New article in the Economist criticizing Linux usability

[Andrej Marjan]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Milne
<thomas.bruce.milne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>wrote:

>
> In general, the claim that adoption of Linux has _anything_ to do with
> the technical quality of the OS is utter nonsense. It is nothing to do
> with this or that package management scheme or number of packages, it
> is a simple matter of politics and economics. Think about it in
> reverse. Is Microsoft on top because it has some technical advantage?
> Clearly, no. It has an effective salesman with the right political
> connections.
>

All else notwithstanding, Microsoft does have a technical advantage that is
important to non-technical businesses: outstanding backwards compatibility
at the ABI level.

What they've achieved isn't pretty or cheap to do, but it is a technical
feat. It allows people to run crufty old in-house tools whose source has
been lost many years ago on the latest version of Windows, and it allows
them to run crufty old enterprise monster systems similarly, without having
to upgrade everything all at once.

This is a big deal: you don't have to spend a penny to remediate the
compatibility of your crappy in-house tool which just happens to be central
to an important business process. From a business perspective, the money
spent to remediate that tool merely for technical compatibility, is wasted.
It gives the business no return.
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