Hi,
> schedule for Windows XP is to release at the end of
> August.
Microsoft has never been able to fulfill the schedules. And anyway XP is a
very very bad thing, because of all the new licensing and privacy issues, all the good
press should have told that already, no?
***BUT*** it's expected that MS will spend much more money in marketing than
it never spent until now for releasing one of its products. So XP will be everywhere
and people may run to the shops to buy it... :-(
Linux companies shouldn't waste their money in doing so much marketing yet,
because anyway if they want to compete with MS on this point, they will lose and close
down, and (most linux users will not agree here... I'm a linux user since Oct. 1995, I
love Linux, but I know MS products and I've a wide experience of MS users) this could
do Linux a disservice because MS users who will try to switch will realize that:
- Linux doesn't have a good competitor to MSOffice. I know about
StarOffice/OpenOffice, but they are still under big development and imports are
missing file formats and don't work perfectly yet. Regarding Wordperfect, it is a good
office suite, but since it uses wine it is definitely too slow and takes too much
ressources.
- Linux doesn't have a competitor to Internet Explorer yet (Konqueror
is on his very very good way, especially in its KDE2.2beta1 release, but is still a
little buggy [in the beta release] and doesn't handle perfectly JS, and cannot already
[but very sonn] support Active X plugins) Not having a good, quick,powerfull, and
quite light web browser has become a big handicap for Linux [but Konqueror will soon
win !!!]
- most (all? ;-) distributions are buggy, especially Mandrake (sorry,
but it's true... 7.2 was quite reliable, but 8.0 is not reliable and Mandrake Freq is
less reliable as 8.0... I don't speak about 6.x where it was impossible to kill
processes until a patch was issued). And when I say buggy, it is really a bug that
appears during the installation, or at first use, or on very often used programs.
Once these 3 points, and especially the 2 first ones have not been improved,
MS users won't switch to Linux.
Now, once that it is solved and once that XP has been annoying so much people
and especially companies because of licencing and privacy problems, it will be THE
RIGHT TIME to attack on the mass media !!!
> Since Mandrake one of the best alternatives to MS
Definitely true, but not yet sufficient.
> products we need to get something out the door to
> trump Microsoft's release.
Linux companies don't have enough money to do that. Remember of Corel
which has tried to promote a distrib for desktop users: where are they now ? Just
developping .Net products for MS which gave them money because they had lost so much
money, partly in Linux dvpt, because the mass-market is not yet there, because MS is
still much more enticing and much more usable (during one month or one year onyl, but
afterwards people think it is their fault if it doesn't work because they have
installed so much crap from magazines's cdroms and so on, so they don't blame MS and
either install again from a CD that formats everything and installs a new clean
system, and/or buy the latest MS "OS" and why not a new PC...). Dell is currently
stopping delivering Linux for end-users PC for the same reasons.
Anyway I'm just stating here my point of view, I don't claim I have got the
Truth... So maybe it's the right time to attack, who knows? ;-)
Cheers,
Mathieu
