Linux compared to window

Microsoft, Innovation, and Linux

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Linux is too much like Windows. You'll discover that all the flavors of Linux and the open-source software that runs on it are getting more and more like Windows. This may cause big companies to dump Windows in favor of the cheaper open-source software, but none of it is quite as good as Windows-based software. Linux may be more efficient and faster, but if you're going to play the features game, you're bound to lose. That's Microsoft's real specialty.

Features sell. Long ago, Microsoft recognized that features sell softwarenot code size, efficiency, or even a pretty interface. Features. In the old days of software competition, to compete with Microsoft, you would put up a features chart and a side-by-side comparison of your product to the Microsoft offering. When your product was faster, you'd sell speed as a feature. Microsoft would counter by copying the same features and combining them with those of another competitor's product. Nobody could match Microsoft for adding features. And when Microsoft couldn't add features, it would say it added them and just not implement them, knowing people were buying software based on the claimed features, not on any real usefulness of these features.

In the 1980s, the term creeping featurism was coined. It's now become part of the landscape.

Rotten roots. You'd hope that the open-source movement would have made a wild leap that would get it off the treadmill of featurism and onto something entirely new. After all, we are told that millions of coders on the Web can match and beat Microsoft and its mere 20,000 to 30,000 drones. The trouble is that too many members of the Linux community started out on the x86 Wintel platform. After all, Linux was designed for the x86. This is the simple but overlooked fact of the Linux revolution: Its roots are in Wintel.

So just as Microsoft has copied Apple's inventions out of necessity, the Linux community copies the inventions of Microsoft out of necessity. This is partly because of the pressure to conform to the dominating standards of look and feel. But also, part of the reason is the Wintel background of the open-source movement. Not everyone in the movement, mind you, just most of the participants. The various user interfaces are compared with Windows. Programs such as GIMP are compared with Windows programs. Though the Linux community does not want to admit this, Linux has become a pale imitation of the evil OS it intends to replace. On some levels, Linux is better, but from most perspectives it is summarized as "not quite as good but a lot cheaper."

Boring coders. Part of the dilemma is also due to the fact that programmersnot artistsare running the show. If you're a coder, your creativity tends to lie in clever hacks and algorithms. It's no coincidence that Apple, which dominates the creative-artist scene, manages to be creative. There is a synergy between the customers and the company. The Windows world, on the other hand, dominates the bookkeeping scene, where creativity involves reinterpreting the tax code. The Linux customer is a raw hobbyist or someone who runs a server. In some cases, he's a revolutionary who believes that Linux will destroy the competition.

No WIMPs. So what needs to happen? First of all, the desktop-window metaphor has had a good run and has its place, but can't we try something different? Before Windows came out, IBM attempted the TopView paradigm. The odd Canon Cat computer came and went, showing a new idea and a new model for computing. Nothing is wrong with experimenting. During the CD-ROM era, numerous experimental interfaces were on the market. Many games have interesting new interface ideas. Yet we get the same old command line and WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, and pointer) interfaces in Linux.

If the open-source folks just want to copy what's already out there, why not look around more? Surely they can find something more interesting than a copy of a copy of a copy.

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