In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Moshe Goldfarb.
<brick_n_straw@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:13:14 -0400
<huj3slf8lgaq$.1svw1vuugkfnx.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:32:38 -0700 (PDT), Rex Ballard wrote:
>
>> On Aug 27, 7:41 pm, Tim Smith <reply_in_gr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> In article <f8gbb41594smpfasin4hmhrsd89pb6n...@xxxxxxx>,
>>
>>> chrisv <chr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> >Interesting how you praise it when Linux distributors do the same thing.
>>
>>>> What would be "interesting" about that, Timmy? Do you find the above
>>>> article to be critical of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony?
>>
>> This does remind me of Harley Davidson back in the 1980s. Harley
>> would send bikes to the dealers,
>> but they were so defective that it often took the dealers a week to
>> get the parts and get them into running condition. Of course, the
>> dealers got so good at doing the work themselves that nearly every
>> Harley became a custom job, and it completely changed the way
>> motorcycles were sold to the bikers who could afford them.
>>
>> Perhaps the OEMs will get so good at "Fixing" Windows that they will
>> start doing "custom jobs" like installing Linux as the primary
>> operating system and installing Vista or XP or Windows 2000 as the
>> secondary operating system. And if Microsoft cuts off support for XP
>> and 2K, oh well, I guess I'll just have to use Linux then.
>>
>> Rex
>
>
> Wrong again Rex.......
>
> AMF bought the Harley company in the late 1960's and ran it into the ground
> by trying to automate the process completely which killed the quality
> control.
>
> Harley bought back their company in the early 1980's and immediately went
> back to the old methods of production.
>
> The dealers lost their shirts when AMF tanked the company.
>
> As for your second paragraph why not ring up Bob Sutor and ask him when
> Linux will become the official IBM mobile employee platform....
>
> Wasn't this promised years ago?
>
> So what's holding it back?
>
The fact that Windows is a better Mobile platform, of course.
Not because of its technical superiority (it's crap),
relative immunity to viruses (it's not), performance
(it's slow), reliability (it's capricious), developer
attention to bugs or schedule, beautiful sales literature,
or adherence to documented standards (it forges its own
path and tends to do so deliberately), but because Windows
is ubiquitous on the desktop, and therefore Windows Mobile
can leverage that ubiquity in order to display all Windows
applications (except the ones that aren't that important).
Also, Windows is very well known on the desktop.
People trust Microsoft. (I'm not really sure they
should, but they do.) People *expect* to see
Windows everywhere. (And they do.)
Also, the OEMs are very familiar with Windows, and know
how to deal with the more obvious problems. It will take
some time for them to familiarize themselves with Linux's
quirks (especially since Linux keeps mutating faster than
I can keep up), and time is money, and therefore better
spent on moving product, shoddy as it is. 30 minutes
times 50 million adds up, though in all fairness the OEMs
could tweak it once and then slap an image (essentially a
physical restore). They'd still have to tweak it, though,
and that might take several hours, just for the tweak, and
a few days for qualification.
Also, board and device manufacturers are also very familiar
with Windows (and its ubiquity); any engineering NRE
preferentially goes towards Windows. In other words,
given a choice, a code engineer is going to write the
Windows driver first, as that's where the money is.
(There are some exceptions, of course, for certain
equipment.)
Also, interoperability means two Windows boxes talking
to one another, in many cases. This is relatively easy,
since both share a common hardware background -- namely,
little-endian 8-byte/16-byte/32-byte Intel hardware.
AFAIK, Windows Mobile only removes the Intel, though
I'd have to look.
Is there a way around these issues? I don't know, but
we didn't get here overnight and we're not going to get
out overnight. An entire working infrastructure has
grown up around Windows, and we modify it at our peril.
Were every Windows box to mutate overnight into Linux
(or FreeBSD), McAfee et al would not really have much of
a reason to exist, would they? Therefore, they're at
best neutral, and at worst actively hostile, to any
sort of switchover to this new OS.
Ditto for certain tools manufacturers such as Diskeeper
(unless they turned the source code over for the
defragmenter; I frankly don't know).
The good news: we've -- finally -- rediscovered Instant-On.
Linux facilitiates Instant-On; Windows does not, though
no doubt Microsoft will work on that. Mobiles would love
a variant of Instant-On; the Orange phones in particular
were derided on taking too long to boot, among other things.
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Windows Vista. Because a BSOD is just so 20th century; why not
try our new color changing variant?
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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