this article makes me ask…even though M$ makes billions, is the world wide dependance on windows in the trillions…or more?
Anyone know of a study on this?
What are you asking, exactly? I’m afraid your question doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
Let me clarify…if Microsoft windows ceased to work all of a sudden on all desktop computers on the planet, some critical error that caused it to fail en masse-say a design flaw. What would the economic impact be, and, can we put a number on this kind of effect in $$?
Everyone would switch to Linux?
Seriously, I’m not sure there’s really a factual answer here. Undoubtedly, such an event would have severe repercussions, but for most applications, switching operating systems wouldn’t be the end of the world; it would just mean some downtime. Doubtless there are purpose-built applications which are only available to run on Windows, and companies using such proprietary software would have to scramble to implement a new solution. There would be downtime, to be sure. But, calculating even a reasonable ballpark figure is probably not possible–there are simply too many variables to deal with. Undoubtedly, it wouldn’t be pretty. Fortunately, such a scenario is extraordinarily unlikely.
If they all just ceased functioning, it would be disastrous. Windows runs plenty of servers as well as just desktop computers and that is where all the real problems lie.
Linux and other types of servers would still be running but these types of things get so intertwined that there could be domino effects as well.
If you are interested in this topic, you need to go back and read the biggest doomsday scenarios predicted for Y2K. That is basically what would happen.
Well when you hear about some company getting hit with a virus and it costing millions of dollars–yet no one seems to feel any effect. Essentially where that “millions of dollars” comes from is all the money that was wasted or not made because there were several thousand employees sitting around on their thumbs for a couple of hours while the techies figured out and distributed some sort of fix.
If Windows failed–and ignoring the possibility of everything going batshit just because people felt like it–you would largely have the same thing–just on a larger scale. Some infrastructure things would be effected (though I doubt much as anything running anything all that central is probably some twenty year old COBOL app running on some Government heavily modified one-off UNIX flavor–again from twenty years ago) but for the most part it would mean that a lot of businesses would have to send everyone home for a week while they waited for MS to release a fix. Of course that fix would most likely be proliferated over Linux, and most probably a lot of companies would probably start giving a move to *NIX a harder thunking–but MS would still probably come out of it as the 790 pound gorilla (down from 800.)
Well, for one thing my stock options would be worth a fortune.
Seriously, it would be a disaster. Not for things using Office, since Open Office could handle the great majority of them. But only really big companies have their applicatons ported to Linux - lots of stuff wouldn’t be available, and porting information to a new application isn’t all that easy.
I once worked as a temp for a hedge fund in New York. First of all, it was all run on windows technology. All computers ran XP and used exchange for email and scheduling, etc. This could probably be done on linux through other sources, but what would be really hard would be all of the Visual Basic custom software written for the traders. That would take ages to redo and the paperwork in this place isn’t exactly in order. I have no idea how they keep up with open trades. In any case, once I was there and the internet went down for about 5 minutes and it was like a bomb had gone off. Everyone went into panic mode. I think if XP were to stop working, then it would be at least a week before these guys could resume operations. And forget Bloomberg terminals. Try to get that running on linux
Any problem in Windows that was both serious enough that it caused complete failure in a system and basic enough that it appeared in all versions of Windows on all hardware would be found and debugged in hours, if not minutes. The fix would be pushed out on every available pipe and the sizeable proportion of servers running Linux would enable people to get it. It would be a big disruption, but it’s not like people would have to migrate to other platforms en masse.
What this tells me is that Microsoft has a massive responsibility, and when people think of them as “lucky” to be on top of the world, to be honest, as a software developer who has tens of thousands of people using stuff I built at any given moment, I thank my lucky stars my software is not mission critical and merely for education/entertainment. I wouldn’t trade that massive responsibility for all the billions in the world.
This question is pretty meaningless, though. Computer programs don’t just decide to stop working. You might as well ask, what happens if all cars stop working?
Even if some critical bug did kill every Windows machine on the planet, Microsoft could always just patch the OS. It would be a bit tricky – they’d have to boot up an alternative OS, probably a flavour of Unix, find the bug and recompile the system. Then they’d have to come up with some way of distributing the patch – bootable CD-ROMs would probably be the method of choice. A lot of things would grind to a halt in the meantime, but I think that long-term it would just be a hiccup in the economy(although Windows would lose major credibility and likely marketshare).
