| Tuesday, August 6, 2002 |
19:23 - Windows Dissatisfaction at an All-Time High
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0208/06.alternatives.php
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There are a number of articles floating around today about a report by The Yankee Group, which says that:
Apple's Macintosh has found a comfortable and committed niche among enterprise customers with sophisticated graphics and production departments. Linux, meanwhile, has gained a groundswell of support in the last three to four years due to its appeal as the "un-Windows" solution, according to Yankee Group senior analyst and Report author Laura DiDio.
"Corporate user resentment and dissatisfaction with Microsoft and some of its practices are at an all-time high," DiDio said. A myriad of issues ranging from Microsoft's perceived monopolistic practices, hyperbolic marketing, ongoing security woes, and habitually slipping ship dates of major new product releases as well as confusion surrounding the overall .NET strategy have undermined corporate customer confidence. A recent joint survey of 1,500 corporations by Sunbelt Software, Inc. and the Yankee Group found that nearly 40% of the respondents were so outraged by Microsoft's new licensing scheme that they are actively seeking alternative products.
"This cumulative dissatisfaction will not necessarily translate into corporate defections to rival operating systems. But it does open the door a crack and raises the possibility that Linux and Macintosh OS X can gain new footholds in an overwhelmingly Windows world," DiDio said.
You know, it would be one thing if there were not this general sense of unease in the corporate world-- if the only reason anybody used an alternative OS was because they were rich, crazy, or a relic of an earlier era. But that's not the case. People are finding new reasons to switch from Windows all the time. It's not just a fringe group of lunatics and geeks, it's a broad-based sense that there's something "dirty" about using Microsoft products-- like filling up at the gas station, surrounded by fumes, with the numbers ticking over and the signs everywhere warning about MTBE, it makes a person feel guilty as hell to do it, even if it's a necessity for life. It's a fairly strong feeling, it seems, in the business world-- and getting stronger.
A company can't shed its past-- or at least, it can't when it follows the normal laws of nature and business. Enron, if it had survived its bankruptcy, would never again be free of the buzzword-esque meaning its name had taken on, as a cautionary tale against creative bookkeeping. Ford and GM are still wrestling with the ghosts of their abysmal build quality from the 70s and early 80s. And Microsoft, having been brought up repeatedly before courts on charges of unfair and slimy business practices, technological plagiarism, piracy of intellectual property, and monopoly-- and finally being convicted of criminal monopolistic practices, before the whole case being unceremoniously dropped by the prosecution with no provocation other than a business-friendly administration in the White House all of a sudden-- is apparently not getting off scot free in the court of public opinion. People are beginning to align "Microsoft" with "evil" in their word-association inkblot tests; at long last, it's starting to take hold.
Maybe it has to do with whether there appears to be a visible and viable alternative available. It's amazing what people will put up with, ranting and fuming and swearing, as long as they don't actually have to do anything about it (or have the ability to do anything about it). It's just Windows. Nothin' you can do. Just reinstall and hope for the best. But perhaps now that there's buzz everywhere you turn about viable alternatives-- big companies making enterprise-class software for Linux, OS X whisperings coming from every direction, Apple Stores in the most crowded malls, geeks gaining an offbeat kind of sex appeal on the screen-- people are starting to move in ways they haven't before. It's okay not to like Microsoft now, because-- well, you're not going it alone.
Personally, I've always tried to be very picky and choosy about who gets my money, and I refuse to give it to any company with whose business ethics I disagree. Since about 1996, that's meant Microsoft has received not one red cent from me. (I'm sure their accountants are quaking in their boots.) And in that time, they've done nothing to change my mind about what kind of company they are-- in fact, they've only proven over and over and over that they're a company that I can't trust to pick out a shirt for me, much less to be the government-approved gatekeeper of my personal digital information. A company that's unapologetically unethical as well as criminally incompetent, undertaking a "Trusted Computing" initiative? Give me a break.
Now that there are all these things in the news-- Open Source is a public buzzword, Apple is in everybody's face, Microsoft is failing to convince anyone of its good intentions with .NET, and too many movies lately have picked up on the notion of dystopian futures in which a devilish Umbrella Corporation controls the production of everything from computers to laser satellites-- the general public and the business community are beginning to realize that calling Microsoft for what it is isn't anti-capitalism or Luddism... it's simply what a conscientious member of a society with a fragile and malleable new technological frontier should be asking of the companies leading the way into that frontier. It's making sure that the people we give our money to are seeing into the future of the world at large, not just their own bottom line.
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