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Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos
theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."
Thats what, 3 or 4 people?
Hardly a statistically significant opinion.
We want users like that using linux because if they can migrate easily, that will disrupt the monopoly standing of Microsoft. Should they be using Debian or Slackware? Maybe not.
Ubuntu was made with them in mind, so if it fails... well, it fails. There are still enough things wrong with Ubuntu (and with the market's opinion of driver compatibility) that people who aren't devout Geeks are likely to turn away. If their (probably moderately expensive) printer/scanner doesn't work or if they have to edit their xorg.config for things to work as they might otherwise expect, I entirely can't say I blame them.
That being said, if we want to upset the balance of power so that there isn't a monopolist serving us the #1 OS, serving users who don't want to fight their OS to get their hardware to work is an important step. If you don't like automation, use Slackware. The Ubuntu forums will probably really miss you.