Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[Evan Leibovitch]

phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:

>My wife refused for a long time to use Linux on her computer, having been
>completely traumatized by the Unix command line. However, when Microsoft
>changed the file formats so that Office couldn't read anything and she was
>faced with spending many hundreds of dollars on the latest version of
>Office, she agreed that Open Office was a better bargain - regardless of
>the learning curve. And, as Evan pointed out, the desktop is now at the
>point where it's very user friendly.
>  
>

Inertia is a very powerful obstacle, arguably more powerful than 
Microsoft's marketing or technical issues. People have career 
investments in doing things a certain way (and decision-makers have had 
more time to go down one specific path than their underlings). More 
often than not, the complaint "Linux doesn't work properly" really means 
"Linux doesn't work the way I'm used to".

It's not enough for open source alternatives to be better than 
proprietary counterparts. They have to be compellingly better in order 
to get people to change direction. This is often simplified during 
update cycles, when the cost of sticking with the chosen path itself 
requires new expense in software, training and support upgrades. The 
task is also made easier when the proprietary version is badly botched 
-- and yet look at the hard time Firefox has had getting a significant 
market share despite all of IE's well publicized security holes.

We are up against senior IT staff with political and social turfs to 
protect, asses to cover, aversion to change, and a reluctance to 
implement technology that new employees will likely know better than 
their longtime managers. Given all that, combined with the lack of 
marketing muscle of "Linux Inc", and I don't think the pace of growth is 
anything to be ashamed of.

- Evan


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