Slashdot Mirror
Linux To Take Over The Low-End PC Market?
An anonymous reader writes "Desktop Linux has a recent commentary on the inevitable growth of Linux on the cheaper end of the desktop market. According to the article, the availability of under-$500 usable hardware, combined with a free operating system, free desktop office products, and free or cheap 'software as a service' online applications, opens a new market in which Microsoft cannot compete. 'Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough.'"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/1331246&from=rss
Is it any coincidence that Microsoft has done this? Piracy does help them to a certain extent, it pushes their products into markets where people cannot afford them, or just flat out don't want to pay for it, which still ultimatley counts towards their market share.
Previously sales figures for Linux desktops were suspect because of the argument "Well, everybody buying them is just putting a pirated copy of Windows on them anyway." Scanning the article I didn't see anything about piracy...
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But recently with activation & continuous authentication, Microsoft has tried to prevent this.
Has Microsoft finally given up its an extra tier of pricing beyond retail and volume? "You'd never give us a cent for Windows? Well, at least pirate it
In my coutry we have had GNU/Linux in low end PC's at mainstream outlets for sometime now.Most of these are replaced by an ilegal copy of windows on the first days of use, but still some stick around.That is just part of the vicious circle desktop systems are inserted due to the monopoly exerced by Microsoft, and certainly the few GNUs remaining do contribute for a slow market share shift.
The main problem, IMHO, is not even Joe Newbie who re-formats his GNU PC. It is the mentality of PC vendors itself who do not even configure their GNU/Linuxes correctly on their hardware.
The other day I saw a notebook at a shop with a misconfigured video driver, logged in X11 with a purplish tint and horizontal garbage lines everywhere. Another example: a local LinuxMagazine review a couple of years ago found out that in a Hwlet Packard low end desktop system pre-configured with GNU/Linux (indeed!), OpenOficce would take a full 3 minutes to start!! Because they had configured a 128MB system with a 1GB Swap.
-><- no
The nicest device I can see at present is the Nokia N810 which runs the Maemo (linux) OS.
High resolution touch screen (800*480), hardware keyboard, gps and customisable - ~$450
This looks dreamy (and its on my xmas list)
liqbase
"people who want Windows will pay for it"
Yeah, but they probably aren't the low end, now, are they? I think a lot of people are fed up with virus software updates and other fine Windows features. The high end of the market is moving to Mac, and the low end -- at least the more knowledgeable among them -- are moving to Linux. I live near Howard County, Maryland, which has an award-winning public library system. The free internet access is spectacular there; walk in, sit down, start using, no waiting, no library card required. Guess what operating system and applications it uses? And no one complains about it not being Windows.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Op-ed from a pro Linux site isn't exactly an unbiased "news" source. Yes desktop Linux is going to become a bit more common, yes we'll see more entry level boxes shipping with it ... but MS' virtual monopoly on the OS market is not going to suddenly go away. If this becomes a serious threat to them they'll release something like XP starter edition for next to nothing, or even at a net income to the vendor after paid crapware pre-installs are added on. At that point Linux loses the main advantage that most people (initially at least) care about : that it's free-as-in-beer.
MS can create a cheap version of Vista or XP with very little effort. And because they are earning *something* on it, I suspect in the long run it will get better support than anything that can be had for free. Commercial version of Linux are of course another story.
I think Linux cannot succeed on price alone. It has to be enough better that people will invest the time needed to change their habits - which today drive them straight to Windows.
These devices aren't going to directly hit MS's products - what they could do is cost them mindshare and threaten the future of their monopoly.
Products like the eeePC occupy a precarious niche just below cheap "regular" laptops - put a bigger screen and a CD drive on them and there'll be a cheaper Dell laptop - so while they may be successful for their manufacturers they're not going to make a big dent in PC sales. People will buy them as "extra" machines for kids or as spare "take anywhere" machines (don't buy a £2000 ultra-portable - buy a £1000 desktop or large screen laptop plus an eeePC for when you don't need the power or don't want to risk carrying your main machine). But if they find that, out-of-the-box, they can connect to web and EMAIL and open most of their documents with these things called "Firefox", "Thunderbird" and "Open Office" then they might have their eyes opened to other possibilities.
Remember, MS's real monopoly is Office, not Windows. How many lUsers have you met who, when asked what version of windows they are running, respond with their Office version? However, I was in a school (in England) recently and saw a big (homemade) poster on the wall saying "Haven't got MS Office at home? Have you tried the free alternative from www.OpenOffice.org?" - so there is hope for the world.
If I were MS right now I'd be busily developing something like "Vista Lite Edition" that could be sold on a memory stick alongside eeePCs and the like for about $25, probably including a stripped down office. ISTR they did do something similar in some countries but it was perceived as "Windows - crippled edition". It might be an easier sell if it was linked to built-to-a-price "appropriate technology" hardware.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Under U.S. law, a company does not need to be a true monopoly (i.e., the only player in a sector) to be classified a monopoly. The threshold there (imlu, ianal) is whether or not the company yields monopoly-like influence over the market, including the creation of significant barriers to entry for potential competitors.
That said, the growing success of Linux (and the Mac OS)will ensure that one day--who knows how soon--Microsoft will use the Linux saturation levels as an argument against sanctions it faced (faces) as a monopoly. That's when the OS war will finally reach the point of full engagement.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The ASUS Eees are good. Yeah, MS is set to sell XP for them for another $40, but their default PDA=like screens are idiot-proof, and it's simple to switch them to a clean, ASUS-customized KDE. The screen is good. The keyboard's good. There's nothing cheap about them except maybe the button bar beneath the touchpad - and you can get the same function from the touchpad itself. And there are no rough edges in the Linux experience. It's not for games, but it boots and loads apps plenty fast. It even has mplayer working out of the box - no extra installation steps for a modern browsing experience (as with, say, Ubuntu).
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Making money is fine - I am happy to pay for stuff, including software and music.
But there is something riding against commercial vs. free software, and it's a double edged sword: feature creep.
In the commercial world, software has to keep adding features in order to sell the next version and keep the profits rolling in. This might help an otherwise under-featured bit of software gain widely sought-after functionality. However, we all know there comes a time when a software package is "just right," yet continues to add features and functionality that are unwanted and only complicate usability (e.g., winamp, nero, etc.)
With free software, there is no incentive to add unnecessary features. This is why I believe that in the long run, free software will dominate the marketplace, because it can afford to not give users features they don't need. But it can be difficult for a sophisticated package to take on critical functionality without a carrot.
Look at the state of video editing on Linux. Yes I have used Kino and Cinelerra, but anyone who has used them knows how tricky and unstable these tools are compared to, say, iMovie.
Free will win in the end, unless commercial software finds a way to bust the bloat.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.