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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?'"
Taking the whose-horse-is-faster analogy from the summary, if you decided not to challenge me to race your horse with mine because you are afraid that I might shoot your horse instead of my actually shooting the horse then you can't really claim that you have a "smoking gun" about my evil intentions.
All that is quoted in the article is that someone said they are afraid of Microsoft. That in itself doesn't even come close to a smoking gun against microsoft. Unless "smoking gun" now just refers to something that is just a circumstantial evidence.
I despise MS tactics and personally suspect that there might actually be some truth to whatever is being implied here, but come on, this article is nothing but preaching to the choir.
Linux has come a long way and it is ready for the average user. Yes, Joe-six-pack can use linux with a 15 minute tutorial in the basics. I just want to scream knowing that Microsoft is still undermining the market and retarding progress!
Good for the horse analogy union that they seem to be making a comeback against car analogies. Horse analogies were always superior to car analogies - they are more maneuvrable, can use almost anything in nature for fuel (car analogies only compatible with Octane Troll and Flamebait) and they don't need a bailout.
It's easy to see Ballmer, gun in hand, claiming "Now, mine is faster".
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
if i shoot your horse, i'd bet to hell mine is faster than yours. my horse would beat any dead or crippled horse.
now... anyone got a horse i can borrow? xerox?
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
he kills your horse so his horse is the only one left standing.
you are free to go on worrying which one would be faster.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
the terrible pollution from their exhaust;-)
The summary was pure gibberish. I only deciphered it because I had fair idea of what was intended in the first place.
What these companies need to to is to club together to form a new "independent" company that makes netbooks. This company would only sell non-Microsoft netbooks (whether that was Linux or some other new-fangled OS) and thus be immune to Microsoft's mafia tactics.
No turnips required.
Stick Men
There are two reasons why it is hard to get a linux netbook these days. First, Microsoft panicked and started letting the netbook manufacturers put windows on for next to nothing. Second, even the better manufacturers put a barely usable Linux on the netbooks that wouldn't allow you to install any software without using the command line, broke the wireless when you installed software updates, etc. Some of the manufacturers didn't even include working webcam drivers on their Linux netbooks.
"There is simply no hard evidence that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly to crush Linux on netbooks"
.. we be quite prescriptive in our investments with Dell relative to the competitive threats we see with Linux .. we constantly benchmark ourselves against the actions they do with RedHat'
'The very next day, Asus' chairman, Jonney Shih, after sharing a news conference stage with Microsoft corporate VP, OEM Division, Steven Guggenheimer, apologized for the Android Eee PC being shown'
Microsofts Walmart/Linux Taskforce
'We invest big, big $$ in Dell
'A cross-group team has been working for the last two weeks on a proposal to have a more planned response process to defend against Linux and other low-cost/no-cost competitors in large education/government deals in both developed and developing subs'
I can't remember where I read this, but from what I understand the reason Linux died on the netbook was because the netbook makers didn't bother to install the right drivers for various hardware components and didn't configure them properly. This resulted in many Linux netbooks getting returned.
OEMs tend not to want to write their own software or do much configuration. Their business model has traditionally been to assemble commodity components, load Windows on them, and maybe the odd driver not included in Windows.
It will take a polished corporate effort such as Moblin or Android to get a non-Windows OS on netbooks.
This space left intentionally blank.
"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?'
Because then my living horse is faster than your dead horse, obviously.
Privacy is terrorism.
I badly want a netbook with Linux on it and I know quite a number of people that would love one too.
The truth is that in the country where I live (Belgium) I simply can't buy one anywhere.
There used to be a web shop that had two (2) high end models, but no more.
I just saw they are started selling one (1) ultra-cheap model for â149 at the local Carefour supermarket.
That's *it*.
Note that exactly the same goes for laptops and PCs. I simply can't buy any brand with Linux on it or even without a Microsoft/Apple operating system on it.
After I bought my Dell Precision M60 laptop, I never even booted it into Windows XP pro, I just booted from a Kubuntu DVD. I simply erased all the crapware from the hard disk.
Now, 3 years later, I haven't looked back, but it *still* annoys me terribly that I had to pay Microsoft for something I didn't even want.
That's at least â100 that I didn't want to spend over at Microsoft although I would have no problem spending it at Canonical.
