Eric's latest meme is a little facile:
I think Linux will take over the desktop, and I think the reason it will doesn't have much to do with whether we clean up and polish our interfaces or not. Linux will take over the desktop because as the price of desktop machines drops, the Microsoft tax represents a larger and larger piece of OEM margin. There's going to come a point at which that's not sustainable, and at which OEMs have to bail out of the Microsoft camp in order to continue making any money at all. At that point, Linux wins even if the UI sucks.The advent of the $300 fully stocked PC system won't be the doom of Microsoft. Today, the primary driver for PC adoption isn't productivity -- it's communication. This month's Technology Review goes into details. Pricing issues aside, it's easier for Joe Random to use a Windows PC out of the box to communicate (with ICQ, Excel, PowerPoint, scanners and digital cameras) than it is to do the same tasks on a random Linux PC with the best office suites and desktop packages installed.And frankly, the UI doesn't suck. It's not perfect, it's got a few sharp edges and a few spikes on it, but so does Windows.
Whatever happens, we will see open source desktops prevail eventually. Cheap hardware that is less expensive than the Microsoft Tax will be another factor to consider, and lead to some interesting second-order effects of its own. When $350 Linux systems appear, they'll be significantly outsold by indentical configurations with Windows slightly more money.
(My question is, what's standing in the way of better spokespeople for quality software that respects our freedoms?)
