This year the 4th of July marks the start of a long holiday weekend
which will be celebrated by millions of Americans at home and abroad. But let's
not forget that back in 1776 the declaration of independence from the world's
then superpower (the British Empire) was a serious and deadly undertaking. Now,
we all know that it ended well, and despite a rematch in 1812, the US and UK
have enjoyed the advantage of mostly being on the same side in world conflicts
for nearly 200 years.
With my headline - "Should Sun, Apple and
Red Hat form an anti Microsoft Alliance?" I'm suggesting that it's time
for the disjointed territories in the world of computing to join together in a
union of states to oppose the tyranny of the mighty Microsoft empire. The US
government has tried it and failed. It's time for market forces to tackle this
job. It's not that I think Microsoft is an evil company, any more than the
British Empire back in the 1770s was intrinsically evil. There were good and bad
parts. But it's basically not right when one huge entity can wield so much power
and ignore the wishes and aspirations of minorities.
In the past Sun
Microsystems (in servers), Apple Computer (in the desktop world) and Red Hat (as
the pioneer of commercial Linux) have done their part to offer alternative
solutions to the hegemony of Windows. But disunited as they are, these market
forces will continue to be marginalised and picked off one by one in marketing
skirmishes where Microsoft can lose 5 time as many men or resources as any of
these companies to win any piece of strategic business and yet still emerge as
the winner.
I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what the legal aspects of
an anti-Microsoft Marketing Alliance would be. But I do know that without it, I
would expect Sun and Apple to disappear as independent architecture forces
within the next 5 years. The Linux camp will last longer than that, but it will
be easy for Microsoft to pick them off or buy them off with favors one by one.
There
would be two main advantages in forming an anti-Microsoft Marketing Alliance
- the companies could pool together marketing
resources to educate the wider public that alternatives to Windows do exist from
the desktop to the mainframe.
- the companies could cooperate technically to make
sure that their products worked together more easily than they do at present.
This would simplify the integration of alternative systems and lead to lower and
more competitive alternate systems.
Holidays
are a good time for people to get away from the pressures of work. But for those
marketers out there, who are workaholics, I just thought you'd like something
challenging to think about while everyone else is watching TV or warming up the
barbeque.
See also:-
...Apple profile,
...Microsoft profile,
...Red Hat profile,
...Sun Microsystems
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