Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Apr 2009 22:32 UTC
According to Canonical head honcho Mark Shuttleworth, Windows 7 presents the ideal opportunity for Linux to gain significant inroads into the desktop market. He said so in an interview with InternetNews. While I certainly do hope so, an eerie sense of deja vu creeps up on me: isn't this like the 923298th opportunity where Linux is supposed to make inroads into the desktop market?
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Member since:
2008-05-27
You're perfect linuxhaters fodder, honestly.
How many text editor does an accountant, physician, secretary need? If you're in the IT business, sure, you need a great one, if not, you DO NOT CARE. And this is the desktop segment.
And maybe I want to print my photo, why do you care? Point is that most Linux applications find it very hard to strike a balance between features and simplicity. Gpicview is a clone of the Windows image viewer, I believe. And it freaking lacks a print button!
Gwenview is ok, but until recently I would have hardly called it "lightweight".
>>Numbers matter only when you have the basic functionalities in place.
> Which you have not shown that Linux doesn't.
I want to edit safely the most popular Office document formats in the world, knowing that whoever receives the file won't have it mangled up.
Read this:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html
[...]
This calculus means that eliminating barriers to switching is the most important thing you have to do if you want to take over an existing market, because eliminating just one barrier will likely double your sales.
[...]
And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently.
Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology.
As long as Linux can't beat feature for feature Microsoft (considering the things that customers want, which would mean that there should be some sort of market research), Linux is never going past 1-2-3-5% of desktop market share.
And I'm just being nice, thing of all the Windows only applications which are market leaders in their field, and which all have nice different file formats which you need to read and write.
Have a nice day.