Microsoft Decides To Take On Linux On Low-Cost PCs 349
e5rebel writes "Microsoft is launching a program to promote the use of its Windows OS in ultra low-cost PCs. It is an effort to stop Linux dominating this market but Microsoft is insisting on limiting the hardware specs of these devices."
XP Home only (Score:5, Informative)
So if you're looking for thin & light notebooks to join your AD domain, you still need the Linux ones.
They've just defined the features for the next big Linux boom: 12" touch screen, 100GB HDD, dual core. That was clever. Differentiate your product as the less capable one. Genius!
These machines will never run Vista well. Let's keep that important knowledge in front of people. Intel expects to move 10 million Atom platforms in the first wave, and none will have Vista.
Re:They have to fight the camel's nose (Score:5, Informative)
Because Joe wants to run Calendar Creator or some such nonsense. He doesn't want to type "sudo apt-get install $whatever". He doesn't even want to use Synaptics Package manager. He wants the damn CD he bought in the bargain bin at WalMart to load and install.
He wants IE and all the stupid toolbars.
He doesn't want to think about this appliance he bought.
And he especially doesn't want to go online and post a question to a forum. Even the warm and inviting Ubuntu forums. He just wants it to work. (Irony noted).
Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
I also found this today. MilaX [milax.org] which claims to be like DSL but is based on OpenSolaris. But it doesn't look like that POS laptop will be able to run this.
MS is planning on charging betweek $26-$32 bucks for Windows XP Home Edition for these machines. That's still a significant cost compared to the price of these machines. Especially the One Laptop Per Child based on reports of what they're planning on charging. But then again it seems their prototypes wound up being 2x as much as planned.
Re:But are these devices that useful? (Score:1, Informative)
I personally use mine as a compliment with a desktop pc, and for that it's perfectly functional. I think it can replace most of the functions of a notebook, but you need to look at what you need and then make a decision.
Re:Not performance limiting restrictions (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But are these devices that useful? (Score:5, Informative)
The point isn't really to replace the notebook. They'll do that too, though. A modern laptop is ridiculously overpowered for the purpose of running a well designed OS and office application. The idea is to make it cheap enough to not freak out about breaking it, to provide enough power to do your stuff but not so much that you have to be chained to a wall wart to accomplish anything that takes more than two hours.
Yes. And it runs just fine. And with Compiz the visual effects are flashier than Aero if you want them to be. And it will play HD video just fine. And it's got all the wireless features you would expect. And on and on. The screen and keyboard are a little small. The next generation may be better in this regard.
Re:In business school... (Score:3, Informative)
I may be wrong, but I think the low-cost market is a brilliant market for Linux to use to slowly move into the mainstream desktop area. As such, this is a market that Microsoft must dominate if they are not to loose the battle before the war has begun.
Consider what would happen if Microsoft did nothing about dead-cheap laptops being sold with Linux on them: first of all, average Joe would notice that it actually works, secondly that it works well, thirdly that it does not need (for now at least) umpteen other programs to keep it safe (firewalls, antivirus....) and lastly average Joe would notice that Linux is free.
On its own, each of these points is a practically negligible threat to Microsoft, but together they have the power to quickly take over the desktop market*. Therefore Microsoft are essentially fighting for their very existence: if they do not stop Linux from getting into the desktop arena, they will eventually be forced out of it, or have the game rules dictated by someone/someones else, and neither of these two futures is very tempting for Microsoft.
* Not today, or tomorrow. Not even next year, but at some point in the future Linux could achieve critical mass on the desktop arena, and after that quickly become the major player.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
- Predatory pricing to prevent a new entrant into a market by a company with market dominance
- Limitations on what resellers can do with the product purchased (only on low-end PCs)
- Arbitrary discounts to some distributors over others
- Agreements between different members of the supply chain to limit customer choice
If the EU is at all consistent with the policies explained in my training today, MS should be forced to either sell low-cost XP to everyone, regardless of the hardware, or not sell XP at all. Who do I write in the EU to get an injunction?Re:But are these devices that useful? (Score:3, Informative)
But it does have an external video port.
Re:So... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The pitch (Score:5, Informative)
At work today, we're using XAML / WPF for some of our newest content creation tools, so I've gotten a chance to play with some of Microsft's cutting edge development APIs. Say what you like, but the
I'm not going to dismiss Linux as a solid development platform. It's got an solid work history, and it, of course, has the obvious benefits of being free and open source. What a lot of people don't seem to understand, though, is that many people really don't care all that much about those last two points. Software development is big business, and developing on Windows is simply the most practical option right now (again, in my industry: game development. I can't speak for yours). Reasons:
1) Windows is the OS of choice for large-scale game development efforts (both for Windows and console development). Some developers, such as Blizzard, admirably support a variety of platforms. I wish our company did, but there's no real economic incentive to do so. If anyone can successfully make the case, let me know. I'd love to present arguments to our company higher-ups.
2) It's hard to find developers with the expertise to port to Mac and Linux. The current talent pool of game developers is nearly universally trained with Microsoft tools and platforms. While on-the-job training is nearly always required to some degree, any more required training is a disincentive. Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, but it's a problem nonetheless.
3) The development tools from Microsoft are excellent. I've seen some cool open-source stuff, and in fact, we do use those tools as well. What's important to us as a development house is productivity, because our real costs are in labor, not software. If buying a few hundred dollars worth of software will save all our developers a few hours (for instance, the company pays for Visual Assist X plugins for developers), it's worth it.
