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."
um.. I don't get it. AOL is actually trying to divorce itself from software that requires quite a bit of tweeking to work right?
The Internet is generally stupid
Lindows CEO Michael Roberts, formerly CEO of mp3.com, was reported as saying "We have great faith in AOL's ability to fund me with another $100 million in venture capital, and I'm really sorry about that whole mp3.com blowout thing. Anyone want to go for a ride on my new yacht?"
For their next trick, having pissed off Microsoft and AOL, Lindows will be renaming to iLindows, just to attract attention from Apple
Lawyers - collect the set.
a grrl & her server
...just how hard is it to mislead potential AOL customers?
Nothing surprising.
Lindows is misleading everyone and everything. When you read their PR, it's like they claim to invent everything. It's always something new, something better. Just marketing, nothing much behind
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
I suspect the main reason Aol is doing this is to distance themselves from being a possible competitor to Microsoft.
:)
Um, it's a little late for that.
As Gates is quoted stating to Steve Case in a meeting with AOL in 1993: "I can buy 20 percent of you or I can buy all of you, or I can go into this business myself and bury you."
Microsoft has perceived AOL as a threat for a looong time now.. I'm sure other readers can post fun examples of other Microsoft-AOL clashes.
slashdot!=valid HTML
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...
Richard Stallman, director of the Free Software Foundation, wrote a 43 page letter to Lindows telling them why they should NOT call their operating system GNU/Lindows.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Imagine this in the future, grom Ask Slashdot:
"Hello. My name is John and I'm having problems with my new PC. The AOL daemon (AOLd) keeps crashing. Anyone had this problem before? Thanks!! u r so cool if u can help!"
I think Lindows is trying to follow the Napster model:
1. Create a product (it doesn't have to be any good).
Oh, that's right, Napster *was* a crappy product, despite the fact that it was one of the first of its kind, and managed to almost single-handedly change the face of music online. Napster was the cream of the crop when it started, despite the fact that it started to tank later on in its life.
Lindows has no such claim to fame. From what I can tell (not having used the OS), it just seems like a sloppy distro, made to look pretty, with a name that (erroneously) implies that it'll run MS products. It very well may do more harm to the Linux (GNU/Linux, whatever) cause than good.
Lindows is misleading people into thinking that it has a strategic relationship with AOL...
This just in.. Company changes its name to AOLindows. Claims it's just an amazing coincidence.
=-Jippy
Everything inside Lindows 2.0 is improved. Not perfect, but improved. The graphics are better and there's an overall feeling of a professional OS inside, rather than geeks-only software. The KDE desktop looks and feels like Windows, with a few exceptions.
Jeez I don't know where to start...
There's an overall feeling of a professional OS inside, rather than geeks-only software.
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. By professional I mean, well it works, it's extremely advanced, can be used for just about anything and it's very customizable. Not because it isn't "geeks-only" what kind of stupid statement is that? If I give my cousin a fisher price computer thingy with those plastic crappy cards that have different games on them, I don't call it a professional computer because it's not. It isn't "geeks-only", but that doesn't make it professional.
When I want a professional OS, I don't install Windows Me, that isn't professional, it isn't "geeks-only" either. I would install Linux (or FreeBSD which I have started to use these past few weeks.) When I use Linux it does have a "geeks-only" feel to it, that's one reason why I like it. It's stable, secure (well most of the time), small, powerfull, and all this stuff is what makes it professional (in my opinion), I don't call something professional when it isn't "geeks-only." I don't want a little paper clip to hold my hand when I compile a kernel, I don't want a little dog to help me updatedb and locate | grep. I want a raw OS, one that's powerfull and secure, not one that's designed with my grandmother in mind. The things that make it professional are the same things that make it feel like it's "geeks-only."
The KDE desktop looks and feels like Windows, with a few exceptions.
