>-----Original Message-----
>From: Benjamin Sher [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 6:01 AM
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: [newbie] gates gets Linux
>
>Bottom line: Until Linux, which is rich in thousands of applications,
>has an equally vast and varied collection of CONSUMER applications of
>every sort, it won't quite be ready for prime time. And this won't
>happen till Linux is much more popular. The old chicken and egg problem:
>no consumer applications until there is a consumer market for Linux big
>enough to justify it, and no consumer market until there are
>applications.
>
And this won't happen until it's easy enough for my mom, wife, and brother
to use and until the elite hacker attitude subsides. Linux is still a
paradise for coders not users... However, most linux users don't care about
running Quicken and such, for linux to win they must pull users off of
Windows and onto linux (these are the only converts, you won't get a lot of
MAC users to give up their OS). The intrinsic road block of linux is the
"cult" personality, like MAC and BSD, us folks are generally emotionally
tied to the OS. Most windows users couldn't give a flying flip that they
are using Windows they just want integrated office products and the facility
offered by those products (and to be able to run their games). They don't
want to be system administrators, just like I don't want to be a car
mechanic. I want my car to work when I drive it off the lot. I will never
upgrade the stereo or engine or interior, i'm just not interested in doing
that. But this isn't a morally depraved behavior, it's just the way it is.
>Meanwhile, Linux as an OS, with its great and beautiful and configurable
>new graphical KDE and Gnome desktops
>
The thing is most ordinary users don't care what the OS is they care about
the interface and how easy it is to get their job done and how easy it is to
integrate their favorite apps. I don't think most folks even mess with
their Windows settings. (Just showing my wife the "Send To" mechanism in
Explorer is like pulling teeth!) Having said that, may the gods be praised
for the efforts of the KDE and Gnome folks but there is still much road to
build.
The thing that should strike fear into the marrow of our bones is that if MS
decided to build a flavor of Linux I think it would be a reasonable
assumption that people like my mom and brother would ditch the Windows
environment and adopt the linux platform because they don't care out the OS,
they care about the usabilty of the products and the availablity of the
products. We laugh about the MS Linux website parody, but really, if MS
ever decided to distribute a flavor of linux I believe they would give
Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat, and etc. a very hard run for their money. People
would actually be willing to give their hard earned money for this new very
stable linux distrbution version of "Windows", very few of us have probably
given a dime to Mandrake for all their hard work. If MFC, VB, and COM was
made available for linux you can be sure that applications would start to
appear like crazy.
MS has enough resources and money to pull this off - it might not ever
happen - but if it did it would be a very bad thing. All sorts of
bastardizations of perl, python, syslog, cron, you name it MS will tweak it
to lock my family into their version of linux.
>I would guess that the most important of all browsers is Mozilla because,
>when it is completed this
>spring, it will spawn dozens of branded versions, which, while building
>on Mozilla, will add special features of their own. In other words,
>Internet Explorer will find itself faced not with one derivated, namely,
>Netscape 6 but with dozens of equally powerful (and superior) browsers
>all built on the open-source Mozilla. This will be good for the
>consumers acorss all platforms and a last laugh at Microsoft with a
>vengeance. There is already one major spinoff of Mozilla called Beonex.
>It's still not quite ready, either. But by the end of the coming year,
>IE will find itself outgunned on every front by the Mozilla browsers
>(under a variety of brands) which they themselves caused by forcing
>Netscape to go open-source. It will be sweet revenge on Microsoft.
>
I hope so, but my pessimism tells me that like the borg MS will adapt,
out-feature, and overcome...