The same sort of laptops get sold with Linux pre-installed in other countries. Not in Belgium, not in many other countries.
It's not very hard to claim that Linux sales is negligible in that sort of situation. Heck, I'm amazed Linux reached the 1% barrier at all.
Matt
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
Whereas Microsoft is a corporation with focus, clarity, and direction. Linux seeped into the netbook niche because it was the best alternative at the time. Any new computing device that needs an O/S and hasn't yet gotten a proven business model for making money is a perfect platform for Linux. It plays to Linux's strengths. The netbook craze caught MS completely unawares, and Linux was very successful for a year or so. Then MS focused on that segment, clarified their offerings, and went directly at the manufacturers to make sure that XP was a viable option on that platform. In other words, the market morphed to a situation that played to Microsoft's strengths. No conspiracies or dead horses here, just the standard business cycle. I hope to pick up a netbook, and I know to get one that has Linux, but most people just don't care, and are familiar with XP. They see the familiar "Start" button and gravitate towards that. To each their own.
If anyone these days has the balls to take on Microsoft, it's Intel. Intel has Moblin, and just sunk a pile of money into Moblin. I suspect they're also a bit tired of getting the screw-deal from Microsoft, too. Intel's entire low-end is pretty much zero profit - they make all their money on the high-end that piggy-backs on top. The lion's share of profit on low-end computing goes to Microsoft. Most live with it, I suspect Intel is tired of that situation.
Not that Intel doesn't have their monopoly abuses, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The great mystery of computing is not that Linux is not in the consumer space, but that Windows is so entrenched in the enterprise space.
Windows is inherently a consumer operating system. It has a developer mythology that the dream Windows development is to make that one product that you can sell and make millions with. It's got a rich set of services developers can use to build consumer products, and it treats a product like a product, a property that can be bought, traded, and rented. You've got a well documented set of graphics and sound APIs, a halfway decent networking stack, and a bunch of tools that are frankly geared towards producing consumer products and these things support a healthy consumer market. Consumers, to some degree, actually like to spend money, so that Windows is non-free actually enhances its perceived value in the consumer space. If you receive something or buy something that doesn't work in Windows, its not something that you try and sort out and fix, its time to move on to another product. Everything is a black box good that you pay for, it either works or it doesn't, and that's what people on the consumer level want.
On the other hand, Linux is a total corporate and government system. It has a developer mythology that "welcome to the basement of megacorp, I've got a jar skittles.. we're both cogs.. here's your cube." Thus, the economic prospect that in the Linux world, your work product is worthless in the market sense, but, your boss gets to use the economic benefit of it over and over again, and, if you can get to keep working on it for a bit, that's pretty interesting and you get a paycheck for it. If you want to get rich with Linux, it won't be by making an application. You'd have to make a consumer black box out of it by hosting a web site using it. But all the development and other tools of Linux have a certain corporate basement feel. Nothing is really a consumer level product, but, everything has all sorts of rich nooks and crannies to do a bunch of different corporate tasks. Consumers don't need to replace social security numbers in a giant database with some new form of proprietary identifier, but Linux developers do, and that's where the strength of Linux tools lie.
Do you really want Linux to be a consumer system anyway? To some extent, that means getting rid of an awful lot that is lovable about Linux. It means polishing out (getting rid of), that barely documented switch to a command where an author left a note saying "uh, this piece of code I put in and got to work for this one thing that I was doing but I'm not really maintaining it", or, to not have that feature at all, or, even worse, have the feature, but not the warning. In any case, there's nothing about Windows that reminds me of the guy in the basement offering some skittles in the basement of the power company, but Linux has that in spades, and I like skittles.
For Linux to be a consumer system, we have to have a world where we take art seriously. That means no copying of images, or songs, worrying about who owns what, and, in a corporate world, all of that is a pain in the rear. If we made Linux into a consumer system and had a consumer culture with it, there's no way you could, from your basement, tell the next bit of bits in your desk to get in line, just like all the other bits. We're all just corporate cogs, hey, here's some skittles.
Me thinks that rather than charging to get consumers to adopt Linux, it should be to drive Windows out of the corporation.
This is my sig.
Sorry good sir. All the complete horse $hit has mysteriously vanished from the tracks and the stables. The Apple trees are gone too.
