Re: Grateful Dead Marketing

[Jaap van Ganswijk <ganswijk@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 20:55 19990317 GMT, Dan C. Rinnert wrote:
>It's true that Linux has done well with the free model, but not as well as
>commercial operating systems.  How many more Linux users do you think there
>would be today if, five years ago, there was a "Microsoft Linux" or "IBM
>Linux"?  I would think that more people would have purchased the M$ Linux
>system than would have downloaded the free Linux systems.

Microsoft owns the name Xenix (was SCO's Unix before they
were allowed to call it Unix) and contributed quite a lot to it.
Like the quite good C compiler and the assembler. (Unfortunately
I don't know the exact details but I believe that originally MS
set-up Xenix as the new universal OS but gave up after it didn't
sell well enough. SCO took over then to sell it in a niche market.

Xenix was very expensive. I think it sold for about $1250 (over here)
for the Basic OS and another $1250 for the C compiler. Everything
else also had to be bought seperately, like a GUI and network
capabilities. Xenix was quite user friendly and became the best
selling Unix ever.

The fact that Linux is for free is indeed a problem as it is perceived
(especially by Americans) as inferior. Part of the problem is also
that there used to be no support for Linux. Currently with companies
like Red Hat, Caldera, S.U.S.E and Yggdrasil coordinating the
release of bundles and giving support and also Cygnus giving
support (I think) this no longer should be a problem. IBM among
others will also support Linux (on user request). IBM usually
puts more effort into a new development than the originator. They
have more people on Java than Sun and more people on NT than
Microsoft.

Could also be that IBM personel is extremely stupid... ;-)


Groeten/Greetings,
Jaap

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