Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, was the guest speaker of an IRC meeting with the Lindows Insiders on July 12, 2002. As you can read in the chat transcript, Mr Robertson is making very clear that the Lindows market is not the Linux users, but people who have never used Linux before. As Lycoris also does, Lindows does not care much about competing with other Linux distributions, as much as they care competing with Windows itself. Their marketing plan is to de-emphasize from showing off GNU/Linux and the broader open source movement as a selling point, and instead to create a hybrid between a commercial and a somewhat open environment: “The audience we’re going for has never heard of linux, so it’s more of a distraction when talking about our system to mention linux.” he said.
Lindows to De-Emphasize GNU/Linux from its Marketing Line
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Finally i enjoyed reading news about Lindows, the fact that they are going to push moreso the linux native apps than the windows ones. But i do think that if they are going to do that, they might want to change names, cause that’ll just cause a whole heck of a lot of confusion. Lindows was ok for their pipedream of their “run all windows apps” world, but i dont think it would work in their favor anymore.
Hopefully no endusers will now assume all linux distribution are as bad as lindows.
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Moderator Kevin Carmony (Jul 12, 2002 5:14:45 PM)
My follow up question is: are you going to offer us better enhancements in the future to kde like what Xandros is doing?
Guest Speaker Michael Robertson (Jul 12, 2002 5:15:13 PM)
i’m not sure what better enhancement you’re referring to. can you be more specific?
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Moderator Kevin Carmony (Jul 12, 2002 5:16:53 PM)
I think that by making a beautiful lindows theme lindows has made one step in that direction. What i have in mind is changes such as better gui in some parts which kde fails to fill. Formatting a floppy disk in kde for instance isn’t as easy as xandros made it possible
Guest Speaker Michael Robertson (Jul 12, 2002 5:17:38 PM)
we want everything to look nice, but the primary focus is making sure things work.
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Making sure things work must include for instance that formatting a floppy disk in KDE is as easy as possible. That shall be Lindows primary focus, I’m surprised it is not.
I went to the Xandros website a week ago, and found the new Xandros desktop screenshot on the frontpage. I haven’t seen the Xandros beta, and I can’t wait to check out those KDE new enhancements, that small screenshot doesn’t promise as much enhancements as I had wished for after the Corel distros(looks like Windows2000). Any beta tester, anyone in the press willing to talk about it? or is that NDA so untalkable?
“we haven’t thought about downloading and archiving CNR apps. our goal is to make that unnecessary because all of their CNR apps are stored on their my.lindows account. think of this this way, when you know you can always go to microsoft.com to get the latest version of IE, you don’t need to worry about creating your own CD copies.”
Personally, I like having my own archived copies, as it is faster to install when I need to and I can always revert back to an older version in the event that the new version sucks or is buggy.
I tried Lindows and thought it really sucked. I even took a link to them off my website. Any recent distro plus Ximiam Evolution and CrossOver Office beats the heck out of Lindows. I’m guessing that Xandros plus Ximiam will move the bar up another notch. The Click and Run deal Lindows has is a total scam that does not even work reliably.
MS may have lost the original lawsuit against Lindows, but they get the last lough since Lindows no longer sells anything remotely Windows capable, nor it seems want to be painted with the Linux brush either. They need to change their name to reflect what they are selling what ever that is.
Obviously, Lindows isn’t a product for me, but then, it isn’t intended to be. If they continue to evolve it along the lines they intend to, it might make a fair amount of progress getting Linux (or more accurately, KDE) on the desktop. That in itself is a Good Thing, because then it becomes a more viable target for commercial application development. And everyone benefits from that.
I will sell them redhat 7.3 for $99, uuuh um, I mean VigraLinux 7.3
I aprove of his position.
Personally I haven’t had the time to mess with Linux as much as I’ve wanted. I may go ahead and dedicate a machine to Lindows for awhile and see how it works for me. I’m so sick of Windows, but don’t have time to RTFM on everything I want to do. *shrug*
as a Debian user.Part of me is ticked off that Deb is at the core of Robert’s “revolutionary new OS” and the thousands of developers who put the sweat and blood into whatever is good in Lindows. The other part of me is really happy that all of the proprietary crud doesn’t get mentioned officially with Debian. It’s sort of embarassing but part of me wishes that some of the development would roll over to Deb.