Say what you like about "point-and-click" developers, but I work on both low-level game engine code all the way up to tools and utilities. The farther down I go in the code, the lower level my style becomes. In my opinion, it's simply smart to use the most appropriate development tools available for the job at hand. When I need to bang out a quick utility to help artists generate a simple XML configuration file, I can create a nice little easy-to-use utility using C# / WPF /
Parent is right (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They have to fight the camel's nose (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The pitch (Score:3, Informative)
They've done a magnificent job with it.
Re:The pitch (Score:4, Informative)
If something is heavily used by programmers, it tends to develop quickly. If it isn't, then it depends on somebody with a real interest in it both starting a project, being a good programmer, and being a good FOSS project manager. This is rare.
E.g., let's consider The Gimp. The latest version is slowly starting to change the name back from an acronym into it's expanded form "The GNU Image Manipulation Program". It's also adding some new features that *SOME* of the users have been asking for for quite a long time. It will never satisfy those whose definition of what it should be as "Just like Photoshop", but it's getting better. It definitely didn't get better as quickly as either Photoshop or Corel (whatever their painting program was called). But it's been making steady progress over more than a decade. (I, personally, prefer Deneba Canvas 8 [not 10, or X as they call it]. I like the combination of pixel based and vector art. But it's not moving to Linux, so I need to find a replacement. Fortunately, I can export EPS files, so I shouldn't lose *too* much work.)
OTOH, consider Gnumeric. That was essentially done by the first time I heard about it. The developer made it in honor of MSExcel (though I think that's because he was ignorant of MultiPlan), and moved on to develop Mono (which I doubt I will ever know whether was any good, as I refuse to install it). But Gnumeric was really good software developed really quickly as a FOSS project, and apparently by a single developer.
So results are all over the map. I could name several closed source projects that never made it out of Beta...even at times when I though the Beta was perfectly usable. If those had been FOSS projects, they might well not have died. There was one fancy spreadsheet program I remember that was fantastic...unfortunately it never reached the 2.0 version, because it was too slow on the then current computers. If it had survived, it might well now be the top spreadsheet. If it had been open source, it WOULD have survived. So sometimes being closed source causes programs to die no matter how good they are...if they don't suit current conditions.
And I can think of lots of FOSS projects that probably should have died, but which haven't, because FOSS projects can live as long as one person is willing to lend them disk space and a way to be downloaded. Many of these will never turn into anything worth while. So we need to develop better tools for sorting the wheat from the chaff...and figure out better uses for chaff.
Which is faster? It all depends. Linux went from nearly nothing to it's current state in a bit over a decade. MSWind went from DOS 1.0 to Vista in around 3 decades (probably a bit less). I think that Linux has developed more quickly. And also I, as and end user with quirks, believe that Linux has in a bit over 1/3 of the time developed into an OS that is in most ways superior to what MSWind has developed into. But others disagree.
Another case: I would pick Python or Ruby or Squeak over MSVisualBasic on any day that you name. But which I would pick would depend on what I was doing. It's arguable that MSVisualBasic is a better lowest common denominator. Still, all three of those FOSS languages developed to their current state in much less time than did MSVisualBasic. (Except possibly Squeak...but if you include Xerox Smalltalk in Squeak's ancestry, shouldn't you include Dartmouth Basic in that of MSVisualBasic? In which case it's still true.)
OTOH, you don't see much rapid progress in games for Linux. So some things develop quite slowly under FOSS.
Re:The pitch (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The pitch (Score:3, Informative)
We've recently moved our project from VS based project files to a CMake based solution since we're planning to port to Linux and needed GCC support. Despite the fact that our project is compiler neutral (mostly), all our developers are on some version of VS, either 2005 or 2008 (I'm using VS2005 Pro personally).
Games often have a lot of custom tools (we have three compilers; one to generate artwork metadata, one to compile levels, and one to compile scripts) which have (or at least should) intergrate into the build process. Until CMake came around, the choices were handling these events nmake makefiles (I've never seen these in the wild; I only use them when I need to cross-compile to x64 or IA-64 using the PSDK), autoconf (which is a nightmare on Win32), or Visual C++ Project Files which could handle custom events and dependencies with an easy to use interface.
I'm not saying that Visual Studio isn't a great tool, but until fairly recently, there was nothing that could do what it could so nicely on Windows.
Re:The pitch (Score:2, Informative)
The Linux setup and the then 30 PCs (now 50) worked out of the box and required very little maintenance. What maintenance they needed was application specific (setting up a comm port for a serial-port scale) which I couldn't have done remotely with a Windows box. These machines were setup in 2002 and are still running today. We upgraded the OS once but it really wasn't necessary.
We do have some Windows PC. We bought an external accounting package. There were 5 PC's and a server for that. Those 5 machines require multiple times the maintenance workload of the 50 linux boxes. We have liceneses to pay for the SQLServer DB and limits on the numbers of clients. It is slower than the MySQL server even though it the MySQL server is on cheap commodity hardware and the SQLServer box was the most expensive system we could find (the vendor recommended a very high-end system). And all we do on the Windows box is simple reporting.
We run our business on the linux boxes and MySQL on cheap, standard hardware. I would recommend Windows if the application requires it or for games and some home use. Otherwise, you really can't justify it, unless you really haven't compared the two in a real world situation.