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The Truth Behind the Death of Linux On the Netbook
eldavojohn writes "Groklaw brings us news of Microsoft holding the smoking gun in regards to the death of Linux on netbooks. You see, the question of Linux on netbooks in Taiwan was put forth to the Taiwan Trade Authority director, who replied, 'In our association we operate as a consortium, like the open source consortium. They want to promote open source and Linux. But if you begin from the PC you are afraid of Microsoft. They try to go to the smart phone or PDA to start again.' It's simple; fear will keep them in line. PJ points out, 'So next time you hear Microsoft bragging that people prefer their software to Linux on netbooks, you'll know better. If they really believed that, they'd let the market speak, on a level playing field. If I say my horse is faster than yours, and you says yours is faster, and we let our horses race around the track, that establishes the point. But if you shoot my horse, that leaves questions in the air. Is your horse really faster? If so, why shoot my horse?'"
So an off hand remark by an executive at a trade show is a "smoking gun"? Get real please. The quote seems to be saying that Microsoft is the dominant player (duh) and that was it.
There is simply no hard evidence that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly to crush Linux on netbooks. None. There is no smoking gun here, just more hysterics and jumps to conclusions from groklaw, as usual. No surprise this would get attention from slashdot.
Don't be silly, it is quite well understood what Microsoft has and does not have. They have marketing power, but not technical excellence nor stable robust business grade software. They make unnecessary changes to major application's UI which serve no real purpose but confuse trained users. They force expensive upgrade and purposely break backwards compatibility to this end.
Please. In the entire first GENERATION of netbooks, it was much easier to find Linux ones on the shelf than Microsoft ones. In fact, IIRC, first-generation netbooks didn't even have enough storage to run XP if they wanted, except maybe an exclusive few.
Why don't you see Linux on netbooks now? The main reason is that the minimum netbook hardware spec can easily run XP now. A healthy proportion of them have HDs, and those that have SSDs have much larger SSDs than the first generation.
I'm sorry to break this to the Linux fans, but the netbook industry only embraced Linux long enough to keep their product lines alive until they could ship the OS that their customers actually want.
Comment of the year
I want to know how Asus pulling the Seadragon-based netbook from Computex after the first day fits into this "smoking gun" theory.
Put identity in the browser.