Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Zygo Blaxell) | Subject | Re: If Linux is to succeed | Date | 24 Jan 1997 05:14:40 -0500 |
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In article <9701231427.ZM8441@platypus>, Jason Benderly <jbenderl@PaineWebber.COM> wrote: >Sorry for the waste of bandwidth but the subject is >the most important one facing Linux, and it has been >mentioned on the list.
I second the motion to have a separate list for Linux advocacy ("linux-future"); I'll probably be subscribed the same day it's created, unless I've missed it already. All this *technical* discussion about the Linux kernel gets in the way of the interesting topics. I assume that everyone who doesn't care has killfiled the subject by now. ;-)
>The Linux community should also shed the notion that everything >should be free. Prices should not be what they are for Sun or HP >products (multi thousand dollars for a GUI painter) but should >be similar to PC market prices. I know I am willing to spend some >cash.
Adobe, Sun, and HP get most of their business from large customers; they don't really have the infrastructure for dealing with millions of individual users.
Quote from my boss: "What the hell is taking [the WINE project] so long? Can they solve their problems if we just gave them money? We have to pay for dozens of Win95 licenses *anyway* so it's not like it makes a difference to us to give the money to someone else."
It will be interesting to see if non-MS implementations of MS API can compete at all. I wonder how much real financial loss MS incurred when people gave up on MS and switched to something else because the new Win95 apps wouldn't run under WABI or OS/2? Until Microsoft has market pressure of this kind, they aren't going anywhere.
The big problem for Windows clone vendors is that there's very little profit margin in it and a lot of risk. The cheapest working Windoze implementation is still a PC running Microsoft you-know-what (remember that the reason Microsoft did so well is that the clone vendors took over the lionshare of PC sales from IBM by selling much cheaper machines). OS/2's Windows implementation is sometimes better than rebooting the machine into Win95 and costs less than keeping extra partitions around if you *must* run or develop OS/2 apps. Sun's WABI is cheaper than buying thousands of Windows boxes for your company, if you already have Sparcs with X terminals lying around. Administration also scales better; WABI can maintain the low sysadmin-to-user ratios customers are used to with Unix. WINE is free software and the same cheap hardware, but it was incomplete the last time I checked.
>Microsoft operating systems are second rate. Everyone knows that. >Microsoft applications and applications architectures are the very best.
Half of the Microsoft applications are horrible, and the other half only exist to solve problems created by the first half. Several application features in Windows don't exist in other places because the problems they solve just aren't there.
>Everyone knows that too, and that is why they hold 90% of the market.
There isn't much space in business plans for explaining why, despite holding 80-90% of the software market, Microsoft is not better.
-- Zygo Blaxell. Unix/soft/hardware/firewall/security guru. 10th place, ACM Intl Prog Contest, 1995. Admin Linux+Solaris for food, Tshirts, anime. Pager: 1613 7608572. "I gave up $1000 to avoid working on windoze... *sigh*"-Amy Fong. "smb is a microsoft toy, like a "child" protocol that never matured"-S Boisjoli.
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