Return to the Press page

LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 13, 2013

A report from pgCon 2013

Little things that matter in language design

Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Mozilla: Curiouser and Curiouser (IT-Director)

[Posted April 21, 2004 by corbet]

Recommended reading: Robin Bloor's followup to his "Will Mozilla Fly?" article on IT-Director.com. "One of Microsoft's problems is that its interface designers suck. I believe that Microsoft is repeating a mistake IBM made in the 1990s. IBM was afraid of the PC market at first, but then it launched the IBM PC and very quickly took control of the market. It thought it had won, but actually it had lost. The PC players quickly got big enough and ugly enough to block IBM. The same is happening to Microsoft and Open Source is what's bringing the giant down."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 16:55 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]

Interesting that Mr. Bloor proceeds effortlessly from using FireFox on Windows to accepting the notion of, at least, trying the Linux Desktop (*Office, Ximian/Gnome, KDE, etc) this year. Perhaps those who fear Open Source on proprietary platforms should take note and solace from this natural progression.

Mozilla: Curiouser and Curiouser (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 22, 2004 18:44 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Perhaps those who fear Open Source on proprietary platforms should take note

Indeed. By percentage, few business will jump into the pool, instead they wade in. OpenOffice.org on Windows will prove over time to be a nice facilitator for gradual migration from Windows desktops to GNU/Linux ones.

Mozilla: Curiouser and Curiouser (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 22, 2004 17:49 UTC (Thu) by blayne (guest, #19468) [Link]

I've noticed something that I think might be slowing the inevitable open source movement. Many people try open source applications on Windows. But the Linux versions are usually much better, almost if a Windows version is an afterthought. Many Windows users are essentially comparing down level versions of open source applications. Of course, they're still typically quite impressed, but not as blown away as they'd be if they were using the Linux versions.

If someone wanted to accelerate the movement to open source software, I think a good live CD with best-of-breed open source applications would be a good starting place. Of course, Linux geeks will always argue over KDE vs. Gnome, and other similar matters, but most Windows users would be happy with any nice GUI version of Linux that was stable and had a good email package, browser, word processor, MP3 player, etc.

In summary, it's going to happen, it's only a matter of when. I've been surprised that it's taken as long as it has. "This is the year of Linux!" Fifth year in a row, maybe for real this time.