cold water on linux

[Joel Hammer]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 09:11:54AM -0400, Net Llama! wrote:
> Now Lindows has just been stupid.  They're taking on MS with a product
> that is mediocre at best, and using Walmart as their primary retail outlet.
> No company can sell products at Walmart and expect to make any profit
> unless they are moving enormous volume.

I think the best way to regard lindows was an attempt
to use a novel marketing plan (yearly fixed payment
for essentially unlimited software) to market to home
users. They decided to attack the destop, likely figuring
if they could get a 1% market share they would be in
deep clover.

I have been using lindows for a couple of years. It is the
most user friendly linux yet. ALMOST everything downloads
and works easily from the warehouse. If lindows can't
get average users to use linux, forget about linux on the
desktop for another 5-10 years, maybe in our professional
lifetimes.

The odd thing is that I know that most desktops in my
corporation, and there are a lot of them, don't need
windows. Now, if linux were cheaper, there would be
considerable savings for the corporation. I just don't know
what kind of deal MS offers large corporations. What I do
know is that typing with vim is much faster than typing
with any other wordprocessor. Why use MS word for average
typing tasks?  Just boggles the mind.

The only ray of hope might come from Europe, where
xenopobic governments might declare proprietary (US)
software verboten. But, what to replace it? I sometimes
wonder why such govt's don't just buy up wordperfect and
quattropro, etc, and make all their govt workers (1/4th
of French workers, for example), use it. Make wordperfect
open source, even. Anything to beat back the encroachment
of MS proprietary software. I think people just take the
easiest way.

Well, MS is reporting record revenues but was hit by legal
actions and stock options. The sky is clear for MS.

Joel