Steve Ballmer, quoted in an article in OS News a few days ago, now speaks of Linux as a bigger threat to Microsoft in the PC market than Apple. How does that sound to you? Apple is obviously a big threat to Microsoft (see Apple Market Share: The Sound of Breaking Windows) and if, as Steve Ballmer maintains, Linux is a bigger threat than Apple, then Microsoft is in trouble. Indeed it looks like it is caught in a pincer movement between Linux on the low ground and Apple on the high ground. The fact is that the Linux share of the PC market (if you include laptops and netbooks) is rising fast and, according to Ballmer, it has overtaken Apple in terms of market share by unit.

It just didn’t use to be that way. Microsoft has been playing Whack-A-Mole with Linux for a long time now, with greater success than most commentators, myself included, ever imagined possible. Here’s a list of anti-Linux tactics that, taken together, have been remarkably effective.

1. Pressuring the OEMs. For Linux to gain traction some vendor would need to to offer more than minimal support for it. Microsoft is never going to look favorably on any major vendor that does that and no major PC vendor is likely to deliberately irritate Microsoft. The commercial consequences can be very damaging. It’s a strategy that was eloquently articulated by Chuck Colson when he said’ If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”
2. Marketing Muscle. Microsoft has huge marketing muscle and a well organized PR operation. Linux has almost no marketing muscle beyond the band of enthusiastic activists that prowl the Internet and chat forums. Linux gets a fair amount of coverage, but it just doesn’t match the co-ordinated marketing campaign that Microsoft runs all the time against Linux. Microsoft has ample funds to pay for surveys, special features in magazines, adverts and so on. In 2001/2002 it ran a “just the facts” campaign aimed at discrediting Linux and took it all over the world. Linux simply had no way to respond to that. In marketing, Microsoft completely dominates all channels except the Internet.
3. The Microsoft Ambassador. Every now and then some government in Latin America or the Far East will announce its intention to make heavy use of Linux and then an ambassador from Microsoft, maybe even Bill Gates himself, will turn up and offer some investment or other in local education based on Microsoft technology and the Linux Penguin will get smacked down. A similar thing happened with Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC initiative. It was too dangerous for Microsoft to allow millions of children across the world to get Linux PCs, and Intel was also unimpressed with the idea, given that the OLPC had no Intel chip, so together they moved in, creating a competitive device and inveigling their way onto the OLPC project. The Linux Penguin was stifled yet again.
4. The Special Anti-Linux Fund. As was made clear by a leaked Microsoft email in 2002, Microsoft engages in steep discounting whenever it goes head to head with Linux on the desktop in a corporate tender. The tactic is to maintain normal pricing policy, but to keep a special fund on one side to fund deals where Microsoft needs to discount heavily. The goal is never to lose to Linux in such tenders. The downside to this is that it inevitably causes some organizations to use competitive tenders that include Linux just to get special discounts. The reality, though, is that not many organizations have done that.
5. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that it hold patents that it believes Linux violates. It doesn’t matter whether any of those patents are legally enforceable, the possibility is enough to spread FUD. The SCO legal cases caused many companies to be a little more reticent in adopting Linux than they might otherwise have been, simply because of the fact that SCO did indeed sue Linux users (although not with success) and there is just the outside possibility that Microsoft might do the same thing at some point. Nobody likes being sued. Even if you win it will probably cost you.
6. Software and Device Compatibility. There is a vast commercial ecosystem that surrounds the Windows PC which pretty much ensures that most devices will work well with Windows, because they have to. Otherwise they don’t sell. The numbers of Linux machines isn’t sufficient for the same vendors to care much whether a device works on a Linux-based PC. Consequently, with some devices, drivers for Linux are either late, come from third parties (open source developers) or are  non-existent. (It’s rare that they are non-existent, but it happens.)
7. The Windows Commercial Ecosystem. PC margins have been getting thinner and thinner. But until recently the cost of the Windows license (to the PC manufacturer) could be deftly hidden in some way. For example 3rd party software vendors will happily pay a small fee to have their demo software ready loaded on the PC you buy. Quite recently, it was estimated that, at the low end of the market, the profit margin of consumer PCs could be attributed entirely to revenue from “preloaded demo software.” There is no market for preloaded demo software on Linux, because the spirit of Linux is entwined with the idea of “free software”. The products aren’t there and if they were the software vendors would not want to compete with free Open Source products. For that reason, at the low end, the price of a cheap desktop Linux PC is pretty much the same as the price of a Windows PC. There’s no clear price advantage.
8. Corporate Drag Along. The monopoly that Microsoft holds in the business world and in government PC usage has helped it immensely in the commercial market, especially in markets where software theft is rampant. The average consumer is not easily persuaded to use unfamiliar products, irrespective of their quality. So the tendency will be to use illegal copies of Microsoft products at home rather than test the Linux-plus-Open-Source alternatives if they can get hold of them.
9. Dominating the Stolen Software Market. Microsoft dominates the stolen software market with great success. More than 20% of Windows usage is unlicensed copies, giving “stolen Windows” a greater share of the PC market than Apple’s OS X and Linux put together. Microsoft needs to maintain that position of leadership. In time some of the illegal users will become legal users and Microsoft will eventually get revenues from them. And while there is a thriving market in stolen software, users will not be inclined to use Open Source alternatives. The trick is for Microsoft to balance the level of software theft with the effort to stop it. No doubt Microsoft could stop it completely – after all it has excellent DRM technology that could be rigorously applied – but that would just encourage Linux and other Open Source products. Far better to have a free version of Microsoft’s products available that can compete with free Open Source products.
10. 24 Hour Linux. Open Source enthusiasts sometimes point out that the sales of Windows are over-counted, because quite a few people who cannot find a PC with Linux loaded will buy one with Windows loaded and then put Linux onto that machine. While this may be true, there’s an opposite effect in countries where software theft is rampant, called “24 Hour Linux.” Where a Linux PC is bought and then a pirate copy of Windows is loaded. In such markets, Microsoft holds its “software theft telescope” to a blind eye.

