April 17, 2008
A bumpy ride for Linux PCs in the emerging markets?
Has Red Hat scrapped its plans to take on Microsoft with a Linux desktop machine for the emerging world?
Unfortunately it’s not easy to answer that question. A Reuters report from India suggests the answer is yes. But my own questions to the company over the past 24 hours have brought nothing in the way of enlightenment, and Red Hat has now instead churned out this verbose and obtuse posting on its company “blog” (if companies keep using their blogs for this kind of corporate-speak we’ll even look back on good old press releases with nostalgia.)
To save you the pain of reading the whole thing, these are the key sentences:
We originally hoped to deliver RHGD [the “global desktop” product] within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes.
“Hardware and market changes”? That’s pretty broad. The only thing to emerge from all of this is that we will probably have to wait at least another year to find out if Red Hat is still interested.
Thank you very much for pointing to the “problem” !
Red Hat Stockholders List reads exactly like the group of Cable and Telcos blocking “peer-to-peer” access in your partners ” Vuze finds users chocking…” blog , Red Hat is the silent darling of Microsoft ,Intel and the Cable Industry, please check the stockholders for the last 4 years, and the patent holders, in my humble opinion it’s a scam,it was and is a way to control the distribution of Linux and monopolize patents, the EU Commission and the EU Courts let’s hope will take a hard legal look at the conflict of interest, at the potential for abuse and the huge loss to the Consumers and to Open Access, at our taxes and taxpayers choices , what a shame !
Linux as a desktop/laptop choice is vital for Growth and Progress in the EU ,the Americas and the World
every kid ,student and worker should have by now the choice of a machine with Linux for voice,video and data,so that he/she can start a solution, a business, a movie site , a shop site , a social site, a product/customer service/sales center, avatar-3d sites for games or training,mobile and fixed, whatever…
one issue very clear today is the low level of Financial knowledge among kids and adults in general, we don’t know how to buy and sell online, stocks or napkins, most don’t know, and this is a social disaster if we want our Culture to compete worldwide, like this we are going nowhere , and without Linux choices, it’s even worst.
Posted by: blogger | April 22nd, 2008 at 8:58 pm | Report this comment