I went to college with Gen. Great guy.

I also am very, very leery of the Microsoft monoculture; I am both heartened and saddened to see that things could be worse than what I experience in the U.S. At least I can do online banking from OS X, Linux, Firefox, Safari, whatever (at least at my bank).

As a consultant, though, I am pretty much tied to Windows/Office, b/c I need seamless compatibility with my clients for all those awesome slides, spreadsheets, etc. But I have a spare laptop on which I am going to install Ubuntu and CrossOver Office, so I can at least break part of the equation (by running Office on Linux). If only the Feds had broken apart MS into 3 businesses when they had the chance (OS, applications, and other) we'd all be better off.

Since when did they give it up? I don't see any conflict in using the word "monoculture" to describe unhealthy dominance by a single type of entity, whether we're talking about organisms or operating systems; either way, it's clearly unhealthy. Obviously advocates of diversity in both agriculture and software know this, and neither has been deprived of the word by the other.

point taken. i think what I was trying to say was that biodiversity advocates can use the power of the metaphor as applied to computing to reinforce the original intent, so there's kind of a feedback loop happening. "reclaim" was probably the wrong word

I disagree. I daresay it is entirely predictable that problems will arise.

Clifton Goodwin

As far as I am concerned, I started to break free way back in 1994-1995, when I installed Linux for the first time. I realized at that time that Microsoft was not the only game in town, when I started using Sun workstations. Installing Linux was a breath of fresh air.

On the other hand, breaking free of the Microsoft stranglehold is hard to do. In my opinion, Linux truly became a viable alternatine recently, with the arrival of the first generation of programmers who have been using since day one. Today, my only Windows machine is pretty much a game machine only, except for a few apps that do not exist (yet?) for Linux, like Frame Maker. Even at work, I mostly use free software (PuTTY) on a Windows PC to connect to UNIX machines.

Regarding the situation in South Korea, one thing that explains the success of Microsoft is that it was the first company, as far as I know, to offer a fully localized operating system in Hangul. Japan, being a much larger market, has always had the attention of larger player: if I remember correctly, Apple is pretty big over there. Microsoft was also smart to establish good working relationships with the Korean Chaebols, which meant it pretty much had the market "sewn up" in its favour. Hopefully, a lot more Koreans are going to migrate to free software solutions following this encryption flap...

Redmond had to do the math somewhere and gamble that the RoK would figure it's more expensive to upgrade sideways to Linux/BSD/ etc.. than it was to upgrade to Vista. Why? You can depreciate hardware, not labor.

Though there are many DBCS Linux distros, I can't imagine they handle or could handle Active X any better under Wine or VM than any form of Windows. So - it's a case where the vendor holds everyone hostage. Well all I can say is that between this, the Zune failure (yes it will be a failure, but it's supposed to be - Zune is a TEST of DRM, I thought everyone knew that) and the big yawn that is Office 2007 I'm glad I dumped all my MS stock when it recently recovered the price point it reached in Jan 2002. Five years of watching it go nowhere then one brief moment while the flacks and 'analysts' bought into the pre release Vista love-fest.

And let me add that personally, as a miser and crank, XP Home will be the last turn of the MS crank we roll out at home. I happily have one old Win95OSR2 machine and a gaggle of XP Home units. I just got rid of a Win2000 machine at home because it was easier to install XP Home on a new motherboard than it was to reinstall the old W2K. So I will be using XP Home for years to come. By that time I feel confident there will be some Linux or BSD desktop distro that will work as well as XP Home does now. And when that happens, Buh-By Billsoft.

Excellent article Mr. Leonard. Very eye opening, I have to confess, I had no idea the Republic of South Korea had a Microsoft OS monoculture issue.

Something you said at the end of the article resonated with me. You stated,

"The example of Microsoft in Korea shows how one bad decision a decade ago leads to unpredictable trouble years later..."

The concept that one decision can have tremendous and unpredictable outcomes down the road is reminiscent of "the butterfly effect," a concept in Chaos Theory (and a bad Ashton Kutcher film). The butterfly effect says that, in chaotic systems, small inputs can lead to large downstream effects that can be impressivley large and, in the case of Korea and Microsoft, very undesirable.

These decisions are being made every day and we are paying the price for previous choices, whether about operating systems, pesticide use, or the proliferation of the internal combustion engine. Each of those decisions seemed rather innocuous at the time, but proved to have far reaching consequences that were not totally predictable. Sometimes we can know that a decision will affect the future, but exactly what the effect will be is impossible to know.

We live in a time where decisions are regularly made that have the potential to drastically affect future outcomes. However, we have no way to predict exactly what will happen. Cloning, nuclear technology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and others hold tremendous promise for improving the lives of countless humans and animals. However, every time we mess with the system, we run the risk of being run over by the Mac truck of the Law of Unintended Consequences while we are looking the other way.

I think Korea's experience with consequences of chaos is a dinging alarm bell that the world can expect more of the same.

Thanks for a great series of articles!

Shawn