Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

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October 27th, 2009

Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative

And I don’t just mean for geeks. I mean a real, viable alternative to Windows for many users despite the apparent quality of both Windows 7 and Server 2008.

About a year and a half ago, ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asked, “ Is Ubuntu becoming the generic Linux distro? ” and concluded that “the evolution of Ubuntu into the generic Linux distro isn’t a bad thing”. Fair enough, but Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth took this idea a bit farther during a press conference call yesterday :

“We’ve already done a lot of work in developer ecosystem and we’re now increasingly interested in the non-developer consumer ecosystem, so that’s what all the OEM work is about,” Shuttleworth said, declaring that his focus was on “making sure that Ubuntu gets pre-installed and Ubuntu is available from Dell.com and others and making sure that Ubuntu is the default alternative to Windows.”

He didn’t mention Apple, which, to many consumers, is the only alternative to Windows. For all its buzz in the tech world, Linux (or Ubuntu) is hardly a household word. Competing with Apple, though, which already has an impressive ecosystem of hardware and is the reigning king of usability, doesn’t make sense anyway and this ad from Novell would never fly outside of the tech community:

So how can I be so confident that Shuttleworth’s vision of becoming the “default alternative”, and not just the default Linux for those geeky enough to try it, will become a reality? Because he very clearly tied it to a vision of platform. If Ubuntu can work well on every device users encounter (including non-Intel smartbooks and other new classes of portable devices that will be emerging in the next couple of years, displacing notebooks for ...

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=26606&tag=nl.e550