The big missing thing is desktop software that a business can use and adapt for their own needs. I think that there's been enough emphasis on the sexy Internet stuff and not enough on the actual things that people make in the real world that creates real wealth. Let's look at the printing industry - which is what I know. The graphics/prepress people use Macs and you won't move them off those until Gilbralta crumbles. For the admin side, print businesses buy prepackaged software that is industry specific. Creditors and debtors lists, an accounting package, an estimating and production package, time and cost, small word processor for quote letters, job tickets, email stuff and other bits and pieces. All the packages around run on windows. These days the usual package sells for about 25 - 40 grand PLUS whatever the customer has to spend on Windows licenses and hardware. A medium sized operation will have to put up something like 80 - 100 grand for turnkey operation for say 5 - 10 users. Then there is the maintenance and help desks costs and customization costs and on and on. This stuff can run around $400 - 600 per month just for a basic package. And this industry is just a sample of manufacturing industries in general. 'Tha's gold in them tha' hills' as the yankees say. Anyone interested in putting together a prepackaged program for Linux for manufacturing anything, let me know. I'm NOT a programmer, but I know what a package has got to look like and what it has to do. I wouldn't be concerned if the source code was given away with it ... the vast bulk of potential buyers wouldn't know source code if they saw it let alone what to do with it. They just want a program up and running to run their business that works without causing too much trouble or costing too much. The money's in the service side. The place I work has about 30 people using PCs and I'm the only one there who knows about scandisk and defrag. Everyone else has been calling in the hardware people when their machines slow down who then charge a couple of hundred bucks to run scandisk and defrag. All the employees do, all they have time to do and all they know is to go into the industry specific program and do their job. Anyone with further interest in creating manufacturing software, my address is somewhere on this message. Richard -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
