"...but expect it to be the X-Box killer if it is."
Thats like saying the playstation 2 was a supernintendo killer. Of course its going to be better then the xbox. What, do you think its going to come out in a few months? This thing is atleast 2 years away. I am sure by the time the playstation 3 comes out microsoft will be right there with a new console too.
This is as bad as those people who say the xbox killed the dreamcast. Of course it did, it came out 2 years later!
Yes thats what I meant, I said flat screen, not flat panel. Anyways flat CRT screens are still more important then regular ones. They are not making an effort to keep the price down.
why do schools need a flatscreen? I don't even need a flatscreen. When will they learn that they want to keep prices DOWN.
This is what they should change for me to buy it:
-non flat screen.
-dvd drive
-make it available in canada.
And for fucks sake make it cheaper! Why is it so damn expensive when its designed for schools and students??
Its just not possible, you can't go arround and experiment with a clients computer. I do Tech Support for a large canadian ISP and I know what I am doing but I am told what I can and can not do. I can know how to solve your problem but I am just not allowed to do it. If I know its a problem in your BIOS I can't guide you through it.
And yes if someone knew how to do everything on a computer and fix everything and how everything works theres no damn way they are going to be working a shitty salary helping grannys on the phone. The truth is 96% of calls are so easy to fix it would be a huge waste of time and talent to hire someone who is overly qualified only to see their talents shine a few times a week.
sure the hard core computer users don't care about looks but to get into the average persons desktop you need to make it look nice. Do you think Friends would of been a succesful tv show if jennifer aniston wasnt so damn hot? (or any of the other ladies) Take a hint and beautify linux.
Oh and one other rant: I absolutely HATE how most distros arrange their K/Gnome menus. Theres almost no logic to them. Lycoris on the other hand does a pretty good job with the k menu.
Interview: Bart Decrem -- Leveraging desktop Linux
To those who have followed Linux for awhile, the name Bart Decrem is a familiar one. Originally from Belgium, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a Master's in International trade before moving to California in 1989 and enrolling in Stanford Law School. In 1999, he became a co-founder of Eazel, the innovative but ultimately unsuccessful open source company that produced the Nautilus graphical shell for GNOME. He has now joined Hancom Linux, the Korean concern that produces a Linux distribution there and that is known elsewhere for its Hancom Office productivity suite. In an interview with Linux and Main, the personable and enthusiastic Decrem discussed life in Korea, his company's plans, Linux business models, what went wrong at Eazel, how dislike of the U.S. could spell success for Linux and disaster for Microsoft, and a multitude of other things. We began by asking him how he had become involved with Hancom Linux, where he is the newly named Vice President of Business Development.
LaM: So what's going on with you and Hancom?
Decrem: I've been in Korea for about eight months. I came out here after Eazel shut down. I wanted to travel, and my wife is Korean-American and I wanted to learn Korean, learn another language, and ride out the stormy weather in Silicon Valley. So I ended up working for a company called Linux One, not the U.S.-based Linux One that everybody has talked about, just a company that happens to have the same name, which is kind of poor marketing. It's a Linux-based system vendor in Korea. I worked there for about six months, helped them with strategic planning and stuff like that. Thre wasn't so much for me to do there because it's really a Korean company with Korean customers. So I moved over to Hancom about one month ago, and here there's lots of stuff for me to do.
LaM: Hancom is known and successful throughout the Far East because of its handling of two-byte character sets. Are there plans for a broader U.S. and European presence?
Decrem: Let me give you my view on the world on that issue. This is my view and not company policy at this point. The way I describe the company is that we're a provider of Linux-based productivity solutions. I'm not saying that to talk fancy, I'm saying that because we're not necessarily just a Linux desktop company, because what we're doing with Sharp and the Zaurus is really important to us. It's not really a Linux computer -- it's a handheld device that happens to run the Linux operating system. That's important to our future. Our company has three products. The first product we have is Hancom Office; the second one is Hancom Mobile Office; and the third one is Hancom Linux OS. Hancom Office is an office productivity suite for the Linux desktop that was first done in Korean, then in Chinese simplified and traditional, Japanese -- this week we're launching the Arab edition, which is kind of our big news for the month, actually. That's a big deal. Let me talk to you about that in a second. We also have the English edition. The mobile product runs right now just on the Sharp Zaurus. That's the beauty of Qt, that you get to port to all different platforms pretty easily, so we're hoping to bring that product to other Linux-based PDAs. I think it all kind of depends on how well the Zaurus does, whether there's going to be a Linux-based PDA market or not. And then the Linux OS right now we're really only marketing in Korea, because in Japan for example we have a partnership with Red Hat, and there we are bundled with Red Hat. In Korea it makes sense for us to have our own branded product. So we took Red Hat and made a derivative. We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop, although I happen to not run it because I've been running GNOME for awhile, from the old days. But we are bringing the Linux OS to other markets. For example, we are doing an Arab edition. As far as I know, we'll be the first pure Linux Arab language Linux-based OS when we ship this week. It's like nothing out there that I know of. I'm scared to say it's the only one, just in case I'm wrong, but I can't find another one and nobody else can either. We're doing an Arab Linux OS and so the way we're looking at the OS business is, if it makes sense because of our partnership agreement and because of the local market to do an OS, we will. Maybe it will be branded Hancom and maybe it will be branded by a partner.
So, to answer your question, in my opinion the U.S. Linux desktop market is the hardest place to make a buck in the world. I kind of learned that one at Eazel, but generally, if you look at the state of the U.S. industry, it's overall much less cost-sensitive than any market elsewhere in the world. When I was in Europe -- I'm a European guy -- copying of software was much more casually done than in the U.S. Companies in the U.S., even small companies, are much more disclplined about things like licensing. Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly. It's a tough place to make a buck. But in the rest of the world the story's a lot different, for two reasons. One, because of cost issues, and second, because of control issues. Even if you talk about Europe, a lot of people just don't like the idea of sending such a big check to Microsoft every year. They want to support the European industry because they think that with Linux they have a chance to build on their own IT sector. And as you go into the rest of the world, the cost issues become much more important. For example, we're doing a deal in Tunisia. I don't think the Tunisian government is too excited about sending a big check to Microsoft or to any U.S.-based company. Those guys are dying to switch to Linux because of the cost savings, because it makes a big difference to them. And the reality is that the U.S. is not very popular in many parts of the world. I'm European, though in a lot of ways I think of myself more as American, in things like an outlook on the world, but the fact is that America isn't very popular in every country. So in my opinion there's great opportunity for companies like ours, first of all in Asia, which is our home base, but I think now with the Arab announcement there are going to be some interesting opportunities for us. We're working on a big deal with the Tunisian government, but then elsewhere in the Arab world, and because of double-byte we get to do Hebrew and all sorts of other languages as well, because now our software is bidirectional. And I think Latin America is an interesting place, and we're talking to people there. The way I would rank things ia Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, U.S.A.; unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa would be below that one because of the state of the economies there.
I think it's important for us to be in the U.S.; it's an important place to do business and we have to have some sort of product strategy there, but it's a tough place. Also, if you look at the Linux desktop space, there are a bunch of interesting things happening, whether it's Xandros or Licoris or Lindows -- lots of fairly polished Linux-based desktop OSes coming out in the U.S. StarOffice is hitting 6.0. It's a pretty decent product. I think our product has some things going for it, but the reality is that StarOffice has been around for much longer than ours and is a more mature product. So we're going to keep working, getting better, and we'll see what we can do in the U.S.
LaM: Are you finding resistance to things like the XP licensing scheme among potential customers who have been using Windows?
