Total War; SCO is only the beginning

[Peter L. Peres]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Walter Dnes wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:39:40PM +0200, Peter L. Peres wrote
> >
> > On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >
> > > "At the moment Microsoft is under attack because GNU/Linux is an
> > > operating system which can replace Windows.
> >
> > I think that they got the focus slightly wrong. There is no distribution
> > of Linux that does not come with at least 500 application programs (most
> > come with 2000+). If the 'others' do not feel threatened yet by things
> > like OpenOffice etc then it must be because they're so confy sitting on
> > their laurels. Know the fable about the rabbit and the tortoise ?
>
>   Microsoft is the only major 'other' commercial office distro.  They've
> run into the "good enough" wall.  Additional "features" only add to bloat
> and the bug list.  MS has publicly dismissed the latest OpenOffice as
> being an MSOffice97 equivalent.  But wasn't MSOffice97 good enough for
> 95% of us?  GIMP is only a wannabee Photoshop competitor, but give it a
> couple more years.  It'll eventually get to the "good enough" stage, and
> people will ask themselves if they really need anything more.  Eventually
> PostgreSQL will sneak up on Oracle too.

Actually I believe that if you run a business based on services provided
by one or several of these programs, then they are aready there,
especially if they were cusomised by a Linux consultant to do precisely
what you need them to do. While the commercial versions remain moving
targets, the small business Linux user can have a set of applications that
solve their problems consistently and without a 'reinstall' every three
days. He can use them for at least twice as long as the competition
without their becoming 'obsolete' by the commercial software maker's
upgrade-upgrade push.

Peter
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