September 20th, 2005
Two ways of pushing Linux internationally
People ask me all the time, why don’t you like Novell?
Well, I do like Novell, very much. It’s just that they have this habit of Cluelessness which, when applied to technologies I care about, results in bad things happening.
Here’s an example from South Africa. Novell loaded its SUSE Linux and a desktop suite onto PCs, shipped them to South African stores, and waited for the rush of customers.
For two months. No results. Needless to say the distributors pulled them. (Oh, they weren’t much cheaper than Windows machines.)
Meanwhile, folks like IBM keep on keepin-on. They and Red Hat are holding a series of seminars, in South Korea, India and China, aimed at getting programmers there to work with Linux, promising technical help.
There’s a Clue here that IBM understands but Novell still doesn’t. In order for desktop Linux to succeed, it needs a Killer App that does not exist in Windows, a compelling set of applications that will cause people to switch.
The way you get that is by talking to programmers, not shoving an OS in a box with me-too applications and putting it on a shelf.
Applications sell operating systems. It’s as simple as that.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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