Decrem: There are three things coming together. The first thing that happened is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which in the U.S. made people take notice, but I think in the rest of the world made people take notice even more. In an event of the magnitude of the antitrust trial, people start sending memos to their bosses, and they start forwarding newspaper articles, so if you're in China or Korea or pretty much anywhere else in the world you really notice that stuff. Your general unease about Microsoft and dependence on U.S. technology becomes a lot higher. You start looking more closely at Microsoft. Then the licensing change is the second part of it -- all of a sudden they made a lot of pretty dramatic licensing changes. The reality is that Windows and Office are pretty mature products, and most people are pretty happy with them, which is why Microsoft does those licensing changes; they've got to figure out a way to keep sucking money out of people who aren't in a hurry to upgrade. These folks are thinking, "Our stuff works, and they're trying to stick these licensing requirements on us so we keep sending them more money, which we don't feel the need to do necessarily." They look at their IT budgets and the amount of money involved, and they'd rather not send all that money. The third factor is Linux finally emerging on the server and establishing itself, and on the desktop there's starting to be a plausible story with KDE and GNOME maturing, with StarOffice being a credible product and right now Mozilla finally coming to 1.0. So it's now a real alternative.
Those three things together mean that in my opinion specifically government markets have become very interesting opportunities. Because governments are one place where those policy factors play in, and they're big enough that you can make money off of them. They're also big enough that they can set their own standards. So if you're the Korean government, you can say that for word processing, our document format standards are such-and-such. If you're a small company, you can't really do that. So whether it be Korea or China or the Middle East, I think governments are a unique opportunity. You can get a big deal with them; they're interested in the public policy issues; they're very interested in the cost-saving issues; and they're big enough and enough of a market maker that they can create a standard. So they're a big opportunity for us.
We've done Korea. Our big deal in Korea was when we did 120,000 desktops. And if you look at how many government announcements have happened in the last nine months, either doing studies on open source, purchasing small numbers of Linux-based servers, or as in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source, there's a lot of momentum there. And it's going to keep picking up.
You see three different things. You see every government in the world commissioning studies on where it makes sense to deploy open source, whether it be the United States, or Europe, or anywhere. The second thing you see is in some places actual legislation passed, where people say first you must look at open source alternatives, and then if you're going to buy commercial software you have to get special approval. That's the extreme case of Brazil, but there are a couple of other places, too. And then third what I think you're going to see is more situations like Korea, where in our case the government bought 120,000 bundles of OS and desktop, and they paid us. And so now people are deploying these things throughout training centers; usually they're second-boot systems, at least in our case in the first phase, where they keep running Windows but they're also installing desktop Linux. The second phase starts for us in a couple of months, and you're going to start seeing some Linux-only desktops. So whether it's the City of Largo in the U.S., or the government of Korea, or the City of Beijing in China, those are the initial business opportunities.
LaM: And governments have generally steered away from products for which there is only a single source, which with Microsoft presents a problem.
Decrem: It's a single-source thing, right. I think people look at it the way you look at national defense. This a critical piece of your economic infrastructure; you do not want a single source. And if you're going to have a single source, you'd rather have a Korean single source than Microsoft, after the antitrust trial, after all the scandals about backdoors in their software, the security holes -- security is a big factor. People are really freaky about that. Not knowing that the security holes are and also the backdoors -- those sorts of things can have national security implications. The Chinese government is very sensitive to stuff like that. So there are a lot of pretty good reasons to look at Linux, including on the desktop, if you're a policy maker outside the United States, and Inside the United States. Andy's favorite thing to say at Eazel was that in the next five years you're going to start to see legislation in the U.S. to the effect of why should we be sending taxpayer dollars to a company that's a convicted monopolist when there are alternatives; we should be using those taxpayer dollars to support open standards and industries where there are fewer barriers to entry. I think you're going to see more of that in the U.S. The Department of Defense is running StarOffice. It's a Windows-based desktop, but you're going to see more of that kind of thing, though it will take a couple more years to pay off.
LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
LaM: Allowing you to look at other issues, such as security.
Decrem: Right. Security and a lot of other issues. I think Eric Raymond is right about the cost of the product issue. If I'm not mistaken, the Microsoft licensing is now more expensive than the cost of the CPU. So it's the highest single-cost item in the price of a new PC these days that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm wrong. Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.
LaM: There's a lot of discussion of software piracy, especially overseas. Have you seen much of this in your travels?
Decrem: I think it varies from country to country, and I think it has varied with time. I think it's a little different in Europe now than it was 10 years ago. Same in Korea. You do buy fake products sometimes, but when I go to the street markets, I've actually tred to find illegal software here in Korea and I couldn't find it. It's interesting. In the U.S. we have CompUSA; in Korea, you don't really have that. What you have is things called technomarkets, which are places that offer small boutiques, technology shops. You go there to buy a computer or a DVD player or whatever. I looked for bootleg XP and I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it in Hong Kong, either. In Hong Kong I could find bootleg DVDs all over the place. In Korea, you can't find bootleg DVDs anywhere. You can find bootleg leather jackets everywhere, you can find bootleg music very easily, but not bootleg software.
The other thing that's interesting in Korea is, I went to Busan, which is a city here, and went to what we call PC rooms, which isn't exactly an Internet cafe, but instead like a computer center; people go there to play games, by and large. But I couldn't find one that ran Microsoft Office -- they were all running Hancom Office, the Windows-based product. Because 10 years ago, this country was a Hancom Word country. And then Microsoft used some of their usual tactics and took over the market. I think that Microsoft is something like 70 percent of the market in office productivity. And even today in a lot of government and other places you'll find a lot of Hancom Word, which is not actually a full office suite. In all of Busan, there was no Microsoft Office. Now in Seoul, most places do end up having Microsoft Office for some reason, but in Busan or anywhere else, you just can't find it. They don't want to spend the money on it, so you just can't find it.
What you should know, by the way, is that a company named Hansoft made a product 10 years ago called Hancom Word, which is what I'm talking about. And our CEO was the V.P. of marketing there, and a couple of years ago he saw an opportunity to do desktop software on Linux. He created a company called Hancom Linux. He licensed the word "Hancom" from Hansoft. So we have a product called Hancom Office, which is our Linux-based office suite, but when I say Hancom Word, that is the product -- it's actually called something else in Korean -- that's a product that's owned by Hansoft, so we have this kind of funny trademark. If you look at our press releases, they all say Hancom is a trademark of Hansoft. They own like 30 percent of our company. It was a kind of spinoff. I think that at the end of this year they won't own anything, but now they own like 30 percent of us. That's why we have to say Hancom Linux -- we can't say just Hancom when we talk about ourselves. Just so you don't get confused.
LaM; Speaking of office suites, Hancom Office Professional has been suspended or canceled. Is there any likelihood that it will be revived?
Decrem: I think it's unlikely that you're going to see it back in its current form. I think that we may include some of the applications that were included in the beta product. I think that what our CEO wants to do is a desktop bundle for the U.S. market that includes and OS, a Web browser, a full stack. I'm urging us to take a hard look at that in view of Licoris, Lindows, and Xandros. I think we'll bundle, and I'm sure it will end up being available in the U.S., but I'm not sure that that's really going to be the target. The kind of bundle I've described, I'm not sure the U.S. is the best target market for it. That's my personal opinion. I think that like one or two of the applications in the beta will be there, but certainly not all four. We're still trying to figure that out. The timeline on that, to be honest, is probably late summer at the earliest. Internally we're saying maybe August, September, so I'm thinking that means at the earliest. That's why we said look, just give people a refund and do it generously and cleanly so we don't damage our reputation too much in the process. We definitely want to do something called "Hancom Professional," but whether it will be Hancom Office Professional we don't know right now.
