greed (was)

[Paul Rudin]

Mongryong <Mongryong at sympatico.ca> writes:

> On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 18:05, Brandon Van Every wrote:
> >Ergo the market
> > perception of Linux remains "a hacker's OS" whereas Windows is "a consumer's
> > OS."  Rightly so.
> M$ has won the desktop market - there's no doubt about that.  To try to
> get into the desktop market now would be a waste of money and time.


People are trying, precisely because of money. Not so much home users,
but organisation that have lots of desktop machines. No doubt the
share of the market is tiny at the moment, but if read the various
trade rags, you'll see a steady trickle of contracts to install
networks of linux desktop machines in different places.


I suspect the way Microsoft licencing is going will encourage
this. Windows is used partly because lots of people don't actually buy
all the licences they need. Microsoft's clamping down on this may
actually something of an own goal. Sure they'll extract more money
from those who are actually using their software, but they'll push
more people to actively consider the alternatives and weaken the
perception that windows is the only thing to have on your desktop.