Of course, some vendors simply don’t get it, that they will loose market share in the long run if they don’t offer support for Linux…

MS Office = OOo (unless you are running Access)
Photoshop = The GIMP (unless you’re business is graphic design)
Outlook = Web-based email

Now the main problem with SMBs is that many of them run Windows-based business software, both custom-built databases and off-the-shelf accounting software. WINE would be the obvious solution, but that’s a hit-or-miss experience. So maybe Canonical should find ways to encourage other developers to create GNU/Linux-based business software.

I’m from Brazil and here Ubuntu would be a very useful system… if it have the most common “winmodem” (soft modem for dial-up conections) drivers out of box.

Others issues like… easy to use… simple, programs, etc… are not a problem (obviously… except for those who need professional tools like Auto Cad).

There’s no problem that Canonical could deal with…

Any Apple’s product is very expensive here… but it is growing… and growing fast… first because of iPod… and now it is iPhone. The Mac computers also are getting space in our market… but there’s no special reason for that… too.

Price is not the issue, what remains is quality.
Pre-installed is important, as many people don’t have connectivity either.

This is for linux in general. For Ubuntu, it helps if the SABDFL please abstain from involving himself in politics of foreign countries. That hurt A LOT when a government is moving towards migration… Now they use a much less user friendly distro and disillusioned people go back to Microsoft.

If Linux is ever going to take over the desktop then all the applications need to be up to scratch. There is absolutely no point in the Ubuntu repositories being chock full of half baked not even nearly finished games if the alternative accountancy software doesn’t do everything the proprietary Windows based counterpart does.

It’s not enough for free or open source software alternatives to do nearly everything or mostly everything the Windows based competition does. Free software alternatives must do it all, do it better and do more.

That is the nature of competition. People will not turn from their expensive ball and chain unless the competition is better. That’s how Apple captured the MP3 download market. They produced a far superior product than the competition.

Open Source and Free Open Source Software developers clearly don’t have the resources to do everything on their own. Companies like IBM are not interested in developing a vibrant ecosystem. Their interests lay closer to home