Slashdot Mirror
AOL: Lindows Is Misleading People
jgeelan writes "According to this breaking news item, AOL has apparently said over the weekend that it is going to ask Lindows to change its promotional material after concluding that Lindows is misleading people into thinking that it has a strategic relationship with AOL."
That Lindows is a really shady operation? Everything they do seems a litle scummy.
Reminds me of AIMster.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Why, it even had MSNBC talking about Lindows 2.0 as "AOL's new Netscape OS."
;-)
So this wasn't just a case of Lindows stretching the truth- it was also a case of bad reporting by MSNBC, without whom the "AOL-Lindows" link would never have been brought up (or at least, it would not have been as hyped as it was).
But what if it wasn't just "sloppy reporting"? You have to wonder- why would a site associated with MS hint at a non-existant connection between Lindows and AOL?
I smell a conspiracy here...
Have you seen the Lindows website? They're already a couple steps in the right direction if their next goal is to piss off Apple. Open Apple.com and Lindows.com side-by-side and compare them.
Ummm I'm just reading this and my head begins to hurt. I use linux and I believe it has always been a professional OS.
And rightly so. However, being professional and giving the feel of professional are two very different things. I could make a distrubution of Linux that had only sh and ed for a shell and editting support. Same very powerful (and professional) operating system under the covers, but does it give the feeling of professional? No. It gives the feeling of a college classroom project... maybe high school.
Also, you have to keep in mind the audience that the author was writing for. For him and his readers, a professional OS is not one that you can recompile a kernel on, its one that you can do professional work on. In this arena, professional work is using various Internet tools and writing stories in a somewhat robust word processor. To prove my point, read the article again to see what the author found to be his most valuable applications (Outlook, Office 2000, and IE).
Why does everyone try to compare desktop managers with Windows?
Given that the product name is LINDOWS, a comparsion to Windows doesn't seem too outlandish, does it? But in either case, look at the audience again. Windows is the de-facto standard for windowed environments. Everyone (even Mac users), knows the Windows look-and-feel. Its a natural base of comparsion.
is the Windows desktop the most creative and easy to use interface we can come up with?
Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows, but their usability research and development is world-class. There is certainly room for improvement, of course, but Microsoft is very good at making intuitive interfaces.
Why shouldn't Linux developers use those same techniques (and possibly improve upon them) rather than reinvent the wheel? Linux developers would quite likely come up with a lesser interface since most don't have the time and money to do it right (Windows took years of usability testing, analysis, and research costing many millions of dollars.)
Isn't the whole point of installing Linux to get away from Microsoft?
I certainly hope not. If Linux can't stand on its own (rather than being "its not Microsoft"), then it has serious problems. Fortunately, this is not the case.
The