However, the market is in flux and it looks like Microsoft will no longer be able to hold back the tide. I’ll explain how the game has changed in a blog posting next week.

A few days ago I ran into one of those howl-for-the-hell-of-it articles printed by that reliable UK fountain of knowledge: The Daily Mail. The story ran with the title:

How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer

According to Dr Aric Sigman, “Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects. Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia.”

These are quotes from the journal of the Institute of Biology to which the Daily Mail has added words like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Skype. And there’s no point in objecting that watching television a great deal or spending hours gazing at fish tanks has the same effect (in terms of not meeting up with people) because the underlying cause here is clearly email and chat.

As if that weren’t enough, those evil social networking sites are not just killing us, they are also destroying the poor vulnerable brains of our children. For proof of this sad fact, I turn yet again to that UK fount of wisdom, the Daily Mail, which also recently printed a story with the title:

Social websites harm children’s brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist

The top neuroscientist in question is the questionable Baroness Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution. Let me give you the facts, quoting directly from the article:

• Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users.
• Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred.
• Repeated exposure [to such sites] could effectively ‘rewire’ the brain.
• “My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights.”

Reading this, my greatest fear is that the infinitely wise Baroness may be withholding the truth from us, and that social networks are also shrinking the attention spans of us adult users, while horrendous cancers form in our socially networked bodies.

In fact, I fear for the whole of our civilization. But most of all I fear for our leaders like President Obama, and all those congressmen and senators who have become addicted to email, Twitter and Facebook. Pretty soon everyone of importance in America will have the attention span of a goldfish and be suffering from some mortal disease or other, and all because a few geeks who needed to pay off their student loans wrote a few lines of PHP code and set up web sites that allowed people to send messages to each other.

The Solution

Don’t be down hearted: There’s a solution.

All you need to do is turn off your computer and go out and meet people. This solution will work for everyone. No matter what age.

You walk out of your house and the first person you meet, say “Hi!” Don’t overdo it. You probably don’t have the attention span for a whole conversation. Just say something about the weather and then move on.

After a couple of weeks of doing this, you could try “speed dating.” This is where you meet someone (normally of the opposite sex) and you try a whole 5 minute conversation with them. There’s no reason to get scared. If both of you fall silent after a minute or so, or suddenly forget who you’re talking to, its OK. Nobody is going to point fingers and you’ll get a chance to try it again almost immediately – until you finally get the hang of 5 minute conversations.

After that you can try going to the bank and discussing whether they’ll give you a loan to buy, say, a boat. This is sneaky, because you don’t intend to buy a boat at all and anyway the banks have no money to lend. But they’ll pretend they do and they’ll talk to you and all you really want is to practice conversations that can go on for up to 15 minutes. After that you’ll soon be ready to hang around coffee shops and in no time you’ll be up to having lunch with people and drinking in bars.

A Foolish Error

Having written this, I realize I’ve made a foolish error. I’ve written about the solution to the problem 450 words into this posting. Unfortunately nobody out there has the attention span to read even 300 words without moving on to some other web page. No-one is going to read the solution. In fact no-one is going to read this sentence. Now I could cut and paste that section of the posting and put it at the front, but I’m not sure I have the attention span to carry out anything as complicated as a “cut and paste.” I guess I’ll just sink into apathy and ignore the problem. Who won the Superbowl? Does anyone remember?

