Unfortunate Ubuntu media coverage

[Colin McGregor]

On 1/16/09, Madison Kelly <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:

[snip]

> Hi Maureen,
>
>    First, if I may ask, you seemed to have taken this thread's comments
> personally. I am not sure why, but if you don't mind, could you explain why?
>
>    This was a reply to my comments, so allow me to elaborate. There are
> some people for whom computers are nothing but a tool. To those people,
> operating systems other than Linux are more appropriate. Perhaps I
> should have said that OS X would be more appropriate for her, but she
> obviously has a bias towards MS.

Well, I would rephrase that slightly, a fair number of people are
interested in a (or a few) "killer application(s)". For example I
attended an Asterix user group meeting a while back, and I was talking
to one man there who didn't give a @#$% about Linux, on the other hand
when he heard about this Linux program that would let him replace a
$100,000 Nortel PBX with a $1,000 Linux box (Linux PC + special phone
network cards) he was all in. It was the application that he cared
about, the fact that it was running under Linux was neither here nor
there as far as this guy was concerned.

Like it or not though, a lot of people still see Windows as being the
home to most "killer applications"...

For Linux to reach the "killer application" people we need to:
- Have more Linux specific killer applications (i.e.: Asterix is A
(note the "a') telephone killer application, but that is a tiny
market...).
- Show that Linux applications can match/exceed most of the killer
applications to be found on other platforms (read MS-Windows) at a far
lower cost.

But we must note that for most people the application(s) comes first.

>    The comment about her not being ready for school was because she gave
> up so easily. School is tough; it is designed to challenge you. She
> obviously was not ready to go outside her "comfort zone". Until she is,
> she should not look at school yet.
>
>    None of this was meant as an attack in the least. Simply as my
> observations.
>
> Madi
>
> PS - It is worth pointing out that when you switch from something you
> are comfortable to something you are new to, there will be a learning
> curve. This is true of switching countries, languages and operating
> systems. They are not meant to be clones, after all.
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