Why does everyone try to compare desktop managers with Windows? Isn't the whole point of installing Linux to get away from Microsoft? Out of the 6 billion people in this world (yeah they're not all comptuer geeks but still at least one should be good enough) is the Windows desktop the most creative and easy to use interface we can come up with? I'm sure there must be something better out there to use. Why do we keep making Linux more and more like windows in all these Distro's. Well I guess it's to make the transition into Linux an easy one, but people seem to learn how to use Mac OS just fine and that's far from windows (at least from what I've seen it is, I could be wrong, not a huge Mac user.) Anyway that statement about Lindows being more professional because it isn't "geeks-only" really pisses me off, and also the comparison to windows.
Why shouldn't AOL team up with a linux distribution to make some kind of "AOL-Linux"? It would be a niche product basically for people who use their PC's exclusively for AOL and web browsing. A 50% tax on perfectly usable hardware ($200 bare bones at Walmart, $300 for same system with windows) is quite excessive.
That MSNBC article reminds me very much of the early days of micros... when nothing worked but nobody would admit it. An attitude that has, alas, to some extent been internalized into the whole PC industry.
... doesn't work. Outlook almost works (it can't find my e-mail server at work) and Internet Explorer works sometimes. I haven't tried other Windows software titles, but I'm told some do work."
In the late seventies, an acquaintance of mine used to rave about his Northstar system. I asked about reliability and he said it had been perfect, never any problems. I asked for a demo. He said he'd love to give me one but he couldn't right then, as the power supply had burned out. I said "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems." He said, "Oh, the problem is just in the power supply. The computer itself is fine."
The MSNBC article has that flavor to me. "As for the Microtel hardware, everything works as advertised except for the CD-ROM drive, which I haven't been able to get sound from yet." Right. It's not as if sound were an important function.
He says "I mentioned that Lindows was originally touted as being able to run Microsoft Windows programs. Guess what? IT CAN." (Capitals his). That's what he says first. It's only a little later that he mentions "[in Office the] Open New Document icon;
Yeah, right. It's not as if you'd ever want to create a NEW document, editing existing ones should be good enough for anyone. It's not as if it matters that the email program can't talk to your email server. And, yes, I'm so picky that I expect IE to work more often than "sometimes." I demand nothing less than "mostly," and you should, too.
Lindows... "IT CAN" run Windows software. And my friend's Northstar computer wasn't broken.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
..AOL is misleading people into thinking that it is actually a ISP.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Since they change the look and feel with every release, and move important functions around so that you have to search for them.
The changes aren't that bad unless you're tweaking. Right-click still brings up the same menu, all the windows keys still work, and everything still has the same names it did in 2000.
I wouldn't have touched XP yet, except that an artist friend of mine just upgraded from a hand-me-down machine to a new one. That was his first comment, why did they change everything? He's thinking about returning it and spending a little more on an Apple.
An apple would be good if he's doing Photoshop or graphics.
But if he just wants Windows to work the old way, he can finally make it work however he wants. XP, without installing anything, lets you use the new or old start menu, the new or old GUI theme, and you can customize the start menu.
The changes in XP are up there, but they're hardly "change for change's sake." I was considering using a differnet shell, but I haven't found one that works in Win32 as well (usablity-wise) as XP's Explorer
I loaded the Windows version of the GIMP to give him a chance to get away from Photoshop. I'm trying to convince him that it is worth his time to learn GIMP rather than Photoshop which will continue to cost him money that he doesn't have. Unfortunately, I'm not experience enough with any of these tools to be able to say that the GIMP has all the features that he will want from Photoshop, or to help him learn it.
GIMP does not have everything Photoshop does, nor is it an easy transition. I get to play with Photoshop & a few other Acrobat programs at work (comes from being the only geek in the office) and there's a world of difference between GIMP and photoshop.
If he doesn't have the cash for a full version of Photoshop, he might want to look at the dumbed-down version. It's rather crippled, but it might be closer to what he needs than GIMP. (Then again, it might not--I don't know what he needs, and I haven't played around with the dumbed-down version.)
As for Photoshop costing money... it's perpetual licensing, so he can stop upgrading at just about any time.
at least on my backup machine..I have to admit coming from Windows to Lindows was relatively painless, easy for a user of Windows since Version 2 (or was it 3?) Anyway it was easy, much easier than Windows, and a damn site easier than learning Linux (for a lifetime Windows user)