On Mon, Jan 07, 2013 at 06:15:47AM -0800, Michael Rasmussen wrote: > And it's not Ubuntu either. > A Samsung Chromebook > http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-top-selling-laptop-doesnt-run-windows-or-mac-os-it-runs-linux-7000009433/
The mudslinging in the replies is more interesting. Here's my bit of wet brown prolixity: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Expanding the landscape 40 years ago, computing meant IBM and DEC. Now it means Windows, games consoles and POSIX/Open (Unix, BSD, Linux, Apache, embedded, ...). Windows still dominates its niche, but that niche is an ever-smaller part of a rapidly diversifying computing landscape. Microsoft needs huge revenue to survive. Even if Linux and BSD and all their many variants are smaller in total size (they aren't), they are starving the giants by reducing both market share and margins. Microsoft can make lucrative marketing deals and produce "vending machine" OSes like Windows 8, but the web is flat, and those deals will only last as long as Microsoft's partners lack the skills to reach their customers directly without sending money to Redmond. Linux is a platform, a way of doing business, a way to add a little frosting on top and deliver a whole cake. For the 90% of companies that are not software or content, it can be a less expensive, lower risk, and more agile way to achieve business goals. Granted, there is much to learn before the open software approach is best for everyone, but the learning accumulates as the number of interactions (the square of the number of participants) in an open system, while it accumulates as the logarithm of the number of participants in a hierarchical system. Metcalfe's law. Google and IBM(!) may be the most public faces of free and open source software, but the real strength is the range of sizes the platform permits. I'm an electrical engineer, not a programmer, but I have found small bugs and patched my own kernel, and much better programmers than I have improved those patches and shared them with the world. Very small companies can rapidly become very big companies (like Google), and very big companies can rapidly become very different big companies (like IBM). Small companies can focus on tiny market niches (small office medical informatics, for example) and provide services and create worldwide communities of fanatically loyal customers. As long as you can abide by "potluck rules" - take something, bring something - you can take a lot more than you bring, given the multiplying effect of the web and the easy customization of open systems. Million dollar problems become ten thousand dollar problems. Four person shops can serve a half a million users. So the big surprise is that in spite of optimizing to serve niche markets, Linux-based Chrome enables a product that can win in a traditionally "big software" niche like consumer notebooks. In time, some of the purchasers of the ChromeBooks will learn that they can hack and customize their devices, and add their skills and insights to the N-squared open network, adding far more value than their dollar spending would at logarithmic/hierarchical Microsoft or Apple. Perhaps some of you have only seen a few pebbles move so far, but deep forces are stirring, and the landslide is inevitable. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