LaM: We did see, for instance, Corel Linux, where the company's applications were marketed with a distribution. There seems to be a saturation of distributions right now. Does this enter into it?
Decrem: That's what I'm thinking. Looking at, for example, Licoris -- pretty nice. My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that. I've been saying for the longest time that they should just hire the guy at Ximian who does what I think is really pretty artwork, they should just hire that guy and have him do the KDE desktop and make it really pretty so I want to use it. But if you look at Licoris, that's exactly what they've done. Licoris in my opinion is a beautiful desktop. The job is done. So my point is, I don't think there's room for three of them -- I don't think you're going to see Lindows and Licoris and Xandros all do well. I think one of them has a shot at it, but it's just too small a space. And Red Hat's just having a blast. From Red Hat's perspective, they're just going to watch all these guys try to work hard to make a product; they watched us at Eazel and Ximian, and now they're going to watch Licoris and Xandros and Lindows try to build a market and try to make this desktop good enough, and then if the market emerges, Red Hat will be the big player that can come in whenever they feel like it. This is the power of being the market leader and having the brand. I think that Red Hat is going to come in and sweep up like half of whatever desktop market there will be, just because of the brand. I mean, it's a quality outfit with quality products, right? I didn't mention Mandrake and the others, but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. It's a shame -- I feel sorry for them because they're all working their butt off to make a beautiful product.
LaM: A year or so ago there was movement away from desktop Linux. Did we learn the wrong lesson, and might it be true that Linux on the desktop could be won by a company willing to do it right and willing to endure many quarters of operating at a loss to bring it to pass?
Decrem: I think that's essentially right. The big news was the IDC report that came out in, what was it, February. Last year they actually put kind of the final nail in Eazel's coffin. We were in the middle of doing our fundraising, and really working our butt off to make the case that we could be a reasonable investment for investors. And in the middle of that, IDC came back and restated their desktop forecast and cut it by like two thirds. I forget what the number was, it was that they had this forecast for something like 25 million desktops, and they came back six months later and said oh, no, whoops, we were wrong -- it's only six. It was something that dramatic. All of a sudden we found ourselves in a place where the investors were all running away from any investment because of the stock market crash, so they were asking us to be super, super firm about our ability to be profitable. And all of a sudden IDC came along and said, whoops, we were off, the market is two times smaller than we thought it was, and it made it hard for us even to go to investors and ask for money. We could not say that we were sure we could deliver what they were asking of us. So the IDC report was like the final nail in our coffin. But now they've come out with another forecast, and they've basically tripled their forecast again. I think that's very positive. But I think that what doesn't work is what Eazel was trying to do; in the benefit of hindsight you can see it was not the way to do it -- you can't just assume that you're going to have an end-user market that's going to pay for itself by buying one-offs off of your website.
I think the right example, the right way to do it is, I would say, ours, and CodeWeavers, and Ximian. I'm familiar with them and am not trying to imply anything negative about other companies. But those are three companies I'm familiar with that I think are doing it right. In the case of Ximian, what I think is great about them is that they're hustlers -- those guys will make a buck anytime they can, and that's kind of what Red Hat did: they were selling CDs out of the back of their truck. And I think that's what Ximian was doing. They were selling teeshirts there for awhile, that's what they did to make money. And they got the money and support thay got from Intel and others in the Mono thing, and they got themselves a big contract with Sun, now they have a big contract with H-P. It's behind-the-scenes stuff, but it makes sense, because they're kind of an infrastructure company, a kind of a desktop-infrastructure company. And they're paying the bills. As an investor, that's what you want to see. You want to see guys that are going to hustle and make money in ways that are roughly consistent with the long-term vision. And most of what they are doing is consistent with their vision. I used to think they were doing way too much stuff and they weren't focused enough, but in all respect they're a resilient company, and boy, I love Evolution -- for me it's the best open source desktop app I've used. I can't think of anything better, actually, than Evolution. I would rank it ahead of GNOME or KDE or Mozilla or OpenOffice -- it's just a piece of beauty, that thing Evolution, from an end-user perspective. I've never looked at the code.
The second one, I'd say, is CodeWeavers. I just love their product, CrossOver Office, or any of their things. It's just stuff that works. It's great. And they've sold a bunch of them. Have you talked to Jeremy? Oh, money's coming in, man! He's selling their stuff. People are buying their stuff.
The third desktop company I'd mention is ours, because I think we make sense in the sense that what we're doing here is, we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing. Our software is rough on the edges -- you know that and I know that; we all know that -- and the Zaurus as a whole is rough around the edges and needs some major work, needs like a 1.2 release, but if they pull that off, they could build a market that will be really big. And we're trying to do some other deals. We're trying to do a deal, as I mentioned, in the Middle East that's of similar size. So while we have a website and you can buy our software, that's not what keeps us in business. What keeps us in business is these 100,000-copies-at-a-time deals, and I think that's pretty exciting, actually. That makes me feel kind of confident, makes me feel positive about our company.
Yet I think all of them are a struggle: I think Hancom is a struggle, I think Ximian is a struggle, I think CodeWeavers is a struggle. I don't think all three of us are going to survive, but I think one or two of us will survive, and that'll be exciting.
LaM: What are you going to be doing in your new position?
Decrem: I spend about a third of my time doing actual legal work, which is kind of fresh and new, and about a third of my time on product marketing, just because I want to make sure we have products we feel good about, so I spend a fair amount of time fixing up the website or looking at the roadmap for the product. And then a third is in business development -- doing deals with companies in the U.S. and elsewhere. But I'm just getting to know the company, really. And in this place people work hard, man! They work 9 to 9 here, six days a week. That's the culture -- the whole country works like that. What we've bitten off it a lot. It's just a huge challenge.
What I think is my pet peeve, and I think I need to work on it this week, is that you have to spend literally half of your time making sure those goddam Office documents show up properly, and then they still don't. We're not as good as StarOffice on that front. And we need to be as good as StarOffice. I think StarOffice does a decent job, and I think we have some catch-up work to do with them; that's my personal opinion. It's such a headache. And it's the same in Mozilla -- all these guys spend all this time making sure ESPN shows up properly. And it's the same with Konqueror, I'm sure, now. Which is why I don't use Konqueror. I know it's got to be a lot of work to get all these pages to show properly. When I go to MyAmazon.com and try to hit that purchase button, is it really going to work? I use Galeon and it's always like, will MyYahoo show up properly today? Those guys at Yahoo, they just do these crazy hacks that work on Explorer and pretty much nothing else. Mozilla works these days.
Anyway, it's a huge challenge to do an office suite. We've been at it for about two years now, and Hansoft has been at it for 10 years, and Microsoft has been at it for like 15 or something. So getting the core product to be as good as it wants to be, we need to be focusing on that.
