Open Source will not kill off Microsoft

Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell said that most research into the OSS movement has focused on the organisation and management issues, that makes Open Source look good.

However, Ghemawat and Casadesus-Masanell say that if you look at the questions of competitive dynamics, you get a different equation that favours the Vole much better.

In their imaginatively titled paper Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows, the pair say that neither Windows or Linux is likely to be forced out of the market. Vole has too much market share and OSS offers too many benefits for users to be pushed out, they say. There is a long interview with the pair here, in which they describe "a dynamic mixed duopoly model" in which a profit-maximising competitor, played by Vole in a trench coat, interacts with zero price competition.

The model factored in all the evil that Microsoft could do to protect itself, for example, using piracy to strategically to improve its market position. It was not so daft, the pair said that countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate, which suggests that Vole could use piracy to get higher profits and damage Linux.

However what ever the two sides do, it looks like Vole and Linux will be able to tough it out against each other for years, with no clear winner ever emerging. µ