Bonum Certa Men Certa

In Spite of Boot-locking (Trying to Make It Hard If Not Impossible to Install BSDs and GNU/Linux on New PCs) Microsoft's Grip is Rapidly Slipping

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 31, 2024

Escaping the Microsoft prison

I tried to turn off 'secure' boot. They don't let you do that with newer PCs.

"There are a lot of market share posts," someone has told me, so "perhaps it is a time for a round-up with a proper analysis of the global, significant shift away from Microsoft and what that means in regards to the end of monopoly rents."

Well, a more detailed market share analysis is overdue and I want to cover this today. Last night I mentioned Puerto Rico and said "Android has climbed to its highest level in 4 years this month." In the morning I said "Africa is "lost territory" for Microsoft colonialism." In the case of Africa, the retreat from Microsoft monoculture is very rapid and there are mass layoffs this month.

In order for Microsoft to charge a significant fee for Windows licences (not from users; Microsoft bypasses the users by colluding with OEMs and then imposing those fees on users whether they like it or not) it needs to have virtually no competition. With Chromebooks being more widely available in more countries, running the Gentoo-based ChromeOS, Microsoft cannot charge much for Windows. In the US and the UK, for instance, many buy Chromebooks (they're more widely available too), so in order to compete Microsoft might as well charge nothing for Windows, at least initially. And regardless, Windows loses relative market share very quickly while its Windows-associated revenue falls, both because total sales volume (units) goes down and the price per unit goes down.

Remember that ChromeOS (or Android for that matter) isn't the destination. However, anything other than Windows helps end the monopoly rents, which in turn compels Microsoft to invent some "fictional" future direction like "Hey Hi" hype and "clown computing", even if those mean deep losses rather than profits. Microsoft already cooks the books while openly admitting that Windows revenue is down sharply, XBox sales are down sharply, and debt has soared.

We expect that Microsoft will try to tighten the screws some more with UEFI 'secure' boot, in effect coming up with "innovative" ways to lock GNU/Linux and BSDs out of the market, under the false cover of "security" of course... meddling with these plans or resisting has been spun as opposition to security, but nothing could be further from the truth. UEFI 'secure' boot is itself a cluster of security problems and booting Windows means instantiating a large bunch of security holes connected to the Internet.

Microsoft won't go away easily. Microsoft won't stop committing competition crimes in an effort to salvage what's left of Windows. So we must remain vigilant.

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