Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> ____/ Mark Kent on Wednesday 24 October 2007 08:26 : \____
>
>>> IME few of the kind of people who buy PCs in high-street shops have a
>>> clue about PCs or operating systems of any kind. If you're going to
>>> get your feet wet, you may as well do it with a real OS like Linux.
>>
>> People make mistakes, but it won't matter. Tescos will take returns as
>> normal, and people will learn.
>
> Do remember that "Linux PC won't run people games" is an argument that's passe.
> With Vista becoming the only other options, many games will meet the **grave**
> anyway.
>
It does illustrate how badly wrong Microsoft have gone with Windows, but
if you consider the complexity of their code-base, their badly broken
internal politics, their despite for their own customers, and their
arrogance, then I think the final result was completely inevitable.
I've been saying here for a few years that proprietary software is
essentially dead, indeed, as is the desktop PC. Consider usage like
this:
When home computers were first born, they were little 8-bit affairs,
which displayed on a domestic television, probably had a rom basic, and
a cassette drive for saving and loading software. Some later machines
had diskette drives, but they were tiny and very slow.
For most owners, they were toys & tools for specific jobs. We would
write software, or type it in laboriously from a listing, hoping to save
it to cassette before the machine crashed in some way. There were early
word processors for driving dot-matrix printers, but the results were
not that great. First generation games were almost entirely text based,
because the graphics engines were just not up to the job.
However, the most popular usage for the real "enthusiasts" was getting
online, with a modem, and connecting to BBSs, perhaps by radio or
perhaps by telephone.
So, where did it end up? Facebook now has 47 Million *active* users.
That's an enormous population, and they do not care one jot about /how/
they access facebook, they just want to access it. It could be using a
PS3 running linux, a library PC running anything at all, a Nokia 810, an
Ubuntu desktop. It doesn't matter at all.
Same thing for IM, email, mp3 playing, and so on.
Real people couldn't give a monkey's what the technology is, so long as
they can do what they want to do. The argument that the world "wants
Windows", so beloved of our Microsoft shilcosystem in cola, is quite
wrong; the world wants Facebook and Google and so on.
Next generation televisions are almost certain to start including
linux-based computers. Once that happens, coupled with the PS3-like
console-come-PCs, and web tablets, and smartphones, what would most
people even want a PC for?
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
