Sun enters the consumer market

[bascule]

Crazy as that sounds, Sun is apparently in negoations with Walmart and Office Depot to sell the Java Desktop System preinstalled on cheap, low-end computer systems ala Lindows:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1406463,00.asp

Unfortunately the article is also laced with the uninformed drivel of morons:

An IT manager, who asked not to be named, said he could not understand why a user would trade one proprietary desktop for another.

"I personally keep Java off my computer because it crashes the system," he said. "If Sun had the interests of the customer in mind, then the Sun desktop would be written in C and donated to Linux. Sun is no better than Microsoft."

[jesse]

Since it's sold through walmart, maybe we'll see Deer Hunter for linux now.

[Xodia]

It will be very interesting to see how well these machines catch on when they are made. The average 30 year old housewife has never even heard of Java, so it will be great to see how they market these things.

[jesse]

ignorance of Java will probably help sales.

[astcell]

Sure they've heard of Java.

Java Latte Grande Cappuccino with chocolate shavings. Java has something to do with Starbucks, right?

[Xodia]

Java Latte Grande Cappuccino with chocolate shavings. Java has something to do with Starbucks, right?

Of course! How could I have been so ignorant?

[skroo]

It will be very interesting to see how well these machines catch on when they are made. The average 30 year old housewife has never even heard of Java, so it will be great to see how they market these things.

I'm just curious as to why we've had the sudden revival in the battle-of-the-desktop segment again. There's a surprising number of players, many of them with experience in the desktop market (IBM springs to mind), suddenly trying to put platforms in front of people. What's changed, I wonder.

[astcell]

Yea, Star Office was not that good.

[Gadsden]

Since it's sold through walmart, maybe we'll see Deer Hunter for linux now.

Dear god, I hope not.
I was cursed by the gods by working in Walhell's electronic section when that game came out. Every redneck in the area bought that damn game, then bitched a blue streak when they were too stupid to get the damn thing running..

[ck3k]

Yea, Star Office was not that good.

I find openoffice far supiuor. The way they are gonna win customers is by slashing the price of a machine, so you only have to spend like one 1/3 of the cost of a computer, you would only use to look at pr0n.

[Chris]

The way they are gonna win customers is by slashing the price of a machine, so you only have to spend like one 1/3 of the cost of a computer, you would only use to look at pr0n.

I personally think the *NIXes should give up on the desktop market. Say what you want about Windows, and trust me I hate it too, but the fact is, they have carved a market out for the end user that doesn't care about anything except ease of use.

The only way that this can be done is by taking away a large part of the configurability and the functionality. You have to make it uniform so that Joe Moron that runs your tech support desk can step through a canned set of questions when Grandma Iwannaemaillittlesusie calls in.

If a *NIX variant did this, it would be no better than the Windows distros we claim to despise. Red Hat came as close to making things "user friendly" as they could, and look at the vitriol they receive from the user community.

I am not on a crusade to see the Linux desktop. I like using Slackware for my workstation OS. I have taken the time and effort to learn how to customize, configure, and generally jack around with it enough so that I can do anything I want on it (well...almost, I can't get Crossover to work with Slack 9.1 yet...but I am still working on that). Most people aren't interested in doing that. Those that are, well...they are already doing it.

[skroo]

If a *NIX variant did this, it would be no better than the Windows distros we claim to despise. Red Hat came as close to making things "user friendly" as they could, and look at the vitriol they receive from the user community.

True. I think a lot of that, though, was down to the arrogant approach RedHat took towards its distribution and users - "You will do things our way" - as well as their absolute insistence that they had to emulate the Windows GUI model for configuration and management of damn near every aspect of the OS; equally frustrating was their (I believe deliberate) blurring of what constitutes Linux - no one distribution is Linux, only the kernel that ships with that distribution.

Problem is, this creates a Catch-22: your existing Windows users have no incentive to change (support and software availability issues), and your existing Linux users don't want to use it (shipping funky-ass custom kernels amongst other things). RedHat got by for a long time (I'm going to say from around version 5 onwards) on being the 'training wheel' distro - you buy it, use it to get your feet wet with Linux, and then move on to something else.

I will concede that they did do a lot of good work in the server arena for Linux, though: many devices (specifically, RAID controllers and backup devices) are now supported under Linux that otherwise wouldn't've been had it not been for IBM's dollars and RedHat's R&D.

OSX and Irix (6.5 and up) are probably the best examples of a *nix-based OS being easy to use - if RedHat had been able to do what Apple did with OSX, it'd probably be on somewhere in the region of 20% of PC desktops. Unfortunately, they never really figured out what to do with it or how to do it. Pulling out of the desktop market is probably the smartest thing they could have done, both for the company and Linux as a whole.