[oclug]Xandros: [mingp@xandros.com: Re: iso]

[Shad Young]

*Grins*

I disagree. Xandros is hitting the desktop market. We are not talking server 
app.. were talking the desktop. In the workplace.  I am responding to what 
they have said in their press release, their website and their interview. :)

Any change is going to cost money. MS makes a compelling case that it is 
cheaper... much much cheaper to stay with their path than making a switch 
over to a product like Xandros. The licensing fees for the MS apps remain. 
The technical skills required inhouse or contract will be higher as many many 
issues need to be sorted out that MS has already solved for them.

It behooves me to point out that big business only constitutes perportion of 
the GDP. It is not all of it.. The economy is still mostly driven by small to 
medium businesses. Their IT budgets are small and philosophies are: Get the 
job done, and get it done today.

For your average small to medium business productivity type applications are 
the predominant user apps. That is why Corel bought WP. To tap into the 
largest product sector outside the OS itself.

A hodge podge of hacked together applications and emulators is not going to 
fly. A well designed mature desktop replacement will. Open Office reads and 
writes just about all MS formatted Docs. As we have debated many many times 
here in the past, OSS offers all the necessary replacements.. what they don't 
yet do is make it easy.

For server side stuff, well there is no issue there. The path the OS took is a 
good one, but one filled by a myriad of solutions already. I am not saying 
Xandros won't attract any customers... they will.. but when some company (who 
ever it may be) finally introduces what I have been talking about these last 
couple of months, I firmly believe MS and MAC will have a serious challenger 
on their hands... (Mac is actually making headway into the desktop market 
faster than linux ATM.)

Xandros points out in the interview (quite correctly) that the current trend 
in the OSS is a more amalgamated approach (I can not tell you how gratefull I 
am as this is what I have been talking about for years).  They are on the 
right track, but they still need to escape the old paradigm. 

Paradigm shifts are painful to any society, but they are inevitable and 
necessary. I am rather excited to see who will be the ground breaking Distro, 
because a few of them are getting closer and closer (it may even be Xandros, 
tiss why I want to try it out). It wont be long now.

Best
Shad

On Wednesday 23 October 2002 05:11 pm, Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> On 23/10/02 Rod Giffin did speaketh:
> > Most of these applications are not the out of the box variety, but custom
> > built applications that cost millions of dollars to produce and maintain.
> > Forcing the corporate market to re-write  all of their legacy
> > client/server apps in order to accomodate a change to a Linux platform is
> > a good business reason not to switch to a Linux platform.
>
>     Absolutely. Tell a corporate IS head that they should just switch to
> OpenOffice with no migration path, "'cause it's the right thing to do" and
> he'll look at you like a martian. We must understand corporate needs before
> we can hope to convert anyone. The way forward is simple, arguing no
> lock-in, portability, etc. The way forward from the current locked-in MS
> Office state is the tough sell. Xandros is offering an answer to that, and
> more power to them.
>
>     Mike