"Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma concluded six years ago that Linux and open source seemed to be executing a classic low-end disruption on Windows and closed-source technology."
Yeah, and he turned out to be right. Now, only 6 years later, nobody uses Windows and everyone uses Linux.
I love how he uses a prophecy that has totally failed to occur at all as the starting point for rehashing the same prophecy.
First of all, he said Linux and open source. Open source has definitely disrupted, most notably on the desktop, Internet Explorer's monopoly. Also, LAMP and others have done rather well against MS on the server (although this would have been more retrospective than prediction even 6 years ago).
As far as Linux on the desktop goes, it's too early to call failure. Six years is not exactly an eternity. But in that six years, Linux has become much more user-friendly and easy to install, major vendors like Dell have started selling it pre-installed, MSIE has lost its dominance (which is important because you can now use the internet without running into MSIE-only sites now), webapps have made the OS less important, and the netbook thing is happening, reducing prices to formerly unheard of levels, making the price differential between Windows and Linux that much more important.
Call failure when the marketshare of Linux stops growing at the expense of Windows.
Here are some stats: Linux's numbers are low, but growing.
That looks about the same as it would have 6 years ago. It's still mostly Windows, then Mac OS. In fact, I'm surprised OSX hasn't grown to more than 5.
Open source hasn't stopped Microsoft or even slightly slowed their growth. The only thing that's had any noticeable effect is the recession.
You can't deny mini-computers did LED on mainframes, then networked PCs did the same to minis and x86 Windows desktops LED-ed RISC Unix workstations into oblivion.
Free software and web applications look, indeed, a lot like a low-end disruptions into Microsoft's software business. Just because ESR predicts Microsoft's demise since ever, it doesn't mean it won't happen one day.
Still, I think Microsoft will become a very different company in the next five years.
Yeah, and he turned out to be right. Now, only 6 years later, nobody uses Windows and everyone uses Linux.
I love how he uses a prophecy that has totally failed to occur at all as the starting point for rehashing the same prophecy.