But a thing I want us to be working on, I think we need to find a way to have kind of the middle layer, between Microsoft Office and KOffice, GNOME Office, StarOffice, Hancom Office. And that needs to be one open source project that we all just put together. It's unbelievable that I've got all these engineers here just kind of reverse engineering Microsoft Office formats. Same at StarOffice. Same at AbiWord and Gnumeric and KOffice. We're all spending way too much time on that one. I think it's one of those things where it's easier to keep plugging away at your own thing than to switch to the common thing. I think we have to build this middle layer, this XML layer, and everybody exports to that and imports from that. In the short term it always feels good to keep making your current filters just a little bit better, but I think if you take like a three-year view, then I think StarOffice and us and KOffice and GNOME Office, if we all worked on the same thing, then we'd all be much better off inm a couple years. We need to figure that one out. I think that in the case of the spreadsheet it's really hard to do that because the application is very closely tied to the format. The functions are very closely tied to the actual document format. In the word processor, I don't think that's the case at all, that it's basically attributes of the document. But the way Gnumeric guys explained it to me, it's actually really hard for the Gnumeric guys to borrow stuff from OpenOffice because it's all tied to the functions you have in the program. Maybe it's hard in that case, but there's got to be a way we can leverage more of that stuff. At least we should be able to have 50 percent of that work done in common. But I can tell you people spend a lot of time poring over Microsoft Office documents here. And it's the only thing people care about -- it's the only thing anybody cares about. And that's why I think that if we all did this together, we'd have a lot more time to deal with changes in document formats and events of that nature, as opposed to everyone on their own.
The good news on that front is Microsoft's embrace of XML -- so far, it seems to be getting easier to figure this stuff out, rather than harder. But if and when Linux becomes a real threat or StarOffice becomes a real threat, then I think you'll start seeing many more surprises start to pop up. If you look back two years, Microsoft was behaving pretty well. They were moving to XML and they weren't messing with their file formats so much. But if you look at the context, first of all they were under the antitrust gun, and second of all, everybody thought they'd be making all their money off of Web services by now. So Microsoft thought they'd be able to turn this thing into a revenue stream and deal with the antitrust problem. But now both of those things are gone, and it's starting to look more and more scary every day. It's like a lovefest, what they're getting from Washington these days. Getting the green light, Linux looking more strong, and these Web services and the XP licensing model, and getting the revenue to keep flowing with these new pressures makes it more likely that Microsoft is going to start springing surprises.
By the way, I think it's a great month and a great quarter for Linux on the desktop. I think StarOffice is great news for us; I think CodeWeavers is great news for us; I think Mozilla 1.0 is the biggest news for all of us; and Xandros, Licoris, Lindows -- those are all very positive developments. And then KDE3, and GNOME2 is coming out next month also. It's kind of like everywhere you look on the desktop, it's just a great season.
I've had nothing but problems with dells. In this house we have two dell laptops (we got them before we knew any better) and both have nothing but problems. First, I have an older dell Latitude CPi, the case is cracking at the hinges and I can barely close it. The batteries last about 1 hour (and yes I condition the batteries). Second I have one of the newer dells, its only a few months old. The battery failed, the hard drive was replaced, the cd-rom also needs to be replaced and the soundcard (or the speakers?) have an odd glitch... out of nowhere the speakers will emit a very high pitched noise that everyone in the house will hear and as soon as you touch the volume knob it stops. So I guess you could say my experiences have been pretty bad. We also have 2 toshibas in the house (older ones, one is about 4-5 years old, the other is aobut 2) and they both work perfectly. I ever used the 4-5 year old toshiba satelite as a network server for about a year. For sure the next laptop I am getting is either an Apple or a Toshiba.
It would be a good system if really stupid posts would not get moderated up to 5. Alot of good intelligent posts get modded down because they go against the grain. There IS a problem the moderation system. Just look further down at the thread "Interesting concept, but". The original posted only got modded 4 and someone who replies "How about we host the website on your server?" get modded up to 5 with "Insightful". THAT is the problem with the moderation system.
all the money Slashdot makes should be donated to the poor sites that get slashdotted. Ever stop and think about the webservers that get crushed in the process? It equals downtime for everyone else who doesnt give a damn about a hub in a teddy bear.
Heres another way of looking at it: When you get cable television you expect more from the new channel you had to pay for, when you you get satellite or digital cable you expect high budget shows and high budget channels (HBO, Movie Channels, etc).
In this metaphor Slashdot is like a local community cable show (think Wayne's World).
I am sorry if my post made it seem as if I don't know that it cost money to run this site. I understand this. I just think that at the current state it is in, it should have paid memberships. They should clean up their acts, review the moderation system (thats another story) and then try and have paid subscriptions.
ps: Firing Jon Katz would make me want to join more.
I think one of the main things that attracts people to slashdot is that it is not commercial and there is a sense of community (a very twisted one at that). Slashdot is a great FREE site and thats as far as it goes. I wish you guys all the success but I really don't think it will make much money. Slashdot is never consistent (which is a terrible business model) , so how can you expect to make a business out of it? Business involves planning and consistency.
I for one don't want to pay for a service that at is heart is free and should always be free.
I use it because its free and generally isnt bloated or some with spyware or third party offers. (AOL icons, REAL ONE, etc)
I don't really think the product is better. I would just rather deal with a crappier product without all the annoying bloat then a bloated good product that fills my computer with SHIT.
from webopedia:
"JPEG: Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression."
Do any of you seriously know any "regular" people who actually have to decide which browser to use? Other then people who use linux. When I use windows there is no question in my mind that I want to use IE. On the other hand on Linux no one browser fits me well so I am often switching between browsers. This "war" of yours is more of a little skirmish.
I've taken unix/linux classes in college and I've seen the linux crash course books and they always focus on how to use grep and how to use kde or gnome but that will only get you so far. Like those people who say that they got their grand mother using Linux. Maybe so but I doubt that once she needs to install new drivers she'll be a happy camper. I suggest you teach them how to use "make", how drivers work in linux, how to install software, etc.
I remember how frustrated I was after I tried to install software and my wireless network card without any rpms. I don't know why no one teaches that, its not like everything is available in rpm.
I don't see how this will help the case against Microsoft. Just because they can make an OS that doesnt have its key features it doesn't mean that its not crippled. Windows WILL be crippled if it has to stop shipping with IE. And even if it doesn't ship with IE people are still going to download it right after. Maybe people should stop wasting their time trying to punish a company that makes a good product and start making products that can actually do nearly as much as Microsofts products.
Re:He really isn't a nut
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
You don't have to believe in a fully deterministic universe to beleive in time travel to the future. Things still happen while you're travelling, people are sill making decisions, you are just kind of "set aside" while time passes. And when you come out of it 1000 years could of passed and you were just locked away for a few minutes suspended in time. So its not really time travel because you can't go back, its just like freezing yourself.
nowhere does it say that this site is a linux site. If it had to be labeled anything it should be an opensource site, thats why you get new about linux, bsd, mac os x.
All the people interviewed in that article are wimps. They clearly say they are looking for jobs similar to what they had before. Tough luck chumps, go look somewhere else. They think that because they are taking commitment-less jobs while they look for another "fall-back-into-a-shitload-of-money-job" we should feel sorry for them? Get up and tough it out and look for a different type of job. I can't imagine someone with a MBA is limited to dot coms.
Slashdot Mirror
"...but expect it to be the X-Box killer if it is."
Thats like saying the playstation 2 was a supernintendo killer. Of course its going to be better then the xbox. What, do you think its going to come out in a few months? This thing is atleast 2 years away. I am sure by the time the playstation 3 comes out microsoft will be right there with a new console too.
This is as bad as those people who say the xbox killed the dreamcast. Of course it did, it came out 2 years later!
I ran a higher resolution on my 15" monitor and I am running a higher resolution on my 17" monitor, some people need extra desktop real estate.
Yes thats what I meant, I said flat screen, not flat panel. Anyways flat CRT screens are still more important then regular ones. They are not making an effort to keep the price down.
why do schools need a flatscreen? I don't even need a flatscreen. When will they learn that they want to keep prices DOWN. This is what they should change for me to buy it: -non flat screen. -dvd drive -make it available in canada. And for fucks sake make it cheaper! Why is it so damn expensive when its designed for schools and students??
