The Dude abides.

Is OSS on the desktop irrelevant?

I was having a short chat with a CEO of a fast growing Malaysian technology company today and he made the observation about industries (spanning from cars to computer hardware to biotechnology):

“At no point in history was an established platform with market dominance ever replaced by a different platform offering similar functionalities“

As a corollary, one can be driven to conclude that open source will only become dominant on the desktop space if and only if Microsoft decides to sell open source software. Either that or that in the next 10 years, the debate of open source software or proprietary software on the desktop will be irrelevant.

Google seems to think so, and judging by Microsoft’s move to webify all its main cash cows, it doesn’t look like Microsoft disagrees.

I will be interested in your comments. I have opened up comment postings for this article so do leave your thoughts

That comment seems to indicate that all industry are stagnant or linear where a “platform” is defined as what it is from the beginning to infinity and beyond :-). I’m not familiar with other industry but when it comes to IT, well, I would say no, I disagree. What constitute an “established” platform changes from time to time.
As far as I can recall, Google seem to be a late comer in the search engine biz and still a winner :-).

This may be impossible because what is a “platform” when you extend it as an analogy to other totally different industry? What is the petrol/diesel engine equivalent for software? And then biotechnology? Is the petrol engine a platform in the same way as a CPU arch is? Or were you using API for software?

I wouldn’t think open source a platform, but as a better competitor with better manufacturing and design processes in the same space. Such as it is with a newer better Honda motorcyle vs BSA. People used to laugh and dismiss those cheap clunky “jap” motorbikes, much like they used to dismiss clunky and unpolished Linux desktop today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms_Company