Red Hat Punts on Consumer Desktops
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The Red Hat Desktop Team has announced that they are not going to be building a consumer-focused operating system product for the foreseeable future. |
A blog entry by the company's Desktop Team explains their priorities, which are to make products their customers ask for and which complement the company's strategic server and middleware products. To this end, they have three desktop products: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Fedora and Red Hat Global Desktop, the last of which has experienced delays.
The consumer desktop market, the blog helpfully informs us. is dominated by one vendor, and the perception that Linux is not a practical alternative is entrenched conventional wisdom, even though "technically savvy users and companies" might know better. The history of the PC business is littered with the wreckage of attempts to displace Microsoft from its dominance on the desktop. Red Hat seems uninterested in being the next such example.
Comments (2)
There have been a few, a very few, articles on why Linux has failed to make in the consumer world. Mostly they hit the nails on the head, but nobody in the Linux development community seems to be listening. To highlight some of the problems:
- Drivers. Drivers. Drivers.
- Too much command line input needed for many things.
- Linux is not user friendly for the home administrator (you have to be pretty saavy to install and use it). Like it or not, Windows and OSX are friendly, perhaps too friendly, for the home administrator.
- Lack of support from any major software vendors. Word Perfect had a version for Linux once, but dropped out.
- Often difficult to network with with Windows.
- Built by and for geeks and not for the rest of the world.
- Mostly I see comments about how secure Linux is, but that is simply because Linux is not the target Windows is, not because it is all that more secure. If Linux takes hold, it will become a major target for the black hats and the Linux world had better have the same security mindset and tools available that the Windows world has.
Posted by Keith Rosenberg | April 18, 2008 12:07 PM
In case anyone still needed convincing, it would be hard to come up with a more dramatic example of the power of pre-emptive monopoly.
Posted by Stratocaster | April 18, 2008 4:08 PM