Opportunity cost of MS?
Microsoft just announced their new OpenXML Developer's Network. OpenXML is the format designed to be confused with the ODF format championed by basically the rest of the tech industry. Pondering the irony in hawking a "standard" with truckloads of non-standard HTML and CSS, I turned to the question of the opportunity cost of MS's hegemony.
An opportunity cost is the difference in value between the potential value of a given situation and the actual real-world value obtained. What then is the opportunity cost of MS? How much better off would we be if the world of software were truly competitive?" Let's take a look.
Where could we be? Well, the hardware industry is competitive. Moore's law still holds. On top of that, we get flat panels, low-energy laptops, Bluetooth, tablets and Wi-fi. Faster, better and cheaper. Which has advanced more in the past 10 years, microprocessors or office software?
Where are we now? We can figure the cost in terms of equipment and man-hours of dealing with spyware, spam from hacked Windows machines, wasting time trying to hack good HTML into a bad browser, staring at a BSOD, etc.
I don't know what the sum would be, but I'd wager that there are more than a few countries whose GDP couldn't match it. How did we get into such a mess? That I suppose is a question for another day.
Microsoft just announced their new OpenXML Developer's Network. OpenXML is the format designed to be confused with the ODF format championed by basically the rest of the tech industry. Pondering the irony in hawking a "standard" with truckloads of non-standard HTML and CSS, I turned to the question of the opportunity cost of MS's hegemony.
An opportunity cost is the difference in value between the potential value of a given situation and the actual real-world value obtained. What then is the opportunity cost of MS? How much better off would we be if the world of software were truly competitive?" Let's take a look.
Where could we be? Well, the hardware industry is competitive. Moore's law still holds. On top of that, we get flat panels, low-energy laptops, Bluetooth, tablets and Wi-fi. Faster, better and cheaper. Which has advanced more in the past 10 years, microprocessors or office software?
Where are we now? We can figure the cost in terms of equipment and man-hours of dealing with spyware, spam from hacked Windows machines, wasting time trying to hack good HTML into a bad browser, staring at a BSOD, etc.
I don't know what the sum would be, but I'd wager that there are more than a few countries whose GDP couldn't match it. How did we get into such a mess? That I suppose is a question for another day.
posted by Pinto at 2:54 PM
1 Comments:
For a look at another MS "innovation," read Tim Bray give the WS-Bullshit family a good slogging.
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