With Linux, the customer often expects to get the product for free and wants the retail price of Windows deducted from his/her purchase price. There are no funds passed back to the vendor and, because Linux is different, customers tend to place more service calls -- at $85 a call. As a result, the vendor generally ends up losing money.
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Damn!! I want to see linux on every desktop

Does LQ ask you $85 for its help?
People who think they need such a commercial paying service should consider trying an other job.

I completely agree with u mate. I just wanted to bring this article to everyone's attention

The article does make some very good points.

However, I am forced to wonder how the marketplace is going to react to the digital rights management movement that microsoft is spearheading.

Granting that the anti-piracy goal is laudable, the resulting "handcuffware" may turn people off enough to motivate a change.

Dunno. We'll certainly see.

You linked an article by Enderle?? WTF?

This guy is a paid troll. He is (or was) an employee of SCO and was almost single handedly responsible (he had help from D. McBride) for all that hullabaloo a few years back.

Every so often we hear this crap from some corner or another. I've been using Linux as my desktop OS at home for nigh on 8 years now. IMO, it has been ready for the desktop for at least that long.

Is Windows ready for the desktop? I don't think so. It is still in beta...

Which ones? :S

The economic ones, of course.

I kindly disagree. His economics points are full of bullshit. "Doing What Is Necessary", seriously come on... Windows is here out of pure luck we all know that. "The OEM Cost of Linux and Windows" part needs no comment the propaganda is self evident and I hope he doesn't seriously think what he wrote. And the "Excessive Advocacy" part...
Seriously did you really find a real economic point in this article? Which one?

Specifically how? It is true that microsoft provides all kinds of backup and support and it is equally true that similar infrastructure is simply not available for Linux - except, of course, through sites like this one. Thus it certainly would appear that the entire burden would fall on the hardware vendor to support.

Now, it is also true that microsoft has provided substantial disincentives for vendors to deploy linux based solutions, but some of those ("we won't let you deploy windows if you deploy linux") went away as part of the agreement to get the justice dept to drop the antitrust suit.

This is certainly not true.

Bill made his own luck. The real genius of Bill Gates is that he is one of the all time great masters of exploiting the mistakes of everyone around him. He didn't miss a trick, in the early days of Microsoft.

I actually thought some parts of the article was correct. The OEMs would lose money because most windoze users are to lazy, or don't have all of the computer knowledge necessary, to search the internet to find a forum to help them fix their problem. They want to make a quick phone call and have the person at the other end remotely connect to their PC and fix everything, without them having to touch the mouse. With all the different distros it would be difficult for the service people to help efficiently, especially when they are used to having Microsoft answer most of the peoples problems.

I also agreed with the last line
QUOTE] However there are times when what you sacrifice is actually more important than what you gain.
[/QUOTE]
I believe that the sacrifices necessary to become the number one desktop OS are too much. Most of the lists of requirements were about profit, and that is not what linux is about. Linux is about producing a superior product that a user is free to use and improve/modify. Become a standardized desktop OS would take much of this away.

There's this little company called Novell that supports a desktop version of Linux (Enterprise versions too)

Novell supports the initial installation, nothing more UNLESS you are a bussiness. I'll go check my warranty card or whatever it is in a bit.

EDIT: Checked warranty card. 60 to 90 day installation support, plus you can pay for extra support at 39.00 US for 20 minutes of support. This is, though, the 9.3 warranty, so it may have changed, though that is likely.

Windows is in its place by using strongarm tactics to worm its slimy way to the top by making the user do what the OS wants them to. Alot of (older) PC users have trouble with Linux because you have a stack of files, have to know your hardware, ect. to be able to get it working cleanly. I almost said as cleanly as Windows, but I don't have logs on the Windows end to prove anything outside of the fact my machine under 'doze is a fair bit slower, but its also a bit slow under SuSe, but I like Linux better the more I use it.

This guy is very biased. Half of his article praised M$, while telling everyone where OS/X and Linux has gone wrong. Lost money for tech support? M$ makes the USER pay for their tech support (if you want to correct me on that, please do, also provide a link, if you will please. If I'm wrong, I'll say so), so when they sell the OS to PC maker, and the user has problems, M$ makes money of that, and we know how fragile Windows is...

As for loosing money, has anyone ever heard of CHOICE? It would cost the PC manufacturer nothing to sell blank HDDs in their PCs so that the user could install whatever they wanted. Take Dell's website for example:
Customize any PC, and they offer 2 to 5 versions of 'doze they will install for you, and they have no support for it themselves. Now, if they took, lets say, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, and installed that (almost virutally cp / /dev/hddb, then a few changes to the files, depending on where it is copied from), then what they would have would be a fairly painless PC on the market that people who want to use their comps instead of their comps using them could buy. They don't have to offer anything outside of hardware support, since it isn't their software on there. Send a LiveCD version of the OS with it, too, and charge an extra $20.00 US for a pile of paper docs like you SHOULD get with an OS and PC.

Personally, I think alot of the PC manufacturers have an under-the-table deal with M$ to keep Linux off their PCs, because they know if it becomes a widely understood OS (widely as in at least 15% of the PCs are *nix at home), then they are in deep shit because they cann't keep up with the advances that run through the Linux world.

Side-by-side, and I'm fairly sure this is obvious, but linux not only has caught up to, but is outrunning Windows as far as stability, security, adaptivity, and general usefulness. Files are passed through ftp and sftp sites which run alot faster then html sites, and the people who work on Linux aren't doing so to be paid to, but because they WANT to. They have te option to "pass the torch" if they get burnt out and they have a good replacement they can trust instead of lining 1000's of faceless people to work on their software.

Look at the KDE meeting. Laptops, the Netherlands, beer. Work, and half-drunk. Then there is the adopt-a-geek thing, which just goes to show how much the Linux community is self-supporting. Reverse enginered drivers and general hardware, 50MB OSs, 1.44MB system repair diskettes, and Windows has what, a 3+GB OS that supplies out-dated software, a buggy system, ect?

Whether he is a paid troll or not, he's showing his ignorance, in either case.