Peter Cornelius writes: > > There's also an interesting article at > > http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0729.microsoft.html > > It says what I've been thinking. If there isn't an easy to use GUI Linux > for home users, M$ will provide one at a price. > > Peter. >
The article just looked like arrant, slightly paranoid speculation to me. Personally, I find the 'embedded XP' explanation that MS is offering rather more convincing than Barr's suggestions. MS would prefer it if there were not personal computing markets that it didn't at least have a slice of the pie, if not all of it. They already *have* the desktop market. They don't have the embedded systems market: here the market has more players that can go toe-to-toe with MS (PalmOS and Linux being two contenders). Basically, I think MS is likely to be going there with the intention of wooing people away from linux. "But look what *we* can do for you" I think is what they will be saying. "a proprietry GUI. a closed GUI" sure sounds awful scary, but what's the point? Who is their target market? Barr suggests the people who want to try Linux but are too scared to... but where are these people going to be moving *from*? Windows, naturally. Providing an easy transition to a competitor's product sounds insane. Providing MS Office for linux would similarly be a mistake for Microsoft. That merely legitimises Linux as an OS for the office: you might be able to sell marginally more copies of Office, but at the cost of potentially severely damaging their ability to sell copies of XP. To do this, Microsoft either has to make X versions of their Office suite, or they have to make their own GUI as this author suggests. All options are probably not cheap. Now, if you make versions of MS Office than run on Linux computers with XFree86, that just means buinesses are going to think twice about spending money buying Windows XP, which they currently *have* to buy if they want to run Office. This could easily have a spin-off effect of more people starting to run Linux at home, where perhaps they might be more inclined to try out that OpenOffice thing. If they make their own GUI, this will either be a desktop environment running on top of X, 'drop-in' replacement for X, which I guess basically means Microsoft X-Windowing System (perhaps with a few 'extras') or a non-X GUI. If they provide a destop environment running on top of X, like an MS version of Gnome, this well might make everything easy for the user, but just means that more people are going to move to linux, and a good percentage of them might simply ditch a pricey MS GUI. Making their own X might be the best option, as current linux users might well buy it just for better performance (if it gives better performance) but again just seems to be helping out the enemy. If they make their own non-X GUI, then this might succeed in locking people into MS, but I can't see why anyone would want to buy it. You wouldn't be able to run the normal Linux offerings, and presumably most (or many) windows offerings won't run, so their doesn't seem a lot of point when either Linux or Windows would be better for you. It *might* be successful as some sort of Windows-LITE, perhaps. But I don't think MS has anything to gain out of marketing this as 'Linux'. I also suspect it would just be cheaper for them to make a crippled version of Windows somehow, after all, Windows source code and licence fees don't cost Microsoft anything. Just as an asside, Barr says that "many are unhappy with the storied and hallowed X Window system. Some believe it is the primary reason Linux has not grown as quickly on the desktop as it has in the server room". It's true that many people think this, but this is based on misconceptions, as we dicussed in a former thread. The first misconception is that X is old, therefore it can't be any good. I don't think I need to say much about this, suffice to say if you think that age is an argument against anything in and of itself, you should probably consider dumping that fuddy-duddy roman alphabet and moving to something a little more contemporary, like tengwar or shavian. The second misconception is to blame any GUI failings on X. X doesn't do much except draw rectangles and squares and fill them in with colour and report events. Anything you don't like about any GUI is the fault of whoever wrote the GUI, not X. The third misconception is that programming in X is difficult and is holding back development. It's true that X is difficult to program for, but that's why you use a toolkit like GTK+ or Qt or any one of a number of other offerings. It may have held back development in the past, but that has been fixed now. The fourth misconception is that X is big and slow. This might be true of XFree86 to a certain limited extent, but they have versions of X running on PDAs so I don't think this is an issue either. In any case, there's little point for the Free world to ditch all the work that's gone into X and start again, as that will only set them back relative to Microsoft. Barr just seems to be scaremongering to me, quite frankly. His basic argument is to pick on a percieved weakness of Linux (X) and the sight of their enemy approaching (Microsoft), and to claim that the enemy will exploit the weakness and deck us all and ravish our women. It's true that the *GUI* is a weak point of Linux, but he should have *said so* instead of continuing this ritual vilification of X. Basically, I think MS is much better off for the time being keeping its current stance of Linux being a poor choice for the desktop. Anything they do to provide things for it will ruin that image. A.
