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Linspire CEO Offers S. Korea To Replace Windows
Spy der Mann writes "Noticing the Microsoft threat to withdraw Windows from South Korea, the Linspire CEO, Kevin Carmony, just offered to license every computer in the country with Linspire, for just $5m. This would be around 10 cents / person. 'South Korea could save around a quarter of a billion dollars. More importantly, however, it would break South Korea loose from the monopolistic grasp of Microsoft, which the country currently finds itself under,'"
While I'm sure the slashbots will shout and cry about the virtues of linux (despite being Linspire), it sounds more like a grab for attention than anything serious. While I'm sure Carmony could make a bundle on the deal, could he really support all of South Korea? I wonder if he even has a team of translators for the major world languages to begin with!
Really, that is all it is. I like Linux as much as other people, but I don't think South Korea, as a whole, is going to jump on this just as I really don't believe MS will pull out of South Korea. It's all marketing and jocking for positions. There is no way that MS will leave South Korea, one of the most advanced industrial nationas around and a lot more advanced than USA. Oh no, MS will never leave South Korea, it means too much to them.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I've got a better offer.
What about they try to find a local solution that will be better localised, that will have local support, that will create jobs, that will keep their cash inside the country, all this meaning that it will help develop a local well adapted independant IT which will benefit their country as a whole?
Korea is too tied to MS for anything like this to happen any time soon. Ironically, with the exception of the Xbox, and MS Office, just about everything else Microsoft has a strong grip here. Major websites are designed for IE, Palm is hardly popular, Apple is only used by some 20K people, etc etc etc. There will be repercussions if MS has to back out of the OS market.
Just look at Mozilla and Firefox and you see what a difference a little marketing can make.
- South Koreans game a lot.
- South Koreans game with PCs (as Consoles where illegal till last year)
- So they will continue to need current games for the OS they use.
Sure, the currently installed Windows base won't vanish, but the change would happen when games start to require Vista.I take it you hold MS Windows to be a user friendly operating system. Sp does that mean if (thought experiment) Windows were to be open-sourced it would suddenly become user-unfriendly?
Or were you just trolling?
the layman's guide to computer science
This would be around 10 cents / person. 'South Korea could save around a quarter of a billion dollars.
Right, and how much would be the cost of Win->Lin transition? Training thousands of people? Porting millions of lines of code? Translating all the stuff? and so forth. Whoever told this must take a look my signature!
He's going to provide support for 50 million computers at 10 cents each?
Poor journalism, it was for licensing not support.
Microsoft pulls stunts, why should not Linspire. Who knows, it might work. If it does not it is free publicity.
It was a bold move, and it did not cost him a penny to do it. If he pulls it off he'll be 5m ahead of where he is right now, since his market share in ROK is pretty much zero. If he pulls it off he also gets to use it as a precedent to go country-by-country offering blanket licenses, which will make Linspire some good money and will royally piss off Microsoft.
Regardless of the merits of Lindows v. all the other Linux distributions out there, this is all about marketing, and it was the right thing to do. Microsoft cannot even afford a counter offer, since this will set the same kind of precedent and every government in the world is going to demand a blanket license like that.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The quesion is, can a single company do as much as an entire country can on it's own? I doubt it and so does Microsoft. Why else would they buy off their competition? They should have all confidence they will prevail without such tricks. The trend outlined above indicates they have no such confidence and can't really keep up.
The screenshots above speak for themselves, even if your browser does not support the characters a default install of Mepis does. The Microsoft programs are unmodified English language programs. Free software has Korean character support and translations that Koreans are giving themselves. It's difficult to see how M$ can maintain dominance without doing more than writing korean language how-to's.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Its a nice publicity stunt by Linspire. But lets be serious here; a 100% to Linux (Linspire) would be devastating for S.Korea (and for Microsoft's image abroad). It won't happen.
Besides S.Korea has a huge gaming culture and within 12 hours of moving to Linux you would have thousands of teenagers shivering from game withdrawal symptoms.
Anyway, Microsoft is an easy target to push around and this is another money EU-style money grab. I mean, first it was the media player that was the big problem, and now MSN Messenger (or rather the really crappy Windows Messenger as MSN has to actually be downloaded). I'm still waiting for the SP2 Firewall lawsuit and the Disk Defrag lawsuit. Why not? Its Microsoft after all and, everything is fair game. Ridiculous.