<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Ric Moore <<a href="mailto:wayward4now@gmail.com">wayward4now@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 13:05 -0700, Francis Earl wrote:<br>
> That article ENTIRELY got it wrong. All RedHat said was they won't be<br>
> pushing Linux on the consumer desktop for some time. They make their<br>
> money from servers, and they are a company, so it's not in their best<br>
> interest to have a product they aren't profiting from.<br>
<br>
</div>OTOH, as I've said for years, desktops beget servers. Who in their right<br>
mind would have ever thought that Windows would become a choice as a<br>
server platform?? The Windows3.1 users got used to the desktop and it<br>
rolled from there. Disregard the desktops of college entry level users,<br>
and they'll migrate with their favorite platform and comfort level to<br>
using it to admin their future server needs. What's not to understand in<br>
this? RedHat could very well be blowing their lead and not seeing it<br>
until too late in the game to recover.<br>
<br>
We (RH) used to have college programs all over the place ...usually<br>
promoted as install fests at Universities. I haven't heard of one in the<br>
press for years now. Servers are where the money is, no doubt. But, it<br>
is better IMHO to have the future admins loyalty through the user<br>
desktop by catering to them. I spent years in Marketing. I learned to<br>
never EVER disregard the little guy. He might become the next purchasing<br>
agent and/or decision maker. My two cents, Ric</blockquote><div><br>An where has it got Microsoft? 20 years and countless billions invested in marketing and they still manage only 30% of the server market.<br><br>True, Novel lost out to WinNT in part because users got used to the Windows interface and wanted a similar experience for managing their servers. I refuse to believe that there is such a gulf between Ubuntu and RHEL in functionality that users would have the same visceral reaction and defect in droves from RH to Ubuntu - because they love brown backgrounds on their Gnome desktops. Red Hat has focused its desktop efforts on crafting a distribution that is best in class for administering servers, just as SUSE is crafting a business productivity centric desktop distribution with an emphasis on Windows interoperability (thus Evolution, Mono/silverlight and "Don't Sue us please Bill!" agreements). These distros have carved their own niches, I don't as yet know what Ubuntu's niche is - windows malcontents? home tinkerers/hobyists? Small Home Office? You could argue that this is exactly the way linux started and who knows in 10 or 20 years maybe they will have a significant enterprise share, however, I doubt it. Being able to play MP3's out of the box rarely makes it onto a enterprise server deployment specification.<br>
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