Saturday, September 22, 2007

Bill Gates sees the handwriting on the wall

I downloaded a copy of Unbuntu Linux the other day. I clicked on download. I was hooked to a fast pipe, so I got the whole ISO in 20 minutes. (Wow! Never been on a fat pipe like that before.) I had to figure out how to do an MD5 checksum...download a free utility...say...five minutes of research. I burned a disc. Another five minutes. I popped the disc in the computer and rebooted. Unbutu's live cd installs itself into your RAM and a swap disk. Your computer is not changed one iota. Ubuntu looks cool. (Linux desktops look cool. When did the designers get into the Linux world? Was it with OSX?) It comes with office software, a bunch of games, firefox, evolution(full featured Outlook clone). You can get more software, choosing from some 10,000 (!) titles using built in browser like XP's add/remove programs, have them automagically downloaded and installed. Apparently you can run windows games through an emulator, even games like WoW. So, I am guessing Gates saw what I saw and he realized that the era of Empire is drawing to a close. Both of his main products are being given away in a package that looks better than and outperforms his own stuff. You can't compete with that business model. Time to throw in the towel. Leave it to Ballmer/Ozzie to reap the rewards of being the leaders who oversaw the downfall of the world's most famous software comapny.

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