Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy

Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"

Comments

I think they don't

[alx5000]

I don't think ordinary users notice. When I talk to my non-tech-savvy friends, they usually ask me if this or that price is right for a given computer, mostly without taking into cosideration its characteristics (Once a girl I know asked me if a 300 price tag for a laptop could be right, and when I asked for specs, she only replied "Acer"). Besides, we've got big PC stores here (like PC City) whose prices can be 50% more expensive than those you find in smaller, franchised, specialized shops, and they still sell the most.

So no, ordinary users will judge the price based on how awesome the salesman tells them it is (and, of course, if it doesn't come with Windows, don't bother calling it a PC, please, it just confuses them).

Re:Flexibility Not Price

[Cro Magnon]

And to be fair, it would be really hard to let people customize as deeply as they need to without letting them muck with the deep details of your OS.

Only because of how MS made its OS. Some OS's *cough*Linux*cough*BSD*cough* let you choose among dozens of different UI's without messing with the kernel.

Re:Slashdot

[gQuigs]

100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.

The school district I grew up at pays MS $400,000 every year for the software assurance program (and then $75,000 to Symantec to secure it). The total budget is about 150 Million. This can not be sustained.

Windows can not compete with Linux. That's why they use lock-in, FUD, etc.

Familiarity isn't worth that much

[Dr. Manhattan]

Familiarity is worth $200 to a lot of people.

A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.

There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.