I believe the Internet and other daily tools that we use should be diverse. And by that I mean that they should not be in the hands of only one or two big corporations. Competition motivates the creation or development of better products. Plus, competition may make big corporations review how much they charge for their products and, hopefully, bring them down.
Today, Internet Explorer is clearly a better product ever since its main competitor, Firefox, appeared. Here's an example: IE didn't offer the tabbed browsing feature (that is, to open multiple Web pages within the same browser window) until 2005.
"The feature--long offered by IE competitors like Opera, Safari and Firefox, and by browser shells built to run on top of IE--is one of many that Web surfers have said they missed in the aging IE 6," says a CNET article published on June 8, 2005.To me, it's much more convenient and time-efficient to have all my Web pages open within the same window than to have multiple windows, which I think also slows down my computer. So I assume this can be considered a good example on how IE is a better product today.
This takes me back to the article about "Mitchell Baker." She "considers it a success that Firefox has already spurred Microsoft to invest again in browser innovation," and I have to agree with that based on my own experience with Web browsers.
In fact, I read that Microsoft is building a new Web browser: Gazelle. The article says that Microsoft is "hoping [Gazelle] will be more secure than existing browsers while at the same time being able to function as an operating system platform for future web-applications." As we can see, Microsoft is clearly investing in browser innovation.
I must confess, though, that I started using Firefox on a daily basis not too long ago. When my computer crashed a year or so ago and I lost everything that was in it, I got it repaired and had to install Windows again. I guess something went wrong and, almost every time I opened IE, it would crash, an error message would appear, and the pages/tabs I was working on would be closed. Because I had Firefox installed in my computer as well, I started using it. Today, I don't even remember what IE was like. Firefox meets my needs and it never ever crashed or gave me error messages. At work, I will chose Firefox over IE. At UT, I will do that, too. In short, I'm a Firefox adept. :)
I believe the "Diffusion of Innovation Theory" also applies to the open source technologies.
"Diffusion is the process in which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system." (Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations)
Because so many people use open source software and have a good experience, these people spread the word and, as a consequence, other people start trying open source software. If they have a good experience, they will pass the word on to other people, who will try the products, and so on and so forth.
Generally speaking, it takes time for an innovation to reach a lot of people. For several reasons, some take less time (electricity, light) and some take longer (microwave, telephone). So, according to the article about "Mitchell Baker", today, Firefox has a market share of 8-10%. In the future, I expect it to be a much larger number because Firefox will have new adepts/adopters, who will chose it over the leading browser, as it happened to me.
As I was searching the Internet to find out more about open source, I saw that there's an open source software for Photoshop! It's called Gimpshop and, supposedly, is very similar to Photoshop. I'm definitely downloading it and trying it out. If the product really works and has the same features of Photoshop, I think it's great that people don't necessarily need to rely on Adobe, nor they need to contribute to the Adobe monopoly with Photoshop.
And below is an interesting CNET video about Gimpshop and other useful open source software:
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