Half-life of Microsoft Products (possibly proprietary products?)
Mike Linksvayer has another great little snippet at the end of a post about wikipedia that is a great theory about Microsoft’s products having a half-life:
However, regarding widely deployed software (e.g., operating systems, productivity applications) I have a theory explaining why it will be free: Microsoft Windows and Office have a half life–eventually a release of each will be a failure, at which point the only viable alternaives will be free, and any non-free alternaitves will face slow death–think commercial Unixes in the face of Linux. I’m not going to stand by this theory–it probably assumes too little change, of any sort.
I wonder if Microsoft’s Vista OS will be the first failure. I think it will be one or two more releases before the water fully redirects around the rocks.
[...] From the aforementioned customer’s perspective, traditional suicideware is just temporally crippled-ware. For a software business, perhaps suicideware (I’m making this up) is that which forgets who the customers are, tempting the gods of randomness. Rouletteware? Deathwishware? [...]
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