Open Source vs. Microsoft

Over the past two months, I’ve given several talks on technology futures at local universities.

One question (still) keeps getting asked about the “winner” of Microsoft vs. Open Source or more specifically Linux vs. Windows.

While i tend to be binary about things, in the short term it’s hard to see a technical “winner” between these two platforms. At the server level, both work, on the desktop one has an enormous lead and mobile is still in flux.

In the long-term however, the question of platform becomes more interesting in 10, 20 and 30 year scenarios. On the desktop Microsoft has more share to loose than to gain, so it’s not unreasonable to predict some erosion there. On the real growth areas of mobile, devices, sensors, etc., what will be the core OS on these 100 billion volume devices?

My view is, we’ll see tremendous gain of open source on these new platforms. There is technical risk for deploying open source today, but that risk is mitigated by the margin issues of massive unit scale deployment in the future.

It seems probable that new products and markets that forecast 10 million units or more will manage the technical risk over the margin loss of having a closed source, per-unit, fee based operating system and support services at it’s core.

Linux and LAMP tools in general are the first wave, Android and like mobile platforms are entering the market and device and sensor markets have tools like TinyOS and many others to help optimize that market in the future.

The erosion of Microsoft “clock-cycles” usage will be cost based, where (like Microsoft before it) open source, will emulate the leader, then surpass it with better technology, better testing, better design and most importantly better “free” margin. Open source has the further benefit of having it’s testing and debugging done outside the cost structures of closed development. The cost of testing and integrating code into production is an order of magnitude more expensive than developing the code. Open source does not carry that burden in the traditional sense.

So when asked this question, the short-term winner is Microsoft, but the question of what platform will be on your devices 10+ years out, I think they will be open source based.