[Gllug] Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu

[Richard Turner]

On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 10:43 +0100, Martyn Drake wrote:
> On 25/06/07, Richard Turner <richard at zygous.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > How? What would they muscle-in on? Do you imagine that "Microsoft Linux
> > 2007" would be a big success? If it was, how would it make them revenue?
> 
> The usual way when it comes to Linux - support?

This isn't what MS does though - they'd have to start from scratch
building-up an infrastructure to do effective customer support. MS
builds and sells software and leaves supporting those products to third
parties.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility of course, but if I can
already buy Linux support from Red Hat, Oracle, Novell, HP, IBM, (I
needn't go on I'm sure) then I'd wonder what MS might provide that those
don't. If I'm technically savvy enough to be using Linux then I'm savvy
enough to know that there's nothing MS could offer me, even supporting
their own distro, that the others wouldn't be able to cope with.

Now, if they were selling their own proprietary software on top of an MS
Linux stack, that might be different, but it's not obvious how they'd
make a big enough impact to be worthwhile for them. Even though the Free
software community lacks a nice collaboration suite, for example, I
doubt many would turn to buy MS Exchange for Linux if it was available.

R.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug