[TriLUG] Where is Linux today?

[Tim Jowers]

Thanks a great idea William.

"Praises to Bill Gates putting a PC in every home". (I've heard this several
times from people and even seen it in news articles. People believe this
propaganda!)

I'm sure legal will be Windows for a while. I looked at several Open Source
legal apps and they were prototypes/version 1. Comparatively, the doctor
office systems are version 2 or 3. The desktop apps I'd say are mature and
competitive. Or post mature. E.g. Firefox seems to use memory as
inefficiently as Internet Explorer. Maybe its the nature of translating HTML
into GUI components. Probably its lax coding. E.g the PMS (doctor office)
has a clear funding model: clearinghouse. The clearinghouse is a
well-established and profitable market. The Open Source PMS companies I
looked at in the past though were using the service billing model, an
immature model IMO. Infer what you will about Linux but one can surely
compare the success of SAN/SNA to the success of Linux companies and make
some arguments for recurring revenue/product models versus services models.
Heck, I conjecture EMC is one of the most profitable Linux vendors as I am
fairly sure their SNA/SAN runs Linux! They chose the product model. I'm not
sure any Linux vendor has stumbled onto a recurring revenue model in the
spirit of the claims clearinghouse etc. Maybe the offsite hbackup folks.

TimJowers


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:03 PM, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:

> Me, again :-}
>
> Another factor to consider is that an awful lot of business software
> really is Windows-only.  Someone mentioned QuickBooks, and there are
> plenty of industry-specific software packages out there that really are
> Windows-only.  In my present line of work (litigation support), I can
> mention Concordance and Summation (both the heavy hitters in the lit
> support business) as examples.  My wife worked for a taxi company and
> their call management software (CabMate) was Windows-only.  From an
> inertia POV, Windows is likely to remain dominant for small businesses and
> executives until someone comes up with a good way of integrating the
> Windows-based software into Linux in a way that reliably and easily works.
>
> That said, the average person seems to be tending towards smaller and more
> mobile devices.  The incidence of Palms, Blackberries, and iPhones points
> to this.  Internet-based PIM software (Google Apps, for example) and the
> desire to remain connected with one's data on the go are important
> factors.
>
> What I think is needed is a small utility device that acts as a
> phone/music player/GPS/remote client to access your data.  It doesn't have
> to be smart enough or powerful enough to run your applications, just to
> render the interfaces to those applications.  Back in the day when I
> worked at Nando with Steven Hilton, our discussions would center (somewhat
> jokingly) on the idea of a device that would stream your music to you,
> handle your phone calls for you, and display HUD GPS and other data on
> your sunglasses for you :-)  Such a device could easily run a
> stripped-down Linux and connect you to more powerful servers that host
> your information.
>
> Just my $0.04
>
> William Sutton
>
>
> On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, Brian McCullough wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:24:31AM -0400, Douglas A. Whitfield wrote:
> >>
> >> My friend has probably never used OOo or Linux.  He's a little over the
> top,
> >> but with OOo doing .docx, more people could use OOo and I think "Word"
> (as
> >> many people call Office) is a stumbling block for many people moving to
> >> Linux.  I know the issue isn't whether people will move to Linux, but
> >> whether they should, but this speaks to that point too.  If people
> aren't
> >> happy with MS Office and OOo can now do .docx, what *shouldn't* they
> move to
> >> Linux?
> >
> > Because it isn't called "Word!"  I have run into this one in the past,
> > from supposedly intelligent business people.  They have bought into the
> > "Microsoft is God" mantra, and can't hear anything else.
> >
> >
> > Brian
> >
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