The carbon compounds you see are from proprietary, non-reproducing animals like the mule on the desktop, and a smaller animal similar to the well liked Pony, is being developed for riders with lower speed riding needs.
Talks are underway in Michigan to return the land back to quadraped friendly parkways suitable for buggies. The whips may be found on the internet.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
more like microsoft just up and killed your horse and then claimed it won the race that they would otherwise have lost
Obviously you should have made a better horse, if it were so easy for Microsoft to have killed it.
This is my sig.
The first "netbook" that started all the craze was the XO... everyone wanted one, even paying twice, donating one to schools to get one of those. And run Linux. The first next ones (asus, msi, etc) consolidated the trend, and run linux too. Till last year, most if not all netbooks had Linux as alternate (if not main) OS. And a bunch of distros/interfaces of linux specialised in netbooks started to show up (eeebuntu and similar, ubuntu netbook remix, moblin, android, etc)
Then the campaing started. Microsoft using a chainsaw to manage to show XP in an XO. Then saying that Linux netbook returns were 4 times higher than Windows ones (at least what an msi exec said, an asus one denied that). Some vendors giving lesser options/specs for Linux netbooks than for Windows ones. And linux offers and showings in netbooks starting to fade
The next incoming market for Linux in small pcs are arm based net/smart books. Started with linux in general, then Android, but recently started a push to say that the right OS for that platform is another Microsoft one, Windows CE.
Clearly this is not a smoking gun... the room of Neo's "guns, lots of guns" is tiny compared with the amount of weapons Microsoft is using in all fronts to try to stop the flood. Will it succeed? I only hope that not.
Picked up an HP Mini 1000 series 10" about a month ago when my original Macbook Pro drank a glass of water as a stop gap measure. I have run this thing through 4 operating systems and (goddammit) it has been my primary computer with about 8-10 hourse use daily in that time.
First was winXP - as you can infer from my screen name I have never been its biggest fan.
Second was OSX using iDeneb - such a pain in the ass to get everything working right that it completely undermines the entire idea of having a mac. Clones will never kill Apples marketshare.
Third round Ubuntu Netbook Remix... Ok, the install was a breeze, the price cant be beat, and it picked up 90% of the hardware without a hiccup. Not bad. Until you start using it - graphical glitches everywhere. There is some single window dashboard on the netbook version that is sluggish and confusing garbage - turn it off first to even attempt to have a decent time. It still fails on so many common tasks without tweaking / dl'ing that it failed "The Wife Test" and that was it.
I cant see some hardware manufacturer sitting down and saying "Yes, this is the best way to show off and sell my hardware" after using it for a week.
Fourth and finally: Windows 7. Mac zealot since '99 here - first gen iPod and iPhone fanboy - and I have to say Windows 7 is by far the best thing Microsoft has put out since Windows 2000. THIS is what is going to kill Linux on netbook - the fact that Microsoft realized that they couldnt hand this segment to the Open Source community on a platter and designed an OS to run GREAT on a 1.6 Core Solo with 2GB of ram.
XP is garbage. Linux had a great chance to lead this market. But now Win7 is here and there is no way in hell the user experiences can be compared. [That said I am still just biding MY time for another macbook ;]
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
That summary made no sense. I read it twice and still couldn't figure out what point the author was trying to make so I wasn't even interested in the linked article.
When netbooks were initially released, they were perceived to be a niche/hobbyist market, so putting Linux on a netbook made sense from both a fiscal and a market standpoint.
Microsoft realized that they were on the verge of losing out on a potentially lucrative market, so they quickly reversed course on sunsetting Windows XP, and under some very netbook-specific licensing conditions, made it available to manufacturers for cheap.
When the average user was presented with the choice of Linux -- a "new" OS to many people -- versus familiar XP which works exactly like their sons/daughters/job had trained them to use, and which runs all of their favorite apps, then it became pretty obvious which way the wind was going to blow.
I'm not saying that Linux shouldn't be an option -- I'm all for more choices in the market -- but there's really no conspiracy here, and no smoking gun.
(And yes, I know that you taught your great-great-grandmother to use Ubuntu in five minutes with no manual, and Wine sort-of runs most Windows apps with only some slowdown or glitches, and monkeying with your printer drivers for an hour is something everyone enjoys, etc.)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is either an illiterate moron (not very likely, for someone who is a "Former Ziff Davis Enterprise Editor-at-Large") or is a Linux-Loon spreading FUD ("Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols ran Linux-Watch from 2005 until April 2008.").
Let me quote the fine link you have posted, but apparently haven't read beyond the Microsoft in the title (and that is often translated to Evil Empire, as later in the text - "The Evil Empire wants to make that up this year by forcing netbook customers into buying over-priced, under-powered Windows 7. "):
Shih said, "Frankly speaking ... I would like to apologize that, if you look at Asus booth, we've decided not to display this product. I think you may have seen the devices on Qualcomm's booth but actually, I think this is a company decision so far we would not like to show this device. That's what I can tell you so far. I would like to apologize for that."
Here, a shorter summed up version:
I would like to apologize that, we've decided not to display this product.
He is NOT apologizing for showing the product, BUT for it NO LONGER BEING SHOWN!
That should answer the question that was bothering SJVN "What the heck does he have to apology for?" (Apparently he is a tad illiterate, seeing that one should "apologize for" and not "apology for").
Also, from TFA linked in that article:
Asustek puts Android netbook on ice for now
Qualcomm showed an Eee PC running Android on Monday as part of the company's display of new products with its Snapdragon chips inside.
...
The Eee PC with Android is not ready yet because the technology is "not mature," said Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asustek, on the sidelines of a press conference at the show Tuesday.
"For the time being this project is not a priority because our engineering resources are limited," he added.
...
When asked about rumors that Asustek faced pressure from Microsoft and Intel over the use of Android and Snapdragon in the Eee PC, Tsang said "no, pressure, none."
...
Another Asustek representative suggested that Qualcomm displayed the Android Eee PC without permission. But Qualcomm vice president of business development Hank Robinson said Asustek approved the use of the device so long as they did not discuss any of its specs other than the Snapdragon chip.
Further more, SJVN originally talks about "Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan" and the "ASUS incident" and to strengthen his position adds:
If this was an isolated incident, I might not make so much of it. But, it wasn't.
On the other side of the world, PC World, Britain's self-professed largest specialist chain of computing superstores, announced that, regardless of what was coming with Linux netbooks, it would only be selling Windows netbooks.
Does he even read his own texts? On the other side of the world? How is that related to something happening at the trade show in Taipei?
Well, simple - by using the magic "Evil Empire Invoking" words, such as "Windows".
And then, he continues to cherry pick his quotes from this article.
SJVN tells us that:
In a statement, Jeremy Fennell, Category Director at PC World, said, "Despite initial hype that netbooks would move more users onto the Linux platform, Microsoft has emerged as the preferred operating system because Windows makes it easier to share content, and provides customers with a simpler, more familiar computing experience on the move."
Therefore, "Based on this insight, all the netbooks in our stores will feature Microsoft Windows, larger screens and keyboards, and greater colo
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The situation on netbooks has very little to do with Linux being good or bad. It has to do with the economics of the retail market space. Here's the story:
* MS had announced EOA (end of availability) for XP prior to the netbook explosion. Early netbooks did ship with Linux because Vista um, sucked on lightweight hardware. MS suddenly dusted off XP and offered it to netbook OEMs for extra super dirt cheap compared to Vista.
* MS did offer a netbook version of Vista that capped the number of applications running at four. This was terrible and went away in a hurry. XP worked better, and MS caved to the market as the alternative was to miss out on selling licenses with netbooks.
* Retailers did experience high return rates on Linux based Netbooks, but not enough to give up on them.
* Consumers purchased more XP based netbooks than Linux. Add to that that Linux users will buy and reimage machines anyway, and there is little reason to stock anything other than XP based systems.
* Consumers chose hard drives over SSDs for one and only one reason: at the time hard drives stored more and cost less than SSDs. SSD also has a reputation of having a limited lifespan.
* Because prices on netbooks have inflated to near notebook levels (some of this is MS tax), many manufacturers are building new designs on non IA32 architecture. So Linux will be back.
* An additional change in landscape that is coming on netbooks: application distribution. Google Android based netbooks will sell applications via an online marketplace and pay the carrier 15%. This puts the incentive on the retailer (cell phone company) to carry Android based devices (netbooks and pdas).
