The emergence of Linux as an alternative to Windows operating system is changing the nature of competition in the IT industry. It is time now for Microsoft to employ innovative strategies to counter the threat.
Five
years ago in 1998, the then President of Microsoft,
Steven A Ballmer (Ballmer) referred Linux as `lie-nucks.'
Bill Gates often referred Linux as the creation of
`hobbyists'. During that time, Linux was just another
operating system, a newer version of the existing Unix
operating system, which was the work of thousands of
anonymous hackers choreographed by a young Finnish
student called Linus Torvalds. The most interesting part
was that Linux could be downloaded free from the
Internet. Most of the people associated with Information
Technology (IT) industry who were skeptical about the
success of Linux, never thought that one day it would
become a serious rival to Microsoftthe Goliath of the
software industry.
Five
factors have helped Linux to emerge as the alternative
to Microsoft's operating system. First, due to the
recessionary condition prevailing in most of the
economies in the world, companies are under immense
pressure to reduce their costs including their IT
infrastructure costs. Linux is a free software, which
according to Professor Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan School
of Management means, "a user may obtain a copy at
no cost and then legally stuff its source code, modify
it and distribute it to others also for free." A
software author uses his or her own copyright to
guarantee those rights to all users by affixing to the
code a standard licensing notice, such as the General
Public License (GPL). "Instead of spending millions
of dollars on expensive high-performance computers,
Linux users spend a fraction on the hardware and
operating system and use the savings to create very
powerful specialized software. |
