[lbo-talk] Linux, was New Imperialism? Imperialism has beenmonopoly

[Adam Souzis]

On Apr 2, 2005 3:55 PM, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
> 
> responses to adam souzis, joanna, carrol, t(ravis) fast:
> 
> 
> Adam Souzis wrote:
> > desktops) and so the usability will follow. Red Hat, Sun,
> > Novell/Suse, among others, all have dedicated usability engineers
> > working on this and so expect the situation to change in the next
> > year or two.
> >
> 
> let me guess... they will get together and form an organization. maybe
> they call it OSF. then they can come up with a common UI and application
> set. i have a suggestion for a name for that too. how about CDE? ;-) red
> hat's idea of making the UI more user-friendly was to hide the
> shortcut/link for the xterm (terminal program) somewhere under a system
> tools sub menu! i hope you are right, but i dont see any reason why at
> this iteration these guys are going to do any better, especially given
> almost all of them (other than IBM) are worse off now than they were
> back in the late 90s.
> 
> 

you're not thinking like a business person... why would any unix
workstation vendor invest much in CDE? did they compete with mac or
windows? no. did their end-users -- engineers, IT guys and scientists
-- care that much about the GUI? no. My point was that for the first
time the mass-market desktop (lin)unix market is looking viable and
various large companies are investing in it in a way they haven't
before.  Of course that doesn't guarantee success, but over the next
two years or so you're going to see serious attempts at an easy-to-use
OS geared towards non-technical users.

-- adam