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                 The Last Dinosaur and the Tarpits of Doom:
                                      
                         How Linux Smashed Windows
                                      
                               cynbe@muq.org
                                      
   If you are a Microsoft investor, be afraid. Be very afraid. By 2010
   Windows will be as dead as CP/M, and every Windows-based software
   vendor will be either supporting Linux or out of business.
   
   The process is in fact 80% complete: The end result is already obvious
   to bright CEOs, and will shortly be obvious even to bright mainstream
   press columnists.
   
   In this essay, we will skim the available evidence, extrapolate the
   trend, and examine some of the mechanisms powering those trends.
   
 How do you extrapolate an exponential?
 --------------------------------------
  
   In his 1952 essay Where to? (available in Expanded Universe) Robert A
   Heinlein pointed out that there are four ways of extrapolating an
   exponential curve. Suppose, for example, that an operating system
   "Linux" has been doubling market share every six months for a decade,
   and has reached 2.5% of the desktop market. How should an analyst
   extrapolate the curve?

     * The conservative mainstream analyst will project that Linux will
       maintain a constant market share thereafter, perhaps declining
       slowly: Linux at 2.5% desktop market share for a few years
       declining to 1% within a decade, say.

     * The daring analyst will allow for a slow rate of growth beyond the
       the current level, rapidly approaching a limit: Linux growing
       slowly from 2.5% of market share to say 5.0% in a decade or two.

     * The very daring analyst will extrapolate a linear rate of market
       share growth: If Linux has grown from 0 to 2.5% of the desktop
       market in the last decade, it will grow from 2.5% to 5.0% of the
       desktop market in the next decade, and by 2100 will have around a
       25.0% of the desktop market.

     * Finally, there is the mathematically correct way of extrapolating
       an exponential: If Linux has been doubling every six months for a
       decade, the most probable extrapolation is that it will continue
       to double every six months. That will put it at about 10% of the
       desktop by Jan 2000, about 40% of the desktop by Jan 2001, and at
       market saturation by Jan 2002.
       
   Note that when Linux reached 10% of server market share, all the
   mainstream third-party server software developers jumped on the
   bandwagon. The conservative assumption, then, is that when Linux
   reaches 10% of desktop market share, the third-party desktop software
   developers will likewise jump on the bandwagon. Understandably: a 10%
   marketshare gain is enough to interest the shareholders. We may expect
   to see this avalanche effect to kick in on the desktop market sometime
   in the year 2000.
   
 Arithmetic Exercise: What is Linux's doubling time?
 ---------------------------------------------------
  
     * Datum: In 1991 Linux had one user, Linus Torvalds.
     * Datum: In 1998 Linux had about 16 million users. (Call it 8 or 32
       if you prefer; It will change our answer only by a few percent.)
     * Datum: 1024 is 10 doubling times, so a million is about 20
       doubling times, and 16 million is about 24 doubling times.
     * Result: 24 doubling times in 8 years is 3 doubling times a year,
       or an overall doubling time of four months.
       
   For this essay, I'll stick with the conservative figure of two Linux
   doublings per year: It makes the arithmetic easier to follow. Daring
   minds can re-do the extrapolation with a four-month doubling time.
   
 Observation: The race is nearly run.
 ------------------------------------
  
   In an exponential process, each doubling is just as difficult as any
   other doubling. Linux has successfully doubled 24 times so far, and
   needs a total of 29 to 30 doublings to achieve desktop market
   dominance: accordingly, in fundamental terms, it is about 24/30ths of
   the way there already, which is to say 80%.
   
   It takes a brave or foolhardy analyst to predict that the runner will
   trip and fall before the finish line when the race is already 80%
   over!
   
 Beyond Numerology: Why?
 -----------------------
  
   It is one thing to tot up plain public facts and make elementary
   geometric extrapolations: It is another to understand them. Why is
   Linux smashing Windows in the marketplace?
   
 Historical Detour: The Open Standards Steamroller
 -------------------------------------------------
  
   For a somewhat deeper understanding, we may observe that Windows'
   eclipse by Linux is not an isolated event, but in fact merely the
   continuation of an overwhelming industry trend in operation for a
   quarter century.
   
   In 1970, the engineering computing world was dominated at every level
   by proprietary standards.
   
   ASCII was a distant dream: Every computer had its own binary text
   encoding used by its own line of terminals: Heaven help anyone foolish
   enough to try transporting a text file between brands of computers.
   Major computer manufacturers had several incompatible text encodings:
   for example IBM's EBCDIC variants and DEC with sixbit vs radix50. If
   you were perverse enough to want your text to be portable across
   computers, you avoided risky extensions like lower case, never mind
   special characters beyond comma and period.
   
