Tuesday, April 14, 2009

When will Microsoft stop the FUD?

Looks like Microsoft are at it again.. apparently they now have 96% of the Netbook market, with four times the return rate from netbooks shipped with other operating systems. (The articles are here and here.) A rebuttal by Chris Kenyon of Canonical, along with it's coverage tries to put this into perspective, but the FUD is already out there. Australia has enough problems getting any form of choice into our markets. (You might say that we live in a country of monopolists.) Netbooks running Linux may well be available in other parts of the world, but the market that these machines were designed for, doesn't appear on the radar of the major retailers here. Not yet anyway.. and all the people that I know who have bought really cool netbooks, which run linux, have done so because they 1) travel and 2) bought it elsewhere. Microsoft can (and probably will) continue generating this sort of press. On the other hand, the Ubuntu community* and Canonical will continue to release an ever improving Operating System complete with application software every 6 months, like they have over the last 5 years and 10 releases. The Ubuntu release - 9.04 - is due 23rd April. * - includes all the contibuting Free and Open Source software developers around the world.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi...

I must have been lucky then because Officeworks a while ago had a sale on the Linux Eee 701SD (white or Black) and when I inquired to there availability here in Hobart I was surprised to be informed that there was plenty of both colours in stock! so I got two of them! :)