> I think a lot of people keep missing the point that > Solaris' bread > and butter is the enterprise server market. I don't > know what the > ratio of server to desktop installations is, but I'd > guess that it's > very tilted in one direction. Solaris shines on the > server. Solaris > can shine on the desktop, but that isn't its main > focus. > > Solaris would have to break into a very crowded > market and make a > better GUI. > > Competition: > > Microsoft > Apple > Ubuntu > SuSE > others? > > You'd have to convince Sun that the desktop market is > as, or more > important than the server market that makes them > their revenues. > > I love my Macs, but I'd rather have Solaris when I > launch the > Terminal application...
While I don't much like the notion of point-and-click (if it's not hard, then you're not _learning_ anything, so why bother using up oxygen?), there's a balance: today's desktop users are tomorrow's mindshare for making purchasing decisions on more profitable systems. The desktop may of itself barely be a break-even proposition, but to concede the desktop today may be to concede ground on more profitable areas tomorrow. And there may be some overlap: multimedia servers may need codecs, visualization servers and render farms may need graphics routines, simplified administration may be useful for any sort of system, and so on. Insofar as problems solved for the desktop can be used to increase the value of servers, not only is taking the desktop seriously an investment in the future, it may turn out to be a more near-term investment as well. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
