But what I am sayin gis if you standardize by international means, other than microsoft products, then give concessions to the large companies to use the products with those standards, then you could essentially change the market by administrative means, and thereby cause a scramble to make suites that utilize the new formats, and the companies making the products will have to work together to make sure that the formats can go between systems. -----Original Message----- From: Jerry Feldman [mailto:gerry.feldman@compaq.com] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 3:54 PM To: 'SLE-list' Subject: RE: [SLE] This should turn some heads.... There is a distro that tries to do that, Lindows. They just successfully defended a lawsuit brought by Microsoft. But, I don't entirely agree. Windows does change things on every release. On 28 Mar 2002 at 15:11, Michael Garabedian wrote:
You forget that windows has already trained most of the general populace to use its products, people don't want to unlearn how to do things, you would need to create a desktop that looks and feels like microsoft but it is a part of linux. That is the only way it would work.
-----Original Message----- From: Kevin McLauchlan [mailto:kmclauchlan@chrysalis-its.com] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 2:35 PM To: John Scott Cc: SLE-list Subject: Re: [SLE] This should turn some heads....
On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 12:28, John Scott wrote:
Secondly, if you read columns on LinuxPlanet.com, LinuxToday.com, LinuxJournal, ZDNet et. al., you see a real who's who of the linux community saying, if only they could get their wife/mother/child to forsake AOL/Quicken/Photoshop they wouldn't have windows at home at all. Now they won't have to forsake anything. Once they prove they no longer need Windows, they will no longer buy Windows. Remember, everyone who has someone else in their house or office who "needs" Windows has already tried to convince them that the linux equivalent is "just as good" and failed. When you can show your wife she can use AOL on the kde desktop, you'll be in business. In the long run, this will
make linux more financially viable for software companies who only support Windows today. This can only be good for the rest of us. Keep an open mind.
Did you notice who you used as examples of the people who need to be weaned from Windows/AOL? Probably only two percent of the people in this list would have made a statement like that in reference to fathers, brothers and nephews.
OK, everybody, pause for a moment, shake your head, and then look around you. How many of the people posting to this list -- either asking or answering -- are women?
Bingo.
There you have the target audience. Sure, there are plenty of savvy women entering programming and IT-support jobs, but they are still vastly outnumbered in two ways.
In the software and IT trades, they are still, by far, the minority. In the rest of the workforce, they are the practical people to whom the OS and the tools are just something that either helps or hinders them in "getting the job done"... whatever "the job" might happen to be. For the most part, they are not the people who willingly (even eagerly...) spend time tinkering with the OS and the tools, and only grudgingly return to their "real work" when they absolutely hafta.
I just described most of you, didn't I.... <g>
Well, it's women and non-techy men who need to see the value in Linux on the desktop, and from where I sit, they are still staying away in droves.
And for you few women who happen to read this... bless you! but you probably don't understand the non-techy women and men any better than do most of the people on this list, to whom figuring out why their printing no longer works is actually the FUN part of the day.
Y'see, it's all very well to say how stable and secure Linux is, compared to Windoze, but that's just not an impressive statement to the average Windoze user. As far as they are concerned, downtime because a config file got hosed, or because the RPMs got confused about dependencies again... is no different from downtime because Word has a memory leak that causes the accounting system to freeze.
When you think about it, there's a lot of truth to the idea that open source applications have many more hackers eagerly fixing every bug that is discovered... but then you have the other side of the coin... many more people introducing new bugs...
I mean, I try to avoid pre-release stuff and the unstable versions and all that, but still, it's no exaggeration to say that I've got something broken on my Linux system about twice a week, and that I waste a good 25% of my work week on trying to find/apply the fixes or learn the workarounds. Compare that with something going blooey every couple of months in Windoze.
My boss -- a woman -- would just not stand for that amount of ongoing trouble. She doesn't want to learn the OS. She'd be willing to learn some tips and tricks to get the most out of her apps, but that's it. If you tried to tell her that her latest grief is not a bug or bad OS design (Windoze?), but just a config problem that doesn't need more than a couple of hours of web searching and tinkering (just like the one on Monday, and the other problem last Thursday and...)... she'd boot you out of her office, and rightly so.
That's who needs to be convinced regarding Linux on the desktop. Not somebody who loves to tinker, but rather somebody who has a demanding job to perform, and needs the OS and the apps to get the hell out of the way.
However, Uncle Bill is certainly doing his part to push people away from Windoze (look at XP, after all), so the only corporate options would seem to be either Linux on millions of desktops, or else a return to UNIX terminals everywhere, working off of big central servers.
There's a damn good economic case to be made for the UNIX solution. If you switch everybody to Linux with independent OS and application suites on every desktop, you need at least as many trained IT people to keep them all working as you do in a Windows environment. BUT, if everybody has an expensive terminal that can only run applications from UNIX servers in the IT room, then a sizable company requires only a couple of IT/admin wonks in the server room and they might need to fix a desktop terminal every other month or so, from a population of 1000+. In other words, the hardware is costly, but it hardly ever breaks, and all of the software is maintained (untouchable) on the servers, so it hardly ever breaks. You (a corporation) pay up front, but you save on downtime and IT personnel).
THAT is the competition in the struggle to get people away from Windoze. Guess which one my boss would approve?
Cheerio,
/kevin
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-- Jerry Feldman Portfolio Partner Engineering 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/ Compaq Computer Corp. 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1 Marlboro, Ma. 01752 -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com