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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."
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:00PM (3 children)
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.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:23PM (2 children)
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$oft" checkbox checked (wow, asking before slurping, THOSE were the days!) probably are the same people that keep all the other defaults.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:06AM (1 child)
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 07 2018, @09:37AM
Just playing devil's advocate, but it's also possible that the defaults have got much better, and people see no reason to change them.
With GNU/Linux distros and any of the BSDs or BSD distros/forks, I'd agree a little. The defaults have gotten much better and people are getting quite usable defaults. Mostly, however, people nowadays come to GNU/Linux without IT experience and instead have a lot of baggage inflicted from long-term use of legacy systems, sometimes concurrently with GNU/Linux.
With the legacy systems, the situation with default settings is more difficult. On OSX it is more or less impossible to customize the interface. On the Vista series, particularly Vista10, not only is the interface hard to customize, but the changes get wiped out at arbitrary intervals by "updates", "upgrades", as well as whims of the M$ 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.