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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the handy-little-machines dept.

The Linux Journal reminisces about the Asus Eee and considers how close the world came to getting a GNU/Linux Desktop as a result of it being on the market. While the article is a bit light on the machinations that Microsoft carried out behind the scenes to impair their utility and cap the growth of netbook sales, especially any with GNU/Linux pre-installed, it does cover a lot of other important aspects about the netbook phenomenon. The Eee was really one of the first if not the first netbooks available. Being small and relatively inexpensive, the netbooks were not practical to use for running the slow, bloated, legacy operating systems that remain all too common among original equipment manufacturers (OEM) even today. Instead the Eee came with a good distro pre-installed and could accept just about any light 32-bit distro in its place. It is hard to overstate how popular these machines became.

It's almost impossible to believe, a decade later, how popular netbooks were in the wake of the Eee. Way past popular, actually: the netbook was the best-selling computer in the world in 2009, with seven-fold growth from 2008 and some 20 million sold. That accounted for almost 10% of the entire computer market at a time when the recession saw desktop computer sales fall 12%, the worst decline in its history.

[...] Netbooks and the Eee were so successful, in fact, that research analysts who followed Apple—whose top executives had famously called the machines "junk"—warned the company that it had better do something to compete. Mac sales fell in 2008, the first decline in five and a half years, and an analyst told Computerworld: "Vendors are waking up to the fact that people respond to so-called 'good-enough' computing. They don't really need all the power of a Core 2 Duo CPU most of the time."


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:54PM (5 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:54PM (#758537) Homepage Journal

    Tragically, customization is not a thing any more. It is one of the FOSS desktops' strengths but not one that can be mareted any more due to the public being so subdued into accepting the defaults.

    I know they get brainwashed, but is the public psyche really that pliable? I suppose it's really a case of your own product's marketing needs to align with and feed off the marketing campaigns of the competitors because it's a lot harder to fight the tide that's constantly washing over the collective consciousness.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM (3 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM (#758544) Journal

    One of the takeaways from the case between M$ and Netscape, even back then, was that over 60% of people kept the defaults exactly as they are. I have a lot of anecdotes that convince me that the percentage is much higher nowadays. However, those are only anecdotes. It is past time for another proper study if it could get past all the political obstacles in place.

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    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:23PM (2 children)

      by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:23PM (#758561) Homepage Journal

      That's sad if it's true, because it suggests we're breeding nations of compliant drones that do not wish to question what is put in front of them or think critically. I'm extrapolating a lot from your example, but if I'm right, that's very bad for democracy.

      I do have to wonder how they got that 60% figure though. The people who say yes to surveys and who used to leave the old "Send details of my experience to Micro$oft" checkbox checked (wow, asking before slurping, THOSE were the days!) probably are the same people that keep all the other defaults.

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:06AM (1 child)

        by deimtee (3272) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:06AM (#758825) Journal

        Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.

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        • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:37AM

          by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:37AM (#758886) Journal

          Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.

          With GNU/Linux distros and any of the BSDs or BSD distros/forks, I'd agree a little. The defaults have gotten much better and people are getting quite usable defaults. Mostly, however, people nowadays come to GNU/Linux without IT experience and instead have a lot of baggage inflicted from long-term use of legacy systems, sometimes concurrently with GNU/Linux.

          With the legacy systems, the situation with default settings is more difficult. On OSX it is more or less impossible to customize the interface. On the Vista series, particularly Vista10, not only is the interface hard to customize, but the changes get wiped out at arbitrary intervals by "updates", "upgrades", as well as whims of the M$ resellers posing as IT departments. Also, their "reformat, reinstall" mantra which they bleat does equal damage to customizations because they are so damn hard to restore, not just zapping third-party applications. The difficulty grinds people down and they just resign themselves to accepting the defaults. That carries over to all systems they use, good or bad.

          --
          Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:10PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @03:10PM (#758982) Journal

    Tragically, customization is not a thing any more. It is one of the FOSS desktops' strengths but not one that can be mareted any more due to the public being so subdued into accepting the defaults.

    I know they get brainwashed, but is the public psyche really that pliable? I suppose it's really a case of your own product's marketing needs to align with and feed off the marketing campaigns of the competitors because it's a lot harder to fight the tide that's constantly washing over the collective consciousness.

    If you want to understand why non-techies aren't into customization, you need to stop thinking like a techie. Most people actually see retaining defaults as a *good thing*, and they're not necessarily wrong about that either. They don't want to customize, because they don't want to learn how the machine actually works. They want to be able to ask the guy sitting next to them or the neighbor kid or whoever how to accomplish some task, and they want step-by-step picture instructions (any text must be less than one sentence per photo) that they can follow exactly on their own system. If a single icon is different -- even if it's not an icon they need to use for that particular task -- then they assume something is broken. They don't see the computer the way we do; they see the computer like they see a microwave oven. It's an appliance with a certain predefined set of functionality which is activated by pressing a certain predefined sequence of buttons. And they just want to be able to memorize the button sequences that they need. And changing settings away from defaults just means learning new buttons and losing the ability to follow other peoples' instructions.

    Most people don't have any clue what their systems are capable of. And they don't care. And a disturbing number of these people are even "software engineers"....

    Go ask people sometime what they really *want* to do with their computers. In an ideal world, if they could have someone developing some custom software just for them, what would it do? Most people will look at you like you've got two heads; they'll barely even comprehend the question. Or they'll just say they want the software they already have to work faster or crash less. But new software, new interfaces, or even something as simple as a macro seems to be too imaginative for most people.

    On the one hand, I want to say that people shouldn't be using computers if they don't understand them. On the other hand...I don't necessarily know all the inner workings of my microwave, and I don't want to. I look at what the store has and I pick one and I use it as designed. We've all got limited time and energy and we can't dig into every detail of every object we come into contact with.