Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) [LWN.net]

Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

Posted Oct 29, 2004 21:09 UTC (Fri) by daveB49 (guest, #25748)
In reply to: Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) by mmarq
Parent article: Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

It won't be stalled very much - or for very long. There is a huge
movement out there to move away from MS (and generally towards Linux).
It's taken a long time to get going but it has momentum that even MS
can't stop.

More than half of the systems out there are pre-XP, most of them running
on older machines that can't even run XP. MS has stopped supporting those
operating systems, XP is in the headlines every day with security issues,
so where are these people going to turn. Certainly not all to buying new
computers with XP. The 'light' versions that they're putting out has far
less going for it than Linux, and it's only available on new boxes
anyway.

Linux distos have come a very long way in the last couple of years. As
the market share starts to grow, the pace of development will increase.
MS can't maintain the 'discounts' and all of the costs of programming
patches without starting to hurt. They already had to scale back on
Longhorn - which will need a very high level system to run - because they
had to put their programmers onto SP2 (which doesn't make them any
money).

Certainly their little tricks should be published - and they getting
published, more and more of them all the time.

This is already moving a lot faster than most people were predicting even
a couple of years ago.

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Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

Posted Oct 29, 2004 22:58 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Right. Besides, it's not like Microsoft hasn't been trying for years now to cut Linux off at the knee.

Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

Posted Oct 29, 2004 23:26 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" More than half of the systems out there are pre-XP, most of them running
on older machines that can't even run XP. MS has stopped supporting those
operating systems, XP is in the headlines every day with security issues,
so where are these people going to turn... "

Without any effort of educating them, and user-friendness, they will again turn to Microsoft of course... without a shred of a doubt.

Worst Microsoft is deceiving them to belive they are going to be safe, and adding more pain to the injury,... they are saying they are more save them Linux!!!...gush!!!...

Well my experience on the field, tells me that that kind of users "trend" to support an amazing dose of abuse from Microsoft... even graduated people inside entreprises... they know something, or at least they belive they know something about computers... Microsoft led them to think so... its something they adquired, and want to preserve as valuable... and the last thing they want is some ' new wave' guy to demonstrate that they dont know letterly nothing about computers...

The truth in face of the ever growing complexity of computer 'things', as stricked as intuition, and so these people domestic/SOHO/SME mostly trend to stick with what they belive they know and dominate... virus, worms, BSODs, everything... so Win9x has still a substancial base of installations(economic reason is not the primary reason).

Some reposition of the truth is badly needed here, studies, press divulgation,... and there is where IBM, HP, RH, Novell should enter strong.

Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

Posted Oct 29, 2004 23:34 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

Experience should be different from country to country, but the 'general picture' would be very close, i belive.

Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)

Posted Oct 30, 2004 2:02 UTC (Sat) by daveB49 (guest, #25748) [Link]

Microsoft is giving Linux lots of press coverage, and thanks to the fact
that Steve B represents the worst side of MS (and that's saying
something) there are a lot of people having a look to see what it's all
about.

Yes we need to educate people - it isn't going to happen overnight, but
we are starting to get somewhere.

I use google news canada for my news headlines. There's at least 5 Linux
items every week these days, a year ago you barely saw Linux mentioned at
all, and most of these items are positive towards Linux. There's also a
lot of bad-news stuff on MS.