   In 1970, primitive proprietary operating systems bestrode the
   landscape like mighty dinosaurs: Prime's PrimeOS, DEC's RSTS, RT-11
   &tc (with VAX/VMS soon to come), IBM's innumerable offerings, CDC's
   Scope and of course dominating the scientific workstation market,
   Apollo's Domain.
   
   Who would then have dared to predict the fall of such giants?
   
   What force could topple such entrenched operating systems, backed by
   massive industry investment, hacker culture and customer loyalty?
   
   Today, of course, we all know the answer:
   
   In 1975 Bell Labs released Unix.
     * Unix had no support from its creator, AT&T: Buy the magtape and
       don't call us. (AT&T was legally barred from entering the
       operating system market.)
     * Unix had no support from any existing vendor: None had the
       slightest interest in backing, supporting or developing an
       alternative to its proprietary operating systems offerings.
     * Unix had zero customer base: Nobody had ever heard of it, nobody
       was requesting it.
     * Unix had zero marketing: Nobody had any reason to spend money
       building mindshare for it.
     * A one-sided competition?
     * Decidedly: Unix wiped all workstation competition off the map in
       less than fifteen years.
       
   On April 12, 1989, HP bought up Apollo at a fire-sale price, putting
   out of its misery the last remaining proprietary operating system
   vendor in the workstation world, and the workstation proprietary OS
   era was over: Unix was left alone in the workstation market.
   
   In fifteen years, a magtape and an idea had effectively destroyed all
   opposition: Every workstation vendor was either supporting Unix or out
   of business.
   
   (A few of the larger dinosaurs lingered on in niche roles, of course:
   VAX/VMS is actually still available if you ask for it, albeit mutated
   now to OpenVMS and more or less claiming to be Unix. Possibly some
   retiree somewhere is still running Domain on genuine vintage Apollo
   hardware. The Boston Computer Museum no doubt preserves some of these
   coelacanths of the computing world.)
   
   What was the idea that single-handedly exterminated these proprietary
   dinosaurs?
   

 Open standards and consumer choice.
 -----------------------------------
   
   The same proprietary monopolies which are so very profitable for
   vendors are so very expensive for their customers that, given a
   choice, customers pick open standards and free competition every time.
   
   And sooner or later some struggling vendor offers them the choice.
   
   In the end, a mature workstation market realized that it was better
   served by open standards across the entire industry, and every vendor
   fell into line or went out of business, all the way from terminal
   vendors (ASCII or bankruptcy) to networking vendors (TCP/IP or
   bankruptcy) to CPU vendors (Unix or bankruptcy).
   
 Microcomputers: The Valley that Time Forgot
 -------------------------------------------
  
   But even as St Unix was slaying the proprietary dinosaurs of the
   workstation world, history was repeating itself in the Valley of
   Microcomputers.
   
   In 1960 DEC introduced the PDP-1 minicomputer, and in 1963 the PDP-8,
   with 4K words of memory.
   
   In 1975 MITS introduced the ALTAIR 8800 microcomputer with 256 words
   of memory.
   
   Just when it appeared that disks and high level languages were here to
   stay, suddenly one could once again experience the joys of assembly
   coded operating systems loaded off tape!
   
   Microcomputing has proceeded to replay the history of the workstation
   ever since, with a fifteen year delay.
   
   On this basis alone, a lazy analyst, noting 1989 as the year of the
   final demise of minicomputer proprietary operating systems, could pick
   2004 as a likely year for the final demise of proprietary
   microcomputer operating systems -- in close agreement with the
   exponential trend's prediction of Linux market saturation starting in
   2002.
   
   Another cheap prediction directly from history: Just as the death
   knell of minicomputer proprietary operating systems was a lawsuit
   requiring that Federal minicomputer purchases specify an open standard
   such as POSIX rather than a single-vendor sweetheart solution such as
   VAX/VMS, the final death knell of microcomputer proprietary operating
   systems will be a successful lawsuit requiring that Federal
   microcomputer purchases specify an open solution such as POSIX rather
   than a single-vendor sweetheart solution such as Windows.
   
   Today, the same people who picked open standards over proprietary
   solutions in the workstation context are faced with the same decisions
   in the microcomputer context and (is anyone surprised?) are making the
   same choices: Proprietary solutions in the microcomputer world are
   being rapidly replaced by open standards on all fronts. Open software
   standards like TCP/IP are rapidly killing off proprietary standards
   like IPX while simultaneously open hardware standards like PCI are
   clobbering proprietary alternatives like Microchannel.
   
