<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Ric Moore <<a href="mailto:wayward4now@gmail.com">wayward4now@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d">On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 13:05 -0700, Francis Earl wrote: > That article ENTIRELY got it wrong. All RedHat said was they won't be > pushing Linux on the consumer desktop for some time. They make their > money from servers, and they are a company, so it's not in their best > interest to have a product they aren't profiting from. </div>OTOH, as I've said for years, desktops beget servers. Who in their right mind would have ever thought that Windows would become a choice as a server platform?? The Windows3.1 users got used to the desktop and it rolled from there. Disregard the desktops of college entry level users, and they'll migrate with their favorite platform and comfort level to using it to admin their future server needs. What's not to understand in this? RedHat could very well be blowing their lead and not seeing it until too late in the game to recover. We (RH) used to have college programs all over the place ...usually promoted as install fests at Universities. I haven't heard of one in the press for years now. Servers are where the money is, no doubt. But, it is better IMHO to have the future admins loyalty through the user desktop by catering to them. I spent years in Marketing. I learned to never EVER disregard the little guy. He might become the next purchasing agent and/or decision maker. My two cents, Ric</blockquote><div> An where has it got Microsoft? 20 years and countless billions invested in marketing and they still manage only 30% of the server market. True, Novel lost out to WinNT in part because users got used to the Windows interface and wanted a similar experience for managing their servers. I refuse to believe that there is such a gulf between Ubuntu and RHEL in functionality that users would have the same visceral reaction and defect in droves from RH to Ubuntu - because they love brown backgrounds on their Gnome desktops. Red Hat has focused its desktop efforts on crafting a distribution that is best in class for administering servers, just as SUSE is crafting a business productivity centric desktop distribution with an emphasis on Windows interoperability (thus Evolution, Mono/silverlight and "Don't Sue us please Bill!" agreements). These distros have carved their own niches, I don't as yet know what Ubuntu's niche is - windows malcontents? home tinkerers/hobyists? Small Home Office? You could argue that this is exactly the way linux started and who knows in 10 or 20 years maybe they will have a significant enterprise share, however, I doubt it. Being able to play MP3's out of the box rarely makes it onto a enterprise server deployment specification. </div></div>