Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> Windows Is Not on 96% of Netbooks
The Vole has been on a major offensive for months (I've personally found
them to be highly offensive for years) attacking OEMs and retailers with
their usual blackmail tactics, to kill the threat of GNU/Linux netbooks.
And they certainly have "succeeded" in this racketeering, as a number of
GNU/Linux systems mysteriously disappear off shelves only to be replaced
by XP equivalents. The GNU/Linux systems haven't disappeared completely,
but they are now far less conspicuous. However, the figure of 96% is way
out of proportion to my observations ... more like 70% at most.
Of course the game is about to change yet again, with the arrival of ARM
netbooks.
Microsoft can bribe and blackmail all they want to - the damage is done.
Ordinary people have been exposed to the power of GNU/Linux en mass, and
they'll want more. They'll no longer be uncertain about GNU/Linux, since
they'll have seen it for themselves, so the Vole's anti-Linux propaganda
simply won't wash any more. Their vicious response is entirely expected,
and has given them a temporary advantage, but it is too late. The cat is
now well and truly out of the bag. They may have taken a sledgehammer to
wipe GNU/Linux netbooks from retailers shelves, but they've already lost
control of the game, and that oh-so precious mindshare that they usually
defend so viciously.
By the time ARM netbooks start to take over, then it really will be over
for Microsoft, as it's hard enough for them to shoehorn that bloated pig
of an OS into *Intel*-based systems, forget about squeezing it into even
/lower/ resource systems, especially those architecturally incompatible,
like ARM.
I predict Microsoft will lose the netbook war just as they were brutally
humiliated in the mobile market. They may have won this battle, but only
because they had XP to rescue them from oblivion (and enough slush-funds
to enforce their usual racket). That won't work next time. Even Vista 7,
for all its alleged efficiency improvements, will not somehow negate the
need for resource-hogging, third-party bloat like anti-virus. Users will
quickly discover their Windows netbooks are essentially unusable, and MS
will be back at square one. For them, there is no solution. For everyone
else ... there's Linux.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
18:48:04 up 154 days, 1:30, 5 users, load average: 0.34, 0.34, 0.27
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