On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 11:00 -0700, John Andersen wrote:
People ACCPET it.
Vendors put windows on machines because they signed contracts forcing them to do so. They have become convinced that in order to be able to do anything they need the same software as everybody else, even when they are just a home user reading email and surfing the web.
This is a defacto LOCK IN. This is NOT a user Choice. It took Microsoft 20 years to build this lock in and it will have to be unbuilt brick by brick.
The face-plant that is Vista is the best opportunity to do this in years.
The Mac vs PC ads on television show that apple clearly understands this.
Novell does not understand that this is the best time to go after Microsoft customers, and because they make no money off of opensuse they really have no incentive to even try.
Amen brother. openSUSE is an amazing operating system that users WOULD use had they know about it. And Novell could certainly position themselves to make money off of it.
The demise of the commercial Boxed Set as we used to have with SuSE (gmbh) is one of the biggest blunders in history. I, and a lot of people I know always purchased the full boxed set. Now, Novell acts like they don't even want my money, releasing the boxed set Late, Incomplete, and Broken.
I've said this so many times, and many have backed me up. Without repeating another long "Boxed Sets" thread (They're out there though), I will say that Novell has cut another incentive to buy the boxed sets: Email from novellcc@novell.com: "Beginning May 1st, 2008, your Novell service requests will need to be registered online at http://support.novell.com rather than calling your local support center. This is a significant change from our traditional model of registering service requests via phone. However, if you have a mission critical system which is completely down, please register your service request by phone with your local Novell Support Center." So now they've even taken away the phone support, one of the most important remaining incentives to buy the boxed editions. I know the arguments that the community is better, and I agree, but most users want a phone number to call and someone at the other end. This cements the real problem with openSUSE as I see it. I hear people from Fedora complaining all the time that the Linux community see them as Red Hat Enterprise's testing ground. I think we face a similar problem: Novell sees us as SLED's testing ground. openSUSE has so much potential to be a great home user/consumer alternative to Windows, in the sense that SLED was for enterprises. But they refuse to do anything about it. They do provide a lot of hardware and other services to openSUSE, as well as keep many core contributors paid and employed, for which we are grateful, but they're ignoring our potential as a serious competitor.
-- ----------JSA--------- -- Kevin "Yo" Dupuy | Public Mail <kevin.dupuy@opensuse.org> | Yo.media: 225-590-5961 Swift Change for a Green Future: Kat Swift for President www.VoteSwift.org
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