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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?"
Namely, that with a closed source OS, vendors are being paid by software companies to install reams and reams of crapware on your system. When (eg) Dell installs Linux, they lose that revenue, which on a $200 unit, is a significant portion.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
It's not price that cripples Microsoft in the mobile market, it's flexibility. As anyone who's used a Pocket PC or Windows CE device knows, it's the chained to the desktop mentality that's killing them.
The inability (well, ok, extreme difficulty in) to skin/specialize the user interface is going to hurt them. Microsoft appears to be mentally permanently stuck in one-size-fits-all land. 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.
The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.
Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.
There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.
Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
For a portable email, quick document, travel internet browser this $400 "piece of crap" is the perfect solution in a hostile environment. I won't let my 11 year old touch the Vaio with my business on it, but when traveling in the car and checking hotels, he can do this easily with this little gadget. When dropped (it is actually more durable than the Vaio) and broken, I am only out a few hundrend and am not stuck with a multi thousand dollar pile of junk. I have no problem sending this "piece of crap" with my kid to school for a project. Would you send a $3000 Vaio with your 11 year old son?
Everex has now come out with the Cloudbook (Linux) at WalMart so, now it is being exposed to the masses. The revolution is starting!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
MS is using all its weight in anticipation of the problem. The new and upcoming Eee 900 for example, has been announced by Asus France as a Windows only version.
http://www.blogeee.net/2008/03/06/le-eeepc-900-uniquement-avec-windows-xp-dapres-asus-france/
The good news is that the French customer is very well protected and forcing a software with a PC down their throat is illegal. So essentially, what will happen is thousands of geeks demanding reimbursement of the XP licenses. That oughta hit Asus really hard, and teach them a good lesson.
I read that Asus Germany announced a similar "forced sale", but can't seem to find the article.
Res publica non dominetur
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.
A-Bomb
You're impugning the credibility of Wikipedia as a way of dismissing anything that contradicts your argument, rather than dealing with the matter head on. That's intellectually dishonest, and a lazy, stupid way to argue.
Also, if you'd bothered to look at the article, you'd find that the quote provides a citation, and that citation points to a PDF file of the article in which Moore made the statement in question:
ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf
In short, you lose on both style and substance.
But it's starting to become more than $200. With the hardware requirements of Vista, you have to buy a much more expensive computer, just to get the same usability. I bought a laptop that runs Linux. It cost me $500. To get a machine that runs Vista just as well, I'm looking at spending $1000, at least.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.
The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.
With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.
That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.
Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.