[Ilugc] Re: Another storm
- From: siva@xxxxxxxxxxx (Sivasankar Chander)
- Date: Sat Nov 27 10:14:24 2004
As for Gnome and KDE and others, they may be great pieces of work
growing very fast, but I doubt whether their numbers are comparable to
Apple's numbers,
Linux on the desktop has passed Apple a while ago - but the numbers
are obviously split over several GUIs.
Usability isn't the only issue here. If Linux *has* made in-roads into
desktop systems, why is it that 30 out of 41 people who responded to the
recent survey on this list dual-boot with Windows?
Because it costs nothing to retain dual-boot capability, and it still
retains the original functionality of the machine, if it becomes
necessary to recover it. For instance, I got a Toshiba notebook 3 years
ago bundled with Windows ME. Instead of nuking Windows ME, I just
re-partitioned it into a little partition of about 1G, and used the
remaining space for several distros of Linux.
Occasionally, you need DOS/Windows functionality to upgrade the flash
BIOS or similar stuff.
Whatever be their reasons, the point to note is that those reasons do
exist.If members of a Linux mailing list find themselves unable to live
without Windows, how do you expect the general public to do so?
I manage without Windows perfectly well - but I'll retain a legacy
fallback mode if it costs me nothing. Simple risk-management.
It's like getting a new car, and
being told that I can keep running my old car if I need to, without
taxes, registration, fuel, etc., at any time. I'll take that option
if I have the space to keep my old car, but that doesn't mean that
I'm going to pay money to buy another model of my old car. That's
the problem that M$ faces now. People aren't willing to pay a high
premium to upgrade. Any time the M$ marketroids come around, you
just have to say the magic phrase 'We're migrating to Linux', and
*boom*, the M$ upgrade licensing fees get discounted by 50%-90%.
The main goal is to get that discount to 100% or more - i.e. force
M$ to pay money to retain customers. That's already happening in
some sectors - XBox, Set-top boxes, Smartphones, etc. It will
spread to Servers and Desktops sooner or later - it's inevitable.
-Siva
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