OpenEuphoria

RE: [OT] New Desktop OS?

• Posted by Ray Smith <smithr at ix.net.au> Sep 18, 2003
• 400 views

C. K. Lester wrote:
> > > Who's their market?
> >
> > Their market is medium to large businesses.
> > Businesses who want to be able to predict and control
> > their costs.
> 
> Then I ask again... what's the pitch?
> 
> "Dump your entire computer system and buy ours. Sure, you'll lose all 
> your
> legacy apps (or have to pay to upgrade them), and any data files you had 
> in
> a M$ proprietary format will have to be discarded or redone, but, hey! 
> At
> least we're cheaper!"
> 
> Trust me... I can't wait for M$ to be gone forever and for good... but
> trying to bring down the behemoth will ill-made plans doesn't seem right 
> to
> me. They aren't showing me an easy migration path if I'm entrenched in 
> M$
> hell... I need an easy way out that's also cheap. :)

My guess ...
It's designed for large corporate users who may only have a handfull
of applications company wide.  Many of these applicatons "may"
already be client/server based or written in cross platform code.

The story is Telstra (Australia's largest telco and a hudge I.T. user
and also a huge user of current Sun technology) has/will use the new
Sun desktop OS.  The last time this was rumoured (6 months ago)
Steve Balmer was on the next flight down under.  I haven't heard of
him coming this time (yet).

As Linux on the desktop has shown, it will take many many years for
any competitor to gain even a small percentage of the desktop market 
from MS.  My guess is that we won't see any "major" percentage share
away from MS desktops for 5-10 years.  

All I know is given a choice I would rather NOT use Windows.  
At home I'm a Linux freek using Mandrake, Mozilla, Open Office, 
Python etc ... but I still come to work each day and sit in front
of Windows XP, use MS Outlook, MS development tools, MS SQL, 
MS Access, MS Office etc etc.

I beleive one of the critical strategies for opposing Microsoft is 
the use of cross platform development tools.  The more developers
(i.e. and end user applications) that use cross platform development 
tools means the eaiser it is for people to swap from one OS to 
another.
Before I swapped to Linux at home I was already using Mozilla, 
OpenOffice and Python.  When I finally got my act together and got 
Linux working (not an easy job!) I was already familiar with most of 
the apps since I've been using them on Windows for over a year.

You also say ...

"I can't wait for M$ to be gone forever and for good"

I don't think this will happen in my (or your) lifetime.  
There can't be good without evil!  (tongue in cheek)

Regards,

Ray Smith
http://rays-web.com