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Microsoft: Linux developers are paid more

According to a Microsoft-funded study reported in the Register, Linux developers are paid more than embedded Windows developers. (If I were a CS undergraduate again, I know what I'd play with on the weekends. :-) Thanks, Bill!)

John Lettice's meta-analysis is pretty interesting: Microsoft's study would like to show that Linux is more expensive and risky to choose as a platform, but it seems more likely that people choose Linux for projects that are inherently more risky (and have a higher potential return):

Windows, in all its many and varied forms, is about commoditisation. Microsoft offers tightly defined and controlled platforms together with a wealth of standard tools, Ts & Cs and support packages for developers to work with, so it's fairly cheap and easy to produce products that are pretty similar to other people's products. Microsoft also, from way back in the 80s, has pushed the industrialisation of the development process. The result as far as hardware is concerned has been that differentiation and price have been eroded, and if you want to compete - with, say, Dell and HP - in the commodity handheld computer market you need to keep your team size down and your ambitions modest.

Avoiding commoditisation while sticking in the Windows arena is however hard, and quite probably a suicide mission, so if you don't want to go on it you go somewhere else instead, check? You don't necessarily go for Linux (Krasner's Linux versus Windows focus is in this sense artificial), but whatever you go for you're likely to be spending more on development than you would by taking the Windows commoditisation route. And your developers are more likely to be more expensive, goof-off prone geeks than cheaper, downtrodden code-monkeys.[...]

High risk projects that are possibly aimed at new categories we think may exist are more expensive and fail more often, but produce higher rewards when they hit the spot. Commoditised categories result in low risk projects, but the rewards are also lowered, and there's a case for saying that, where there is an overall objective of commoditisation, innovation dies.

This fits really well with my experience of embedded Linux. Linux is strong in networking. It's reasonably easy to build commodity firewall, webserver or storage appliances on Linux, and indeed many companies do just that — and with correspondingly low margins in general. Conversely, if you wanted to produce a mass-market PDA with little engineering effort, the sane course at the moment would be to licence PalmOS or WinCE. Of course (in both cases) just slapping some existing software on a box and calling it an appliance is not generally a path to riches, unless you can produce or distribute far cheaper than everyone else.

Personally I'd rather work on projects that are innovative and exciting, even if they're more risky.

posted Mon 21 Jul 2003 in /software/linux | link

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