You’re right…I just wanted to further assess the idea of how important Microsoft is to our functioning as a society. For example, perhaps it is unlikely that MS Windows wont just stop working, but a lack of innovation or creativity can also have some if not more effect on all of our lives. For example, we still suffer with single point interfaces on machines when technology exists to accept multiple points of interaction in not only a two dimentional surface, but even a three dimentional workspace. I see no significant advances in the user interface (hardware) in the past 30 years, with the exception, perhaps, of the trackball.
anyhoo, just a thought.
After 9/11, airtravel all but stopped, for what; 2 weeks?
Sort of the same thing, isn’t it?
Major, major infrastructure shut down in a matter of hours.
[sub]I did say sort of the same thing…[/sub]
Just trying to draw a comparison.
No, it doesn’t. Read your licensing agreements with MS and tell me how many times they disclaim all responsibility for anything regardless of what happens and how much you lose.
MS has probably contracted with some large corporations to provide support and software sufficient to keep that corporation’s networks running, but for most of the people running Windows their responsibility is nil.
You can’t compare an operating system to a car. Programs can and do just stop working because of viruses, programming errors, and weird stuff like a small voltage drop, for instance. Files of just a few kilobytes of code (worms/viruses) have shut down entire networks around the world in just hours.
If Microsoft really wanted to, I don’t see why they couldn’t insert hidden code to delete everyone’s hard disks at a future time. However unlikely, that would certainly screw us up.
True, but I really doubt that any virus could ever disable every Windows machine in the world. A programming error would have to be some incredibly stupid one involving dates to affect every Windows machine at the same time. It’s just so incredibly unlikely.
Well, other than everybody suing them for it. I realize that the EULA says that MS is not responsible for any loss of data, but I doubt that it would apply in the case of malicious loss of data.
I apologize for not being clearer, I meant moral / public responsibility, not legal responsibility, and yes, if “terrorists” managed to take over microsoft or infiltrate it, or buy a controlling share in it…they could likely do a lot of damage to the world, although Id like to assume they have pretty good security and checks against such an unlikely event.
Doubtful. I certainly have never once seen it acting like it has any moral or public responsibility whatsoever. (No, Bill Gates’s private philanthropy does not count, any more than the private philanthropy of any other Microsoft employee.)
This is quite a different issue, and probably belongs in its own thread, but can you possibly think of a scenario where a terrorist-owned corporation could do serious damage to anyone without breaking existing laws?
I didn’t think of this. Indeed, probably the biggest hastle would be compiling Windows without a running Windows box. Rewriting the whole thing as GCC compatible would probably take a bit, so they would probably need to first get a hacked-up mini-Windows with just the DLLs to run Visual-C, and compile it under UNIX. Of course they may discover the error in that process since it would have to be something pretty central.
Come on guys, this is all a little silly.
A computer isn’t some mystery box. It’s a machine. Given the same inputs, it does the same thing, over and over again, every time. If you somehow magically had a bug in every windows system in the world that caused it to cease to run after a certain date, you fire up a machine with its date set to some prior date that you know works, fix the bug, then set the date back properly. There may be a lot of reloading things from backups, but there’s certainly no reason to move to unix or port the entire OS to gcc or any other nonsense.
There is also no way that a virus can take out every system in the world, because some systems just plain aren’t connected to a network. And let’s all keep in mind that the worst case scenario for a virus is that you have to wipe the system and start over. You’ll probably spend more time reloading your applications and data than you’ll spend fixing the OS.
The worst case scenario that I can come up with in my head is that the internet gets royally screwed for a few days, and businesses have to deal with things that for the vast majority are a bunch of minor headaches, and for a small minority of businesses, are major issues. The worst of the bunch would be a very small number of businesses that might be shut down completely until they get a fix, which I can’t imagine would take more than a week or two. The total economic impact would be measured in trillions of dollars, but the total impact on the world economy would still be rather small. It’s just not a doomsday scenario.