   Microsoft was the biggest of the microcomputing dinosaurs pushing
   proprietary solutions, and unsurprisingly it is proving the last to
   sink in the tarpit of open standards, just as Apollo, leading vendor
   of proprietary workstation operating systems, was the last to give up
   the ghost.
   
   True, like a trapped Tyrannosaurus Rex, Microsoft remains dangerous,
   able to rend any competitor within reach of its jaws, even as its
   struggles sink it ever deeper into the tarpit.
   
   But with the long-term self-interest of the entire customer base
   working against proprietary solutions, Microsoft can only buy
   incremental short-term survival by selling off what remains of its
   future:

     * To maintain the appearance of robust growth critical to its
       dominance, Microsoft has had to nearly triple the real per-CPU
       cost of Windows over the last half-decade, from below $20 to over
       $50. In the short term, this is an effective way of converting
       monopoly power into revenue, but the result is to increase the
       incentive for customers to switch vendors: Today 60-80% of IT
       managers say they would switch from Windows if they had a choice
       -- and companies like Compaq are starting to ship boxes with Linux
       pre-installed. With new PC prices dropping below $400, $50 for the
       OS is no longer economic: Change is in the wind.

     * To survive the short term, Microsoft software has had to offer
       steadily increasing support for open standards: Today its
       applications have to support C, Java, HTML, TCP/IP, SQL and a host
       of other standards beyond its control. But each time it switches
       from a proprietary standard to an open one, the Last Dinosaur
       reduces its monopoly power, opens the door wider to free
       competition, and increases the leverage customers have to demand
       yet more adherence to open standards. Every such tactical victory
       is a strategic defeat. The result from Microsoft's perspective is
       an exponentially increasing sink rate into the tarpit, resulting
       in a steadily rising level of desperation sufficient (for example)
       to drive the Last Dinosaur to bet-the-company confrontations with
       the American legal system which it would never have considered in
       happier days.

     * To deal with competitors like AOL, Microsoft has had to go beyond
       merely reluctantly supporting one standard after another, and
       begin actively promoting the construction of new open standards,
       for example its promotion of via the IETF of an instant message
       protocol standard (RVP) to compete with AOL's ICQ. Even if this
       succeeds in weakening AOL in the short run, it will result in yet
       another industry move from proprietary to open standards, which in
       the long run will move Microsoft one step closer to open
       competition in a free market. No points for guessing that
       Microsoft wouldn't be doing this if it thought it still had the
       faintest ghost of a chance of creating a proprietary standard it
       controlled: Microsoft is implicitly admitting that the days of
       proprietary microcomputer standards are over.

     * To slow its sink rate somewhat, Microsoft has had to resort to
       increasingly heavy-handed tactics, which may sometimes work in the
       short run, but which mean that is it stepping steadily more
       painfully on the toes of organizations ranging from the Pentagon
       to General Motors -- organizations which can and do have resources
       for dealing with irritants. It is no coincidence that Microsoft
       misbehavior has simultaneously become of interest in venues
       ranging from the US Congress to the European Union to Japan to the
       US Department of Justice to any number of US state governments:
       Microsoft has begun buying short-term survival at the cost of
       long-term hostility, a desperate bargain indeed. It is anyone's
       guess what the specific result of any particular legal or
       legistlative action will be, but it neither does it matter: What
       does matter is that vast groupings of the world's power elite now
       see Microsoft as a problem to be solved, and will crank up the
       pressure until a solution satisfactory to them is achieved. To
       them, that means being able to make commodity purchases in a
       competitive market, and not being subject to the whims or
       self-interest of any single CEO. The direct costs to the world
       economy of Microsoft's monopoly now run to the tens of billions of
       dollars; The indirect costs run to the trillions. That's more than
       enough to motivate mainstream action. No amount of PR posturing
       can hide those costs from the people paying them, nor stave off
       indefinitely solutions to the problem.
       
   Will Microsoft in the end suddenly turn to the Light Side? There is
   precedent in the way DEC suddenly switched from "Unix is Snake Oil" to
   "We're the biggest Unix vendor in the industry".
   
   Or will Microsoft fight with conviction to the bitter end, as did
   Apollo, going down with all PR guns blazing?
   
   We have no way of guessing, but in industry terms, it really doesn't
   make any difference anyhow, except perhaps to Microsoft employees and
   stockholders.
   
   Let us leave the Last Dinosaur sinking inexporably deeper into the
   tarpit which has now claimed all of Microsoft's predecessors in the
   proprietary operating systems game.
   