What’s a hundred milliseconds between friends? Well if you must know it’s an intolerable delay, if your friend happens to be a Search Engine. A hundred milliseconds is a brief amount of time that sits close to the threshold of human reaction time. We can normally react to a stimulus in the 140-200 millisecond range, which is great news for cobras, because it takes a cobra about 100 milliseconds to bite. To put it another way, if a cobra is within striking range and it decides to bite you, it’s too late to stop it. If the mouse pointer moves more than 100 milliseconds after you move the mouse, it feels slow.

So What Does That Have to Do with Search?

Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products & User Experience had something interesting to say on this topic at the Web 2.0 conference last year. It began with Google running user tests to try to establish what users wanted. So they asked a group of searchers whether they’d like to see more (than the usual 10) results on a page. When they said “yes” Google upped the number of results to 30. The outcome was that traffic and revenue from this group dropped by 20%.

After wondering why their test group was so ungrateful and scratching their collective heads, the testers suddenly noticed that there was another variable that hadn’t been controlled – the response time. The page with 10 results began to display after 0.4 seconds, while the page with 30 results, needing to collect significantly more data, began to display after 0.9 seconds. And it turned out that it was the response time that was the real “fly in the soup.”

The sad truth is that we humans are so impatient that we’ll not tolerate delays even at the 100 millisecond level. Once response time stretches out beyond our reaction time threshold (140-200 milliseconds) we’re likely to take our business elsewhere. You know how it is:

“Can’t wait all day for a bloody search engine.”

“If this auction takes another 100 milliseconds, I’m gone.”

“Sorry I’d love to read you blog article, I really would, but milliseconds are milliseconds, damn it.”

The evidence suggests Google understood this before anyone else. User impatience is measured in units of 1 tenth of a second starting at 200 milliseconds or so. In her talk, Marissa described how Google saw a substantial boost in traffic on Google Maps when they introduced a new version that rendered faster (because the page size was smaller). The impact was almost immediate.

In a keynote presentation at WSDM 2009, Google Fellow Jeff Dean presented some statistics about Google’s growth in the past decade. He noted that both the number of search queries and the amount of processing power to handle them had risen by a factor of 1000, in that time. Meanwhile, Google’s search latency had gone down from a whole second (1000 milliseconds)  to 200 milliseconds. Nowadays, the complete search index to the whole web is held in memory, shared across a thousand machines that divide up the work of handling a query. It’s kinda awesome to think that every time you send Google a query, 1000 computers jump into action.

If you go to Microsoft Search or Yahoo Search to see if there’s any difference, you probably wont detect any – at least I didn’t when I tried it. If anything, Yahoo seemed fractionally slower, but they all gave the impression of being instant. This isn’t a matter of the competitors catching up, so much as all the players realizing that performance is a very important criterion. Google was the first to understand that, just as it was the first to appreciate that search users don’t like cluttered screens with flashing animated adverts.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Apps?

The uptake of Google Apps will increase significantly this year. There are several discouraging factors to the use of web apps and, of course, performance is one of these. The truth is that your word processor-spreadsheet-powerpoint-email apps running on a PC or Mac do not violate your response expectations (unless you try to overload the computer.) To acheve parity, Google Apps have to offer the same level of availability (which they can do by having a client component using Mozilla Prism or Adobe Air) and equivalent response time. That only matters when data transfer occurs, but clearly it cries out for “no discernible latency” over a PC or a Mac when it saves files locally. That’s pretty much the case now.

My expectation is that Microsoft Office will not be brought down by Open Office (although Open Office may deny some revenue to Redmond), but by cloud based Office apps.

A Ghazal is a love poem. Many of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi’s poems are classified as Ghazal, although the love written of here is not mundane love at all.

What Do You Think Will Happen?

If you pass your night
and merge it with the dawn
for the sake of the heart,
what do you think will happen?

If the entire world
is covered with the blossoms
you have labored to plant,
what do you think will happen?

If the elixir of life
that has been hidden in the dark
fills the desert and towns,
what do you think will happen?

If because of
your generosity and love
a few humans discover their lives
what do you think will happen?

If you pour an entire jar
filled with joyous wine
on the head of those already drunk,
what do you think will happen?

Go my friend.
Bestow your love
even on your enemies.
If you touch their hearts,
what do you think will happen?

Based on the translation by Nader Khalili