Its just not possible, you can't go arround and experiment with a clients computer. I do Tech Support for a large canadian ISP and I know what I am doing but I am told what I can and can not do. I can know how to solve your problem but I am just not allowed to do it. If I know its a problem in your BIOS I can't guide you through it. And yes if someone knew how to do everything on a computer and fix everything and how everything works theres no damn way they are going to be working a shitty salary helping grannys on the phone. The truth is 96% of calls are so easy to fix it would be a huge waste of time and talent to hire someone who is overly qualified only to see their talents shine a few times a week.
sure the hard core computer users don't care about looks but to get into the average persons desktop you need to make it look nice. Do you think Friends would of been a succesful tv show if jennifer aniston wasnt so damn hot? (or any of the other ladies) Take a hint and beautify linux. Oh and one other rant: I absolutely HATE how most distros arrange their K/Gnome menus. Theres almost no logic to them. Lycoris on the other hand does a pretty good job with the k menu.
Interview: Bart Decrem -- Leveraging desktop Linux
To those who have followed Linux for awhile, the name Bart Decrem is a familiar one. Originally from Belgium, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and a Master's in International trade before moving to California in 1989 and enrolling in Stanford Law School. In 1999, he became a co-founder of Eazel, the innovative but ultimately unsuccessful open source company that produced the Nautilus graphical shell for GNOME. He has now joined Hancom Linux, the Korean concern that produces a Linux distribution there and that is known elsewhere for its Hancom Office productivity suite. In an interview with Linux and Main, the personable and enthusiastic Decrem discussed life in Korea, his company's plans, Linux business models, what went wrong at Eazel, how dislike of the U.S. could spell success for Linux and disaster for Microsoft, and a multitude of other things. We began by asking him how he had become involved with Hancom Linux, where he is the newly named Vice President of Business Development.
LaM: So what's going on with you and Hancom?
Decrem: I've been in Korea for about eight months. I came out here after Eazel shut down. I wanted to travel, and my wife is Korean-American and I wanted to learn Korean, learn another language, and ride out the stormy weather in Silicon Valley. So I ended up working for a company called Linux One, not the U.S.-based Linux One that everybody has talked about, just a company that happens to have the same name, which is kind of poor marketing. It's a Linux-based system vendor in Korea. I worked there for about six months, helped them with strategic planning and stuff like that. Thre wasn't so much for me to do there because it's really a Korean company with Korean customers. So I moved over to Hancom about one month ago, and here there's lots of stuff for me to do.
LaM: Hancom is known and successful throughout the Far East because of its handling of two-byte character sets. Are there plans for a broader U.S. and European presence?
Decrem: Let me give you my view on the world on that issue. This is my view and not company policy at this point. The way I describe the company is that we're a provider of Linux-based productivity solutions. I'm not saying that to talk fancy, I'm saying that because we're not necessarily just a Linux desktop company, because what we're doing with Sharp and the Zaurus is really important to us. It's not really a Linux computer -- it's a handheld device that happens to run the Linux operating system. That's important to our future. Our company has three products. The first product we have is Hancom Office; the second one is Hancom Mobile Office; and the third one is Hancom Linux OS. Hancom Office is an office productivity suite for the Linux desktop that was first done in Korean, then in Chinese simplified and traditional, Japanese -- this week we're launching the Arab edition, which is kind of our big news for the month, actually. That's a big deal. Let me talk to you about that in a second. We also have the English edition. The mobile product runs right now just on the Sharp Zaurus. That's the beauty of Qt, that you get to port to all different platforms pretty easily, so we're hoping to bring that product to other Linux-based PDAs. I think it all kind of depends on how well the Zaurus does, whether there's going to be a Linux-based PDA market or not. And then the Linux OS right now we're really only marketing in Korea, because in Japan for example we have a partnership with Red Hat, and there we are bundled with Red Hat. In Korea it makes sense for us to have our own branded product. So we took Red Hat and made a derivative. We cleaned up KDE and made it look pretty. It's a pretty decent desktop, although I happen to not run it because I've been running GNOME for awhile, from the old days. But we are bringing the Linux OS to other markets. For example, we are doing an Arab edition. As far as I know, we'll be the first pure Linux Arab language Linux-based OS when we ship this week. It's like nothing out there that I know of. I'm scared to say it's the only one, just in case I'm wrong, but I can't find another one and nobody else can either. We're doing an Arab Linux OS and so the way we're looking at the OS business is, if it makes sense because of our partnership agreement and because of the local market to do an OS, we will. Maybe it will be branded Hancom and maybe it will be branded by a partner.
So, to answer your question, in my opinion the U.S. Linux desktop market is the hardest place to make a buck in the world. I kind of learned that one at Eazel, but generally, if you look at the state of the U.S. industry, it's overall much less cost-sensitive than any market elsewhere in the world. When I was in Europe -- I'm a European guy -- copying of software was much more casually done than in the U.S. Companies in the U.S., even small companies, are much more disclplined about things like licensing. Because of that, in my opinion, it's hard to make money in the U.S. because the companies are pretty happy with Windows. It works pretty well, and the cost savings that result from Linux on the desktop for most companies do not warrant the trauma of having to worry about whether your Microsoft Office document is going to open properly. It's a tough place to make a buck. But in the rest of the world the story's a lot different, for two reasons. One, because of cost issues, and second, because of control issues. Even if you talk about Europe, a lot of people just don't like the idea of sending such a big check to Microsoft every year. They want to support the European industry because they think that with Linux they have a chance to build on their own IT sector. And as you go into the rest of the world, the cost issues become much more important. For example, we're doing a deal in Tunisia. I don't think the Tunisian government is too excited about sending a big check to Microsoft or to any U.S.-based company. Those guys are dying to switch to Linux because of the cost savings, because it makes a big difference to them. And the reality is that the U.S. is not very popular in many parts of the world. I'm European, though in a lot of ways I think of myself more as American, in things like an outlook on the world, but the fact is that America isn't very popular in every country. So in my opinion there's great opportunity for companies like ours, first of all in Asia, which is our home base, but I think now with the Arab announcement there are going to be some interesting opportunities for us. We're working on a big deal with the Tunisian government, but then elsewhere in the Arab world, and because of double-byte we get to do Hebrew and all sorts of other languages as well, because now our software is bidirectional. And I think Latin America is an interesting place, and we're talking to people there. The way I would rank things ia Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, U.S.A.; unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa would be below that one because of the state of the economies there.
I think it's important for us to be in the U.S.; it's an important place to do business and we have to have some sort of product strategy there, but it's a tough place. Also, if you look at the Linux desktop space, there are a bunch of interesting things happening, whether it's Xandros or Licoris or Lindows -- lots of fairly polished Linux-based desktop OSes coming out in the U.S. StarOffice is hitting 6.0. It's a pretty decent product. I think our product has some things going for it, but the reality is that StarOffice has been around for much longer than ours and is a more mature product. So we're going to keep working, getting better, and we'll see what we can do in the U.S.
LaM: Are you finding resistance to things like the XP licensing scheme among potential customers who have been using Windows?
