IBM is hoping that linux will pan out some good things for them in the future. If you hear my husband spin the tale, it sounds like something right out of a thriller movie, with Microsoft as the intended victim that is running away screaming from a blood-stained, chainsaw weilding killer.
And… they might be right. Even HP is standing up to take notice with a new line of notebooks based around Novell’s SuSE version of linux, sporting OpenOffice, a media player, and cd burner support. In addition to wireless connectivity, which has been one of the larger hurdles for unix based operating systems in the world of notebook pc’s. If HP is jumping on the bandwagon, you can bet that they see something on the horizon that the average user has yet to take notice of… but I bet it has something to do with some of the cool tricks that desktop environments in unix can pull that you would never see happen on a windows machine.
Not to mention the fact that the price for all of this is right. The operating system, office suite, media players… e-mail programs, browsers… and everything under the sun that you want for a unix OS… are free. That’s right, free. You can download updates to your heart’s content and no one is going to charge you a dime. To the average user wanting to get into a laptop, and with the spread of OpenOffice as a very competitive and viable alternative to Microsoft’s Office Suite… free is going to look pretty damned nice. Not to mention that they’ve knocked 60$ off the laptop over the same model outfitted with Windows XP.
Look out Microsoft! He’s right behind you!