As always with MS, it's not about good or bad product, it's about good or bad business. MS does business in a way many feel is too good.
-- $G
I have not RTFA and in this case I don't think I need to.
Netbook manufacturers are going to skim the cream. That's been the pattern for all high tech innovations for more than 20 years. It means that that you first work the most profitable price points, then as those markets get saturated, you aim at the lower price points.
People willing to pay $500 - $900 for a netbook expect to get MS Office and probably MS Outlook on it. They may well add a dual boot with Linux after purchase, and they might end up spending most of their time in Linux, but for that price a Windows OS and the ability to handle Excel and PowerPoint files perfectly are an expectation. Failure to meet that expectation is a deal breaker.
So long as there is good profit to be made in selling these high end machines, the less expensive netbooks in a manufacturer's line-up are going to be positioned to encourage consumers to buy the more expensive ones. They will have fewer features, of course, but more important to this discussion is that they ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CAUSE THE CONSUMER TO DOUBT that the top of the line netbook is the best product available. Manufacturers certainly don't want showroom discussions that compare their $750 wonder with all the MS bells and whistles with a $250 Linux with FOSS machine. That would be cutting their own throats.
Savvy sales persons are willing to talk up how Ubuntu could be easily installed as a dual boot on this $999 machine since its got the big hard drive, and that yeah, you might see more battery life, and yeah, it would probably be more secure when you are surfing on the wifi of your favorite coffee shop. Don't expect them to volunteer that info, but a good salesperson will spout on that if asked.
But that's as far as Linux penetration of the showroom is going to go, until the high end market is saturated and the $200 - $300 price point becomes the most profitable for manufacturers. Then things are likely to change, because then the license fees to Microsoft cut too deeply into the smaller margins.
There is no conspiracy here; simply the same market dynamics that have been at work in computer sales since the mid 1980s. Linux is undoubtedly being installed on a lot of netbooks after purchase. But until showing your overpriced netbook in the Golf Club's lounge is no longer a status symbol for the PHBs, Linux on a netbook is detrimental to the health of the manufacturers. Our turn will come.
Will
There is no market with Windows. There is MONOPOLY. Ugly and rotten monopoly that even US government does not dare to fight. All the world pays M$ taxes with computer hardware. There is no choice at all in every computer store. So guys, what market you are speaking about? Only few people around the globe managed to get money back for unused Windows on their computer. It is the situation if you dare to look at it with sober eye.
I bought a (Windows) Acer Aspire One 8+8 because that's the flash version that was available at all locally. I have to say, they screwed up big time with the default software. So much was loaded by default that the thing crawled. As it is, I never planned on running it with windows anyways; I need it as a technician's tool and I find Linux more productive for this use (may be based on having many years more experience with Linux than WinNT).
My experience with it has brought up some interesting thoughts...
Most of the netbooks seem to be set up and marketed on the assumption that they're being bought by unsophisticated users for web (facebook, twitter, etc.) and email access on the go. While this may be true for some, it's certainly not true of me and a sizeable (but low percentage) part of the market. There must exist a sizeable but diffuse niche of technicians and contractors who need a light-weight and robust technician's tool, not an adolescent's toy.
So here's my idea for a product that some manufacturer could probably market successfully via direct marketing: A netbook roughly the same specs and form factor as the Aspire One 8+8 but with a mainstream KDE based distro plus a few extra tools:
Couple of problems here
Another Groklaw commentator pointed out that: (1) people are familiar with Windows which makes them tend to choose it. (2) multiple distributions confuses ordinary computer users (there was no de facto standard distribution for netbooks). (A good fraction of the Linux users who purchase Linux netbooks through out the distribution that came on their netbook and install one of the more mainstream distributions). (3) There are still ease of use problems.
PJs response was interesting. She accused the commentator of working for Microsoft, told him he needs to update his FUD because "Linux is way easier to use now than Microsoft stuff. No comparison", and tossed off a circular argument ("If they were as difficult as you pretend, why kill it?").
OEMs get to choose what hardware they use. They shouldn't have to hack into Linux because they could have chosen components that just worked. They didn't. Why? That's the $20K question.
Put identity in the browser.