On 11/14/06, Lev Lafayette <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 18:25 -0500, Joe Zitnik wrote:
You underestimate people.
I work in an enterprise with less than a thousand people. Because of those people, we went from a Word Perfect shop to a MS Office shop. Why, because they ran it at home. People see Microsoft advertising everywhere, and that's what drives their decisions. I'd wager no one, and I mean no one, at our organization has ever heard of Ubuntu, or most any other flavor of Linux. Worse yet, the CEOs haven't either. Do you think they run MS because it's technically superior? To the contrary, MS failings are widely publicized, and it's STILL dominant. You expect those people to choose Linux?
Just for the record, when Linux Users Victoria did their Software Freedom Day walk around Melbourne handing out Ubuntu CDs, not only were people aware of Linux, they were also aware of Ubuntu as a distribution.
Maybe that's just Melbourne, but I think it's more general. So I'll take you up on your wager. Gentleman's bet of course. Run a survey of your less than 1,000 people and I bet you $1 that, apart from yourself, someone has heard of Ubuntu.
Ball in your court,
People have heard of Linux. But people like their computers to work all the time and they really like it even more when the computer does no change on them. Regular joe user gets heart palpitations when the "web browser" icon that launchers their web browsers gets moved from the top left to the top right hand of the screen. They really don't like it when their entire system does a 180 degree turn on them that they didn't ask for. People are creatures of habit and they like what they are used to. -- jjgitties, "*We* need to convince OpenSUSE to fork, or let 'em die. To bad, it is a wonderful Distro. But their parent company is NOT our friend."