Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
I know many Ubuntu users are going to be jumping up and down right now
ready to flame me and tell me how they got Ubuntu to work with their
hardware, peripherals and wireless network the very first time. However, I've
been to your forum and seen how many haven't. And these are computer
users who take the time out to visit a forum.
I also have no doubt that many Windows XP users who have attempted to
upgrade to Vista using the boxed software are having similar problems.
The Wall Street Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg confessed to being amazed at
how many makers of Windows software and hardware have failed to update
their products to work smoothly, or to work at all, with Vista.
Where I am going with this is that the key to the success of Ubuntu or
any other Linux distribution in the consumer market is getting
mainstream hardware manufacturers to release pre-installed plug and play versions of the
operating system. Dell has already committed to making this happen and
other hardware makers will be watching to see how it goes.
Like many computer users, I want to be able to walk in to a computer
store and walk out with a working Linux computer, whether it be a Dell,
HP, Acer or a white box. I want to take that computer home and be able to connect it
to my printer, scanner and digital camera and have them recognised. If
it's a laptop, I want to take that computer into a wireless hotspot,
click on a view available networks icon and, provided I have the WEP
key, be able to connect to the Internet.
I know all of that is a lot to ask but to be honest if Linux and its
most popular distributions, like Ubuntu and Suse, is to gain more than
a couple of percent market share on the desktop then that is what is
necessary. Perhaps in order to make it happen, the funders of the most
popular distributions should be spending as much of their budgets on
selling the benefits of Linux to consumers and hardware vendors as on
development. Microsoft certainly does.
David Bass
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