 But Why Linux?
 --------------
  
   There can be little doubt that when Windows falls, Linux will inherit
   its mantle: It is a simple matter of momentum. Ask Alta Vista (say) to
   count hits:
   
                       Windows: 2,530,775
                       Linux:     502,053
                       Solaris:   251,513
                       HP/UX:     105,833
                       FreeBSD:    81,781
                       MacOS:      70,851
                       UnixWare:   23,386
                       Ultrix:     15,133
                       OpenBSD:    11,892

   Linux is not only growing faster than any OS in history -- it already
   has twice the Web mindshare of anything but Windows.
   
   Why?
   
   Part of the answer is of course simple chance. Had Linus Torvalds been
   born ten years later, FreeBSD might well have inherited the ecological
   niche which Linux has claimed.
   
   A more interesting part of the answer is the Open Source revolution:
   Thanks to the rise of the Internet, microcomputing is here going on
   beyond a mere replay of workstation computing history to break new
   ground.
   
   Open standards make the computing world more efficient by reducing the
   amount of wasted motion needed to implement a new idea: Standards cut
   the software environment into pieces with defined interfaces, and only
   the component behind a given interface need be re-implemented.
   Introducing something like SSH can now be done just by replacing a few
   programs like telnet, instead of by introducing perhaps an entire new
   operating system.
   
   This reduction in wasted programming effort translates directly into
   cheaper and more plentiful software, which in turn produces indirect
   cost savings in every part of the economy leveraging software.
   
   Open source takes this a step further: When the source is available,
   instead of having to rewrite programs like telnet from scratch, the
   existing source code can be merely modified, resulting in still
   greater reduction in waste effort.
   
   Proprietary ownership of source code has in the past allowed large
   corporations to dominate the software market because they could modify
   their existing proprietary code more cheaply than others without
   access to it could rewrite from scratch. This allowed extraction of
   monopoly rents from customers, with the usual happy results for the
   seller and unhappy results for customers and the economy as a whole.
   
   The growth of the Internet has now put the shoe on the other foot: It
   has made cooperation so cheap, and the set of cooperating Linux
   developers so large, that Linux now not only has a programmer force
   dwarfing anything Microsoft can field (with a doubling time measured
   in months), but an existing codebase dwarfing that available to all
   but the very largest corporations. The Linux codebase consists of
   about one hundred million lines of code, which at the accepted
   industry rate of $100/line, represents an effective capital investment
   of ten billion dollars.
   
   For comparison, a company like Lotus or Apple has a market value of
   about a two billion dollars, Oracle has a market value of about thirty
   billion dollars, and Microsoft has a market value of about one hundred
   billion dollars.
   
   In economic terms, if Linux were a corporation, by conventional
   economic metrics of book value, it would currently be roughly the
   third largest software firm on the planet, behind Microsoft and Oracle
   and ahead of firms like Autodesk ($1.3 billion).
   
   In terms of sheer productive programming power, Linux already dwarfs
   Microsoft, and is pulling away fast: If it were a conventional
   software corporation, it would have the largest effective development
   budget in the software world.
   
   Since there is no conceivable way Microsoft can match the scale of the
   Linux effort, there is no way Microsoft can ever close the capability
   and reliability gap which Linux has already opened up over Windows: By
   the time the Last Dinosaur can struggle up to where Linux already is,
   Linux will be over the horizon.
   
   Thanks to the availability of source, the entire academic and research
   world has become a Linux R&D lab. For example, thanks to NASA's
   Beowulf project, Linux has today operational, production
   supercomputers with hundreds of nodes. It is a safe prediction that
   within a year there will be Linux-driven supercomputers with over a
   thousand CPUs -- quite possibly many thousands.
   
   I don't know what will come out of the research labs at NASA, MIT,
   Caltech and kin tomorrow or next year, but one prediction is easy: The
   overwhelming majority of the advances will be built on Linux.
   
 New Computing World Order
 -------------------------
  
   The result of all this is the start of a fundamental phase transition
   in the way the entire software industry works.
   
   Innovative companies are discovering that by going with Linux, they
   get to leverage a software base with a commercial equivalent worth
   already exceeding ten billion dollars and doubling steadily -- instead
   of having to re-invent these wheels and be correspondingly late to
   market -- and to boot gain as an ally the largest software development
   team on the planet.
   
   It's already hard to resist, and once Linux' market share passes that
   of Windows, it will be irresistable and irreversable.
   
   The future beckons!
   
   On your way out, please leave a donation for the Dinosaur Preservation
   Foundation: Someone needs to start preserving memories of the old
   order, before they are lost forever.