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The Truth Behind the Death of Linux On the Netbook

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-a-horse-analogy dept.

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?'"

15 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. Smoking Gun? Hardly by hansraj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by just_another_sean · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Having RTFA I can say that there is a lot more to it then just an off hand remark by a Taiwanese executive. No one seemed to be showing off Linux products. Any hype that companies like AMD, Intel and Acer made about using Linux seems to have dried out completely. And there sits MS, fat and confident that they can continue to tell hardware companies what to do and they'll just fall in line.

      Hyperbole? Maybe. But history *does* seem to suggest otherwise...

      --
      Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
    2. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The first netbooks; the ones so successful they started the entire trend; were based on Linux. It is very strange that we have quite a few of the first people posting here people claiming that nobody tried Linux based netbooks. That no one is "showing off" Linux products now is likely because Microsoft made it clear to them that they had better not.

      --
      =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
    3. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is a good example of what I find is one of the least desirable traits of the Linux community in general: a tendency to blame everyone else for any failure, whether it's the user who's too stupid or Microsoft who's too mean.

      Fairly widespread deployment of Linux on netbooks was a great opportunity to get some real user feedback and identify problems that could be addressed, but instead all that comes of it is whining about Microsoft. Sure, MS has a bad track record and I have no doubt they tried their best to use their influence in this case, but it appears the Linux community is completely squandering the chance to address real end user issues and making excuses instead, just like MS does.

    4. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      I suspect whoever controls (or fails to control) monopolies there might disagree. When a monopoly has purchasers afraid to do business with competitors, the fundamental supply-and-demand mechanism at the heart of the capitalist trading system is completely undermined. Also, being "afraid of microsoft" is vastly different from being afraid that microsoft's products might be a better choice.

    5. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by RDW · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's more like consumers wanted horses, but were (briefly) offered zebras. The netbook companies made much of how the zebras looked pretty much like horses, and could do most of the things that horses could. The zebras were healthier and more resilient than the horses, ate less (you couldn't fit much hay in the early netbooks), and were cheaper to buy. And back then, microsoft was trying to sell a new breed of pretty horse, which they wanted people to like, even though the new horses were slower than greedier and more expensive than the old workhorses. But consumers weren't quite convinced by the zebras. They were used to working with horses, they had one at home, and another for the kids to play with, and some of their horse tackle didn't fit the zebras. And then the netbooks got a little bigger, so they could easily feed a horse, and Microsoft realised that if they bred some more workhorses from the old stock that people were used to, and sold them cheaply to the netbook companies, then everyone would lose interest in the zebras. And so everybody was happy, except the Mac users, who still didn't have a netbook for their leopards.

    6. Re:Smoking Gun? Hardly by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The point is, it doesn't make the slightest difference what MS did or didn't do. The Linux community has had a decade and a half to come up with some awesomeness that they can convince people to use when they give it away. It hasn't happened? Why?

      I think the answer is that Linux developers develop Linux for themselves. If someone criticizes it, they rationalize away the criticism (or just attack the person), rather than try to improve the OS. THAT's why Linux isn't competitive with Windows except on servers, where there's a Linux geek to take care of them.

      If Linux were up to snuff for end user use and MS tried the "we'll raise the price from $15 to $100" trick then ASUS would just tell them, "well, we're getting Linux for free, and everybody likes it just as much, so piss off."

      The only reason MS could pull that trick, if they did is because Linux is not competitive with Windows. Rather than take feedback from this (or any other) opportunity and make it so, the Linux community has chosen to whine about conspiracies instead.

  2. Horse analogies are making a comeback! by selven · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. The real reasons by asavage · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. smoking gun and hard evidence by viralMeme · · Score: 5, Informative

    "There is simply no hard evidence that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly to crush Linux on netbooks"

    '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 .. 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'

    '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'

  5. OEM laziness by javacowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  6. Linux is a very loose federation... by PinchDuck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Linux is inherently anti-consumer, pro-business by tjstork · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  8. Re:Need a better horse by node+3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Obviously you should have made a better horse, if it were so easy for Microsoft to have killed it.

    Horses have the inherent weakness of being able to be shot. The problem isn't the horse. Even MS's horse can be shot. The problem is that only MS has a gun.

    So, instead of finding out how each horse compares with the other on the racetrack (MS's horse would still most likely win, but it won't be a 95% (or whatever the actual value is) market share, which they get by default if they don't have to race), all we've found out is that horses can be shot, and MS has a gun.

    That's the problem with anti-competitive behavior. The market can't work if it never gets a chance to. If we want the best products at the best prices, we need fair competition.

  9. Two big problems with this "smoking gun" by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Couple of problems here

    • Whenever Linux and Windows netbooks were made equally available to the public, the public has mostly chosen Windows. For example, Linux and Windows netbooks were (and still are) readily available from Amazon, and Windows, and if you check the top sellers, Windows dominates.
    • The quote doesn't say anything about Microsoft pressuring anybody. As one of the commentators on Groklaw pointed out, is can quite reasonably be read as simply saying it is hard to be different from the vast majority, and so its better to start off in a market where there is more diversity, like PDAs and smartphonest.

    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?").