Decrem: There are three things coming together. The first thing that happened is the Microsoft antitrust trial, which in the U.S. made people take notice, but I think in the rest of the world made people take notice even more. In an event of the magnitude of the antitrust trial, people start sending memos to their bosses, and they start forwarding newspaper articles, so if you're in China or Korea or pretty much anywhere else in the world you really notice that stuff. Your general unease about Microsoft and dependence on U.S. technology becomes a lot higher. You start looking more closely at Microsoft. Then the licensing change is the second part of it -- all of a sudden they made a lot of pretty dramatic licensing changes. The reality is that Windows and Office are pretty mature products, and most people are pretty happy with them, which is why Microsoft does those licensing changes; they've got to figure out a way to keep sucking money out of people who aren't in a hurry to upgrade. These folks are thinking, "Our stuff works, and they're trying to stick these licensing requirements on us so we keep sending them more money, which we don't feel the need to do necessarily." They look at their IT budgets and the amount of money involved, and they'd rather not send all that money. The third factor is Linux finally emerging on the server and establishing itself, and on the desktop there's starting to be a plausible story with KDE and GNOME maturing, with StarOffice being a credible product and right now Mozilla finally coming to 1.0. So it's now a real alternative.
Those three things together mean that in my opinion specifically government markets have become very interesting opportunities. Because governments are one place where those policy factors play in, and they're big enough that you can make money off of them. They're also big enough that they can set their own standards. So if you're the Korean government, you can say that for word processing, our document format standards are such-and-such. If you're a small company, you can't really do that. So whether it be Korea or China or the Middle East, I think governments are a unique opportunity. You can get a big deal with them; they're interested in the public policy issues; they're very interested in the cost-saving issues; and they're big enough and enough of a market maker that they can create a standard. So they're a big opportunity for us.
We've done Korea. Our big deal in Korea was when we did 120,000 desktops. And if you look at how many government announcements have happened in the last nine months, either doing studies on open source, purchasing small numbers of Linux-based servers, or as in the case of Brazil, passing legislation forcing people to use open source, there's a lot of momentum there. And it's going to keep picking up.
You see three different things. You see every government in the world commissioning studies on where it makes sense to deploy open source, whether it be the United States, or Europe, or anywhere. The second thing you see is in some places actual legislation passed, where people say first you must look at open source alternatives, and then if you're going to buy commercial software you have to get special approval. That's the extreme case of Brazil, but there are a couple of other places, too. And then third what I think you're going to see is more situations like Korea, where in our case the government bought 120,000 bundles of OS and desktop, and they paid us. And so now people are deploying these things throughout training centers; usually they're second-boot systems, at least in our case in the first phase, where they keep running Windows but they're also installing desktop Linux. The second phase starts for us in a couple of months, and you're going to start seeing some Linux-only desktops. So whether it's the City of Largo in the U.S., or the government of Korea, or the City of Beijing in China, those are the initial business opportunities.
LaM: And governments have generally steered away from products for which there is only a single source, which with Microsoft presents a problem.
Decrem: It's a single-source thing, right. I think people look at it the way you look at national defense. This a critical piece of your economic infrastructure; you do not want a single source. And if you're going to have a single source, you'd rather have a Korean single source than Microsoft, after the antitrust trial, after all the scandals about backdoors in their software, the security holes -- security is a big factor. People are really freaky about that. Not knowing that the security holes are and also the backdoors -- those sorts of things can have national security implications. The Chinese government is very sensitive to stuff like that. So there are a lot of pretty good reasons to look at Linux, including on the desktop, if you're a policy maker outside the United States, and Inside the United States. Andy's favorite thing to say at Eazel was that in the next five years you're going to start to see legislation in the U.S. to the effect of why should we be sending taxpayer dollars to a company that's a convicted monopolist when there are alternatives; we should be using those taxpayer dollars to support open standards and industries where there are fewer barriers to entry. I think you're going to see more of that in the U.S. The Department of Defense is running StarOffice. It's a Windows-based desktop, but you're going to see more of that kind of thing, though it will take a couple more years to pay off.
LaM: And with StarOffice it's fairly easy to change the underlying operating system.
Decrem: That's the beauty of it. That's the importance of Mozilla and StarOffice. Those are kind of mission-critical applications, and as you switch to those, the operating becomes all but irrelevent. That's the beauty of the Internet, frankly. It commodifies the operating system to a large extent.
LaM: Allowing you to look at other issues, such as security.
Decrem: Right. Security and a lot of other issues. I think Eric Raymond is right about the cost of the product issue. If I'm not mistaken, the Microsoft licensing is now more expensive than the cost of the CPU. So it's the highest single-cost item in the price of a new PC these days that I'm aware of. Maybe I'm wrong. Compaq paid like a zillion dollars in royalties last year to Microsoft.
LaM: There's a lot of discussion of software piracy, especially overseas. Have you seen much of this in your travels?
Decrem: I think it varies from country to country, and I think it has varied with time. I think it's a little different in Europe now than it was 10 years ago. Same in Korea. You do buy fake products sometimes, but when I go to the street markets, I've actually tred to find illegal software here in Korea and I couldn't find it. It's interesting. In the U.S. we have CompUSA; in Korea, you don't really have that. What you have is things called technomarkets, which are places that offer small boutiques, technology shops. You go there to buy a computer or a DVD player or whatever. I looked for bootleg XP and I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it in Hong Kong, either. In Hong Kong I could find bootleg DVDs all over the place. In Korea, you can't find bootleg DVDs anywhere. You can find bootleg leather jackets everywhere, you can find bootleg music very easily, but not bootleg software.
The other thing that's interesting in Korea is, I went to Busan, which is a city here, and went to what we call PC rooms, which isn't exactly an Internet cafe, but instead like a computer center; people go there to play games, by and large. But I couldn't find one that ran Microsoft Office -- they were all running Hancom Office, the Windows-based product. Because 10 years ago, this country was a Hancom Word country. And then Microsoft used some of their usual tactics and took over the market. I think that Microsoft is something like 70 percent of the market in office productivity. And even today in a lot of government and other places you'll find a lot of Hancom Word, which is not actually a full office suite. In all of Busan, there was no Microsoft Office. Now in Seoul, most places do end up having Microsoft Office for some reason, but in Busan or anywhere else, you just can't find it. They don't want to spend the money on it, so you just can't find it.
What you should know, by the way, is that a company named Hansoft made a product 10 years ago called Hancom Word, which is what I'm talking about. And our CEO was the V.P. of marketing there, and a couple of years ago he saw an opportunity to do desktop software on Linux. He created a company called Hancom Linux. He licensed the word "Hancom" from Hansoft. So we have a product called Hancom Office, which is our Linux-based office suite, but when I say Hancom Word, that is the product -- it's actually called something else in Korean -- that's a product that's owned by Hansoft, so we have this kind of funny trademark. If you look at our press releases, they all say Hancom is a trademark of Hansoft. They own like 30 percent of our company. It was a kind of spinoff. I think that at the end of this year they won't own anything, but now they own like 30 percent of us. That's why we have to say Hancom Linux -- we can't say just Hancom when we talk about ourselves. Just so you don't get confused.
LaM; Speaking of office suites, Hancom Office Professional has been suspended or canceled. Is there any likelihood that it will be revived?
Decrem: I think it's unlikely that you're going to see it back in its current form. I think that we may include some of the applications that were included in the beta product. I think that what our CEO wants to do is a desktop bundle for the U.S. market that includes and OS, a Web browser, a full stack. I'm urging us to take a hard look at that in view of Licoris, Lindows, and Xandros. I think we'll bundle, and I'm sure it will end up being available in the U.S., but I'm not sure that that's really going to be the target. The kind of bundle I've described, I'm not sure the U.S. is the best target market for it. That's my personal opinion. I think that like one or two of the applications in the beta will be there, but certainly not all four. We're still trying to figure that out. The timeline on that, to be honest, is probably late summer at the earliest. Internally we're saying maybe August, September, so I'm thinking that means at the earliest. That's why we said look, just give people a refund and do it generously and cleanly so we don't damage our reputation too much in the process. We definitely want to do something called "Hancom Professional," but whether it will be Hancom Office Professional we don't know right now.
