Microsoft, Open Source, and their impact
April 10, 2006
I was having an interesting discussion the other day about the role of Microsoft in setting technology trends and what their overall impact on the tech world is today. I’d say compared with 10-15 years ago, it’s much less than it was, and the major impacts today are coming from the open source world.
This is not a ‘bash Microsoft’ entry. They’ve done a lot of good over the years, helping to make GUI computing ubiquitous (and, dare I say, affordable) years ago. Some time in the mid to late ’90s, the network effect of having fast connections and instant communication made the open source/free software communities able to work together in ways that were simply not possible just a few years prior. Both in terms of speed of development and number of contributors, the internet made a huge groundswell of development and participation possible from people who probably would never have participated.
Many of the innovations we take for granted today - tabbed browsing, open wikis, community forums - are primarily the result of people getting together at the grass roots level and hashing out ideas and tools to make their lives easier. Microsoft makes a good office suite, and a decent operating system, no doubt about it. However, it seems to be that the innovations and progressions we’ve seen in software - at least those apparent to average consumers - have been far more influenced by those in the open source community, whether credited or not.
Am I way off base? Let me know!
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