| Tuesday, April 21, 2009 |
11:27 - Windows Elements
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345579,00.asp
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PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff buries the lede nicely in this article that waxes pessimistic about Linux's ability to gain ground on Windows even in the face of Vista and its attendant stagflation:
Let's look at what really happened when a good portion of early netbooks shipped with Linux: They were returned! Consumers did so because netbooks targeted the least tech-savvy, most cost-conscious rung of the market. Not exactly a good fit for Linux, which, while a great OS, can get a bit confusing at times (i.e. adding apps, updating drivers, finding things in the varied distro interfaces, etc). Microsoft was pushed into offering Windows XP on netbooks because manufacturers were desperate. If they didn't replace Linux, the market would have suffered an untimely death. Against its own best interest, Microsoft has allowed netbooks to extend the life of Windows XP.
Now let's look at Linux offspring Android's opportunity to take it to Microsoft and Windows.
As you know, I've been running Windows 7 Ultimate for months. It's a good OS and could make people forget about Microsoft's Vista blunders. Windows 7 Starter is the low-end edition in the Windows 7 line. Interestingly, under Vista, "Starter" was only available in third-world countries and the abysmal "Basic" was the low-end, entry-level OS in the Vista line.
Windows 7 Starter doesn't sound much better than Basic. Running just three apps at once could be a buzz kill for almost any user. (What happens when Internet Explorer or FireFox opens multiple tabs? They're seen as separate processes in Windows. Does this mean Starter will see those tabs as separate apps? I hope not.)
Certainly that's a good point; Linux-on-the-desktop types are inevitably those who are "too close to the situation"—they are technocrats and evangelists for whom a "novice" is someone who's only written desktop apps from packaged APIs, rather than rolling his own. It's as difficult for someone who's become used to living in GNOME and updating apps via apt-get to imagine what it's like to be a tech-unsavvy end-user perusing the aisles at Best Buy as it is for an iPhone user to imagine having to look for a pay phone and refold a gas-station map.
But... wait. What? Three applications at once?
I'd love to know what the sales stats are that have told Microsoft that their godawful proliferation of Windows "editions" in Vista has been so successful that rather than simplifying their product line, they should now expand it further.
And to try to eke out a new slot at the bottom of the food chain... by restricting the number of applications you can run? God. That's... diabolical. It's like a crippled shareware version of Windows. Why don't they just make it ad-supported while they're at it?
I guess it makes a certain amount of sense to some degree. Some (perhaps many) users honestly don't need as many as three concurrent apps; those are users for whom the nominal cost of an entry-level PC or even a netbook is prohibitive, so why not lower the barrier to entry while locking out power users looking for a bargain? Sure, I get the reasoning. It's classic market engineering. It's been as successful for Adobe as it has for the auto indus... erm. Wait. Lemme get back to you on that.
But regardless: Three apps? That's got to strike even the most undemanding user as petty. It's a purely artificial restriction. It goes the "Vista Chrome" restriction one better by withholding yet another bit of end-user freedom and capability that it doesn't cost Microsoft one penny to grant, except in the sense that it might cost them the price of a higher-tier version of Windows if some penny-pinching power user determines he could get away with using a cheaper version. Do those kinds of users exist in the kinds of numbers as would be offset by new users at the bottom tier who until now just haven't been able to come up with the cash for Vista Home Basic?
Linux isn't getting anywhere on the desktop anytime soon; that's not at issue. But I would argue that part of the reason is that it presents the bewildered user with so much of the kind of choice that Windows is promoting—the kind where you don't know just what the hell you're supposed to do, and just wish someone would tell you what the right choice is—that it paralyzes a user into ineffectiveness. You get bogged down in infrastructure and maintenance, and far from disappearing into the woodwork like an OS should, it becomes the end-all be-all of computing. Which, for an OS hacker, is great. But for someone who just wants to get everyday communications and work done... it sucks.
And as for Ulanoff's sidelong conclusion:
In that time, Linux rose up and, as we all expected, finally dominated the desktop landscape. Many millions of Linux distros were downloaded and installed. Dell, HP, Acer, and others watched in disbelief as systems pre-installed with Linux rolled into homes and businesses around the world.
Wait. That's wrong. NONE of that happened. Linux's golden opportunity—three years of Windows market stagnation—did virtually nothing for Linux's market share. Oddly enough, it didn't do all that much for Apple's desktop share either.
Er.... it didn't? Maybe "desktop share" is deliberately deflecting the point, but... this doesn't much sound like a company that's sitting around lazily not taking advantage of a market opportunity, and this is just an example of an inherently wasteful government agency recognizing reality and deciding not to reinvent the wheel at three times the price. All based, dare I say, on demand.
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Brian Tiemann