LaM: We did see, for instance, Corel Linux, where the company's applications were marketed with a distribution. There seems to be a saturation of distributions right now. Does this enter into it?
Decrem: That's what I'm thinking. Looking at, for example, Licoris -- pretty nice. My big gripe about KDE is I think it's butt-ugly. The main reason I keep using GNOME is that the icons on KDE are aesthetically offensive to me. And the letter K is kind of offensive, it's not very elegant. There's an elegancy missing in the thing. The underlying thing is pretty darn good, no argument with that. I've been saying for the longest time that they should just hire the guy at Ximian who does what I think is really pretty artwork, they should just hire that guy and have him do the KDE desktop and make it really pretty so I want to use it. But if you look at Licoris, that's exactly what they've done. Licoris in my opinion is a beautiful desktop. The job is done. So my point is, I don't think there's room for three of them -- I don't think you're going to see Lindows and Licoris and Xandros all do well. I think one of them has a shot at it, but it's just too small a space. And Red Hat's just having a blast. From Red Hat's perspective, they're just going to watch all these guys try to work hard to make a product; they watched us at Eazel and Ximian, and now they're going to watch Licoris and Xandros and Lindows try to build a market and try to make this desktop good enough, and then if the market emerges, Red Hat will be the big player that can come in whenever they feel like it. This is the power of being the market leader and having the brand. I think that Red Hat is going to come in and sweep up like half of whatever desktop market there will be, just because of the brand. I mean, it's a quality outfit with quality products, right? I didn't mention Mandrake and the others, but I think maybe one or two of them are going to make it. It's a shame -- I feel sorry for them because they're all working their butt off to make a beautiful product.
LaM: A year or so ago there was movement away from desktop Linux. Did we learn the wrong lesson, and might it be true that Linux on the desktop could be won by a company willing to do it right and willing to endure many quarters of operating at a loss to bring it to pass?
Decrem: I think that's essentially right. The big news was the IDC report that came out in, what was it, February. Last year they actually put kind of the final nail in Eazel's coffin. We were in the middle of doing our fundraising, and really working our butt off to make the case that we could be a reasonable investment for investors. And in the middle of that, IDC came back and restated their desktop forecast and cut it by like two thirds. I forget what the number was, it was that they had this forecast for something like 25 million desktops, and they came back six months later and said oh, no, whoops, we were wrong -- it's only six. It was something that dramatic. All of a sudden we found ourselves in a place where the investors were all running away from any investment because of the stock market crash, so they were asking us to be super, super firm about our ability to be profitable. And all of a sudden IDC came along and said, whoops, we were off, the market is two times smaller than we thought it was, and it made it hard for us even to go to investors and ask for money. We could not say that we were sure we could deliver what they were asking of us. So the IDC report was like the final nail in our coffin. But now they've come out with another forecast, and they've basically tripled their forecast again. I think that's very positive. But I think that what doesn't work is what Eazel was trying to do; in the benefit of hindsight you can see it was not the way to do it -- you can't just assume that you're going to have an end-user market that's going to pay for itself by buying one-offs off of your website.
I think the right example, the right way to do it is, I would say, ours, and CodeWeavers, and Ximian. I'm familiar with them and am not trying to imply anything negative about other companies. But those are three companies I'm familiar with that I think are doing it right. In the case of Ximian, what I think is great about them is that they're hustlers -- those guys will make a buck anytime they can, and that's kind of what Red Hat did: they were selling CDs out of the back of their truck. And I think that's what Ximian was doing. They were selling teeshirts there for awhile, that's what they did to make money. And they got the money and support thay got from Intel and others in the Mono thing, and they got themselves a big contract with Sun, now they have a big contract with H-P. It's behind-the-scenes stuff, but it makes sense, because they're kind of an infrastructure company, a kind of a desktop-infrastructure company. And they're paying the bills. As an investor, that's what you want to see. You want to see guys that are going to hustle and make money in ways that are roughly consistent with the long-term vision. And most of what they are doing is consistent with their vision. I used to think they were doing way too much stuff and they weren't focused enough, but in all respect they're a resilient company, and boy, I love Evolution -- for me it's the best open source desktop app I've used. I can't think of anything better, actually, than Evolution. I would rank it ahead of GNOME or KDE or Mozilla or OpenOffice -- it's just a piece of beauty, that thing Evolution, from an end-user perspective. I've never looked at the code.
The second one, I'd say, is CodeWeavers. I just love their product, CrossOver Office, or any of their things. It's just stuff that works. It's great. And they've sold a bunch of them. Have you talked to Jeremy? Oh, money's coming in, man! He's selling their stuff. People are buying their stuff.
The third desktop company I'd mention is ours, because I think we make sense in the sense that what we're doing here is, we've got this big contract with the Korean government -- that's 120,000 seats -- and we've got a big bundling deal with Sharp, every Zaurus that moves, we're moving a copy of our product, and Sharp has big plans for the thing. Our software is rough on the edges -- you know that and I know that; we all know that -- and the Zaurus as a whole is rough around the edges and needs some major work, needs like a 1.2 release, but if they pull that off, they could build a market that will be really big. And we're trying to do some other deals. We're trying to do a deal, as I mentioned, in the Middle East that's of similar size. So while we have a website and you can buy our software, that's not what keeps us in business. What keeps us in business is these 100,000-copies-at-a-time deals, and I think that's pretty exciting, actually. That makes me feel kind of confident, makes me feel positive about our company.
Yet I think all of them are a struggle: I think Hancom is a struggle, I think Ximian is a struggle, I think CodeWeavers is a struggle. I don't think all three of us are going to survive, but I think one or two of us will survive, and that'll be exciting.
LaM: What are you going to be doing in your new position?
Decrem: I spend about a third of my time doing actual legal work, which is kind of fresh and new, and about a third of my time on product marketing, just because I want to make sure we have products we feel good about, so I spend a fair amount of time fixing up the website or looking at the roadmap for the product. And then a third is in business development -- doing deals with companies in the U.S. and elsewhere. But I'm just getting to know the company, really. And in this place people work hard, man! They work 9 to 9 here, six days a week. That's the culture -- the whole country works like that. What we've bitten off it a lot. It's just a huge challenge.
What I think is my pet peeve, and I think I need to work on it this week, is that you have to spend literally half of your time making sure those goddam Office documents show up properly, and then they still don't. We're not as good as StarOffice on that front. And we need to be as good as StarOffice. I think StarOffice does a decent job, and I think we have some catch-up work to do with them; that's my personal opinion. It's such a headache. And it's the same in Mozilla -- all these guys spend all this time making sure ESPN shows up properly. And it's the same with Konqueror, I'm sure, now. Which is why I don't use Konqueror. I know it's got to be a lot of work to get all these pages to show properly. When I go to MyAmazon.com and try to hit that purchase button, is it really going to work? I use Galeon and it's always like, will MyYahoo show up properly today? Those guys at Yahoo, they just do these crazy hacks that work on Explorer and pretty much nothing else. Mozilla works these days.
Anyway, it's a huge challenge to do an office suite. We've been at it for about two years now, and Hansoft has been at it for 10 years, and Microsoft has been at it for like 15 or something. So getting the core product to be as good as it wants to be, we need to be focusing on that.