Just wait until your users find out about apt-get, Michael.
I went to the Xandros website a week ago, and found the new Xandros desktop screenshot on the frontpage. I haven’t seen the Xandros beta, and I can’t wait to check out those KDE new enhancements, that small screenshot doesn’t promise as much enhancements as I had wished for after the Corel distros(looks like Windows2000). Any beta tester, anyone in the press willing to talk about it? or is that NDA so untalkable?
Well, from the screenshot, you could see that they are including KDE 3.0. Also, they are naming KMenu as “Launch”. I mean, logically, it is far more amusing than “Start”, especially if you use the menu to log off/ shut down.
Obviously, Lindows isn’t a product for me, but then, it isn’t intended to be. If they continue to evolve it along the lines they intend to…
Lindows.com intended to make all Windows apps available on their platform… I wonder why they changed their strategy? Oh oh, I get it! See the next quote
There was no problem with licensing. We like the guys at Codeweavers. We helped them with their CrossoverOffice products and they helped us. However, our users told us they didn’t want to deal with Microsoft Office and things like activation code. So we’ve been focusing more of our energies on building CNR so that users can get all the software they need for basic computing for $99 rather than continuing to pay hundreds or thousands to MS.
1) It is so apparent that you guys have problems with CodeWeavers. Why? Simply because Lindows.com existance is one of the two major contributing factor by CodeWeavers, other than Transgaming, to LGPLed Wine.
2) I think it is rather that Lindows.com found out that it couldn’t do an implementation of Win32 without taking too long that their work becomes useless. Also, the fact that under MS Office XP EULA, you cannot run it on Lindows, Lindows previous target market, corporate desktops, had become impossible.
if by “bad image” you’re referring to linux web sites, that’s part of the challenge. Traditionally linux publications are fairly vicious towards any commercial companies. We take their criticism with a grain of salt and always ask ourselves if we can do better.
GNU.org may be vicious to any company seeking profits… even Red Hat, but most of Linux press are anti-Lindows mainly because of a few reasons
1) They don’t follow the rules of GPL. It doesn’t mean all their software are suppose to be open source, but it means that all GPLed apps should come with LindowsOS should come with the source code, or at least allow it to be downloaded as an option.
2) They apparently first claim they could do a better job than the Wine team, then failed misserably, and then change the lead feature to CNR.
3) The very fact that they automatically puts the user as root, and have no easy way for the user to make a new sfaer account. If Windows XP and Mac OS X could do the latter, why not Lindows.com? Plus, why not automatically create a normal account and log the user in there automatically – it is more safer.
We’ll reach more of them by stressing the dramatic cost differential. $99 for a membership with access to an entire library of software vs. paying 100-400 for each and every program. Those savings will resonate with many consumers who are looking for affordable computing.
Well, $99 for a bunch of old GPLed apps – I rather use Mandrake Club. Oh wait, did I mentioned Mandrake Club? Yes, I did – it offers much more software than CNR does. Use that with Red Carpet, you pretty much have whatever CNR does, except the backups of the software it places on its servers.
Personally I haven’t had the time to mess with Linux as much as I’ve wanted. I may go ahead and dedicate a machine to Lindows for awhile and see how it works for me. I’m so sick of Windows, but don’t have time to RTFM on everything I want to do. *shrug*
If all the reviews are true, I think you are much better off without Lindows.com – maybe Lycoris, SuSE or even Mandrake. Reason: Lindows.com for one doesn’t have configuration tools, plus also it is purposely using an insecure method 🙂
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Personally, I would see Lindows.com fail in the few more years time. This company is even more worse than Eazel
Their business plan is shabby, relying on the adoption of broadband (which isn’t happening right now to their “target market”) and also easily replicated by its Linux competitors (Red Carpet? Mandrake Club? Who knows? One day you might have something better than CNR in terms of features and ease of use).