It seems to me that microsoft's decision to stop supporting win98/ME will make little difference in the grand scheme of things.
What does lack of support mean to the average 98/ME user? In my opinion, not much.
When we talk about support we are often talking about business users. Since the average business replaces computers about on average every 3 years, and new computers generally come with new windows versions, the majority of 98/ME users now will be home users. They generally won't want to pay for an upgrade and support is usually to ask a friend. Just because microsoft stops making fixes, won't remove the 'friends' knowledge of how to support 98/ME and won't help with the learning curve of switching to linux.
So who will actually switch? I can't see much reason to switch just because Microsoft say they are no longer supporting an OS.
I work and play with linux all the time and would love to see more users, but this just isn't going to make much difference. What we need is a more user friendly linux and more bug fixing to remove the negatives of linux before we will see a large increase in the user base.
Even if this happens I see linux as always being a poor alternative to an OS with such a large income stream. Money is the driving force of the market and the driving force of development. Until linux users are willing to pay for the effort that thousands of people are putting into developing linux it will always be a minor player in the whole market.
Think I'm talking trash, then just look where we have got in the last 15 years I've been using linux. We have made great strides, lots of improvements, great user interface, but still only 0.4% usage. There's still lots of distro's many having come and gone over time. Lots of minor distros claiming to be the best but never going anywhere. And a few at the top fighting between themselves for a minor share of the whole market. I know it will never happen, but just think where we could have been if all linux developers all over the world had been working together on a single distro, we'd have a market share 10 or 100 times what we have now and a product worthy of decent consideration.
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It seems to me that microsoft's decision to stop supporting win98/ME will make little difference in the grand scheme of things.
What does lack of support mean to the average 98/ME user? In my opinion, not much.
When we talk about support we are often talking about business users. Since the average business replaces computers about on average every 3 years, and new computers generally come with new windows versions, the majority of 98/ME users now will be home users. They generally won't want to pay for an upgrade and support is usually to ask a friend. Just because microsoft stops making fixes, won't remove the 'friends' knowledge of how to support 98/ME and won't help with the learning curve of switching to linux.
So who will actually switch? I can't see much reason to switch just because Microsoft say they are no longer supporting an OS.
I work and play with linux all the time and would love to see more users, but this just isn't going to make much difference. What we need is a more user friendly linux and more bug fixing to remove the negatives of linux before we will see a large increase in the user base.
Even if this happens I see linux as always being a poor alternative to an OS with such a large income stream. Money is the driving force of the market and the driving force of development. Until linux users are willing to pay for the effort that thousands of people are putting into developing linux it will always be a minor player in the whole market.
Think I'm talking trash, then just look where we have got in the last 15 years I've been using linux. We have made great strides, lots of improvements, great user interface, but still only 0.4% usage. There's still lots of distro's many having come and gone over time.
Lots of minor distros claiming to be the best but never going anywhere. And a few at the top fighting between themselves for a minor share of the whole market. I know it will never happen, but just think where we could have been if all linux developers all over the world had been working together on a single distro, we'd have a market share 10 or 100 times what we have now and a product worthy of decent consideration.
Comments please.