But a thing I want us to be working on, I think we need to find a way to have kind of the middle layer, between Microsoft Office and KOffice, GNOME Office, StarOffice, Hancom Office. And that needs to be one open source project that we all just put together. It's unbelievable that I've got all these engineers here just kind of reverse engineering Microsoft Office formats. Same at StarOffice. Same at AbiWord and Gnumeric and KOffice. We're all spending way too much time on that one. I think it's one of those things where it's easier to keep plugging away at your own thing than to switch to the common thing. I think we have to build this middle layer, this XML layer, and everybody exports to that and imports from that. In the short term it always feels good to keep making your current filters just a little bit better, but I think if you take like a three-year view, then I think StarOffice and us and KOffice and GNOME Office, if we all worked on the same thing, then we'd all be much better off inm a couple years. We need to figure that one out. I think that in the case of the spreadsheet it's really hard to do that because the application is very closely tied to the format. The functions are very closely tied to the actual document format. In the word processor, I don't think that's the case at all, that it's basically attributes of the document. But the way Gnumeric guys explained it to me, it's actually really hard for the Gnumeric guys to borrow stuff from OpenOffice because it's all tied to the functions you have in the program. Maybe it's hard in that case, but there's got to be a way we can leverage more of that stuff. At least we should be able to have 50 percent of that work done in common. But I can tell you people spend a lot of time poring over Microsoft Office documents here. And it's the only thing people care about -- it's the only thing anybody cares about. And that's why I think that if we all did this together, we'd have a lot more time to deal with changes in document formats and events of that nature, as opposed to everyone on their own.
The good news on that front is Microsoft's embrace of XML -- so far, it seems to be getting easier to figure this stuff out, rather than harder. But if and when Linux becomes a real threat or StarOffice becomes a real threat, then I think you'll start seeing many more surprises start to pop up. If you look back two years, Microsoft was behaving pretty well. They were moving to XML and they weren't messing with their file formats so much. But if you look at the context, first of all they were under the antitrust gun, and second of all, everybody thought they'd be making all their money off of Web services by now. So Microsoft thought they'd be able to turn this thing into a revenue stream and deal with the antitrust problem. But now both of those things are gone, and it's starting to look more and more scary every day. It's like a lovefest, what they're getting from Washington these days. Getting the green light, Linux looking more strong, and these Web services and the XP licensing model, and getting the revenue to keep flowing with these new pressures makes it more likely that Microsoft is going to start springing surprises.
By the way, I think it's a great month and a great quarter for Linux on the desktop. I think StarOffice is great news for us; I think CodeWeavers is great news for us; I think Mozilla 1.0 is the biggest news for all of us; and Xandros, Licoris, Lindows -- those are all very positive developments. And then KDE3, and GNOME2 is coming out next month also. It's kind of like everywhere you look on the desktop, it's just a great season.
I've had nothing but problems with dells. In this house we have two dell laptops (we got them before we knew any better) and both have nothing but problems. First, I have an older dell Latitude CPi, the case is cracking at the hinges and I can barely close it. The batteries last about 1 hour (and yes I condition the batteries). Second I have one of the newer dells, its only a few months old. The battery failed, the hard drive was replaced, the cd-rom also needs to be replaced and the soundcard (or the speakers?) have an odd glitch... out of nowhere the speakers will emit a very high pitched noise that everyone in the house will hear and as soon as you touch the volume knob it stops. So I guess you could say my experiences have been pretty bad. We also have 2 toshibas in the house (older ones, one is about 4-5 years old, the other is aobut 2) and they both work perfectly. I ever used the 4-5 year old toshiba satelite as a network server for about a year. For sure the next laptop I am getting is either an Apple or a Toshiba.
It would be a good system if really stupid posts would not get moderated up to 5. Alot of good intelligent posts get modded down because they go against the grain. There IS a problem the moderation system. Just look further down at the thread "Interesting concept, but". The original posted only got modded 4 and someone who replies "How about we host the website on your server?" get modded up to 5 with "Insightful". THAT is the problem with the moderation system.
all the money Slashdot makes should be donated to the poor sites that get slashdotted. Ever stop and think about the webservers that get crushed in the process? It equals downtime for everyone else who doesnt give a damn about a hub in a teddy bear.
Heres another way of looking at it: When you get cable television you expect more from the new channel you had to pay for, when you you get satellite or digital cable you expect high budget shows and high budget channels (HBO, Movie Channels, etc). In this metaphor Slashdot is like a local community cable show (think Wayne's World).
I am sorry if my post made it seem as if I don't know that it cost money to run this site. I understand this. I just think that at the current state it is in, it should have paid memberships. They should clean up their acts, review the moderation system (thats another story) and then try and have paid subscriptions. ps: Firing Jon Katz would make me want to join more.
I think one of the main things that attracts people to slashdot is that it is not commercial and there is a sense of community (a very twisted one at that). Slashdot is a great FREE site and thats as far as it goes. I wish you guys all the success but I really don't think it will make much money. Slashdot is never consistent (which is a terrible business model) , so how can you expect to make a business out of it? Business involves planning and consistency. I for one don't want to pay for a service that at is heart is free and should always be free.
I use it because its free and generally isnt bloated or some with spyware or third party offers. (AOL icons, REAL ONE, etc) I don't really think the product is better. I would just rather deal with a crappier product without all the annoying bloat then a bloated good product that fills my computer with SHIT.
I think its safe to asume within one week of these product being launched someone will have found a way to rip music from it.
from webopedia: "JPEG: Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression."
it was possible not to know about jpeg compression.
This just in: things that cost less save you money! Oh was I stating the obvious. Sound familiar though? Compression saves you bandwidth!
Do any of you seriously know any "regular" people who actually have to decide which browser to use? Other then people who use linux. When I use windows there is no question in my mind that I want to use IE. On the other hand on Linux no one browser fits me well so I am often switching between browsers. This "war" of yours is more of a little skirmish.
I've taken unix/linux classes in college and I've seen the linux crash course books and they always focus on how to use grep and how to use kde or gnome but that will only get you so far. Like those people who say that they got their grand mother using Linux. Maybe so but I doubt that once she needs to install new drivers she'll be a happy camper. I suggest you teach them how to use "make", how drivers work in linux, how to install software, etc. I remember how frustrated I was after I tried to install software and my wireless network card without any rpms. I don't know why no one teaches that, its not like everything is available in rpm.
I don't see how this will help the case against Microsoft. Just because they can make an OS that doesnt have its key features it doesn't mean that its not crippled. Windows WILL be crippled if it has to stop shipping with IE. And even if it doesn't ship with IE people are still going to download it right after. Maybe people should stop wasting their time trying to punish a company that makes a good product and start making products that can actually do nearly as much as Microsofts products.
You don't have to believe in a fully deterministic universe to beleive in time travel to the future. Things still happen while you're travelling, people are sill making decisions, you are just kind of "set aside" while time passes. And when you come out of it 1000 years could of passed and you were just locked away for a few minutes suspended in time. So its not really time travel because you can't go back, its just like freezing yourself.
stop with these april fools posts. I've seen enough.
nowhere does it say that this site is a linux site. If it had to be labeled anything it should be an opensource site, thats why you get new about linux, bsd, mac os x.
All the people interviewed in that article are wimps. They clearly say they are looking for jobs similar to what they had before. Tough luck chumps, go look somewhere else. They think that because they are taking commitment-less jobs while they look for another "fall-back-into-a-shitload-of-money-job" we should feel sorry for them? Get up and tough it out and look for a different type of job. I can't imagine someone with a MBA is limited to dot coms.