Valve is releasing a free operating system next year which will be a direct threat to Microsoft’s Windows OS. Dubbed SteamOS<\/p>\n

Valve have of course built a reputation in the computer gaming community for Steam – a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform.<\/p>\n

Steam is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses; in October 2012, Valve expanded the service to include non-gaming software. Though initially developed for use on Microsoft Windows, the client has expanded to include OS X and Linux versions, and clients with limited functionality on the PlayStation 3 console and for both iOS and Android mobile devices. In addition to being a central hub for gaming software, Valve has created a version of Steam with altered functionality to be used in schools for educational software, including a modified version of Portal 2 for teaching science and critical thinking lessons.<\/p>\n

Justin Jaynes writes at Seeking Alpha<\/a> that\u00a0the reason he feels SteamOS has the potential to be a disruptive force to Microsoft due to the sheer size of the user base. As of 2012, Steam had 54 million active users<\/a>. \u00a0Insignificant when you consider that Microsoft projected an active 1.3Billion <\/a>Windows users in 2012<\/p>\n

The argument has some sound rationale but history has proven that even in the face of ‘free’, Microsoft manages to hold on to mainstream advocacy through a legacy of past use and continued new releases and support for core products like Microsoft Office. \u00a0Challengers like LibreOffice have failed to make a significant difference. There are several alternatives to Microsoft Office but are they really alternatives <\/a>that the corporate mainstream will consider particularly now that Microsoft is pushing Office365.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valve is releasing a free operating system next year which will be a direct threat to Microsoft’s Windows OS. Dubbed SteamOS Valve have of course built a reputation in the computer gaming community for Steam – a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform. Steam is used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119,191,189,192,190],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technews","tag-microsoft","tag-msft","tag-steamos","tag-valve","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonesassociates.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}