Matt Hartley writes on Lockergnome about a former Microsoft employee predicting proprietary software death, or at least Redmons’ products one (full article at http://www.lockergnome.com/linux/2009/05/21/ex-microsoft-programmer-taken-entirely-too-seriously/).

I think that most important thing is something very similar to adverse selection seen in insurance (the phenomena for which those at most risk are those most likely to take insurance for this risk).

Open source software is quite interesting for companies (because of less cost associated, at least at startup), but proprietary software is so present and binded within companies that feels to me quite difficult to substitute it with open sources.

This is true, at most reason, for OSes: if I can agree that funcionalities of a Linux based system (whichever it is) are more usefull and easily available to the power (or not so power) user than those in proprietary systems, on the other side I must admit that Windows is so pervasive in today computing that seems quite impossible to drive it to death in medium term.

There are also other two points:

• People using computers are, in general, not hackers nor power users, nor technical aware people. And this is a barrier to understand and accept  the open source switch;
• Companies that use open source systems rely on a set of tools, functions and other means specifically tied to an OS (think of APIs and DLL on 3270 web emulation packages that are tied, oftenly, to specific OSes and browsers)

So, Bill can sleep well for another couple of decades, maybe loosing some of his tremendous market share, but, definitely not closing his business.

The king is dead (?), so long live the king.

This article also as a comment at http://www.lockergnome.com/linux/2009/05/21/ex-microsoft-programmer-taken-entirely-too-seriously/#comment-91321

and at http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2009/05/26/will-microsoft-endure-ex-employee-presents-good-reasons-it-wont/#comment-8727