decline, and Windows Vista is the proximate cause. While Vista retains a huge fraction of the market sales-wise, end-users have rejected it, and continue to do so. They reject it for its annoying and intrusive so-called security features, such as User Account Control (UAC), and will reject it even more once they move to high-definition video and find that Vista has technological usage restrictions (TUR, often misnamed as digital rights management/DRM) deeply embedded into the OS, such that simple things like copying your own home videos will be blocked because it cannot verify that a corporate distributor grants you the right to copy them.
Further, MSFT miscalculated just how much governments meant it when they said they wanted open standard file formats for their documents--they came up with MS Office 2007 with horrifying interface and file format changes in response--and just how large of a backlash they would feel for resisting the already-standardized OpenDocument Format (ODF). Microsoft has announced that it will integrate ODF functionality in a patch to be delivered next year, while they will still not fully support their own standard, OOXML (Office Open XML). This means that the greatest portion of MSFT's publicity among technically-savvy people and both open technology & open government activists has been negative for the past two years.
One of the great benefits, I think, will be that software companies will have to make their products a lot better at cross-platform functionality. Device-makers, too, will adapt or die. Platform lock-in will almost die. (I'd expect surviving proprietary companies to try to keep it, but it may be the thing that finally kills their businesses the way that planned obsolescence put the Detroit automakers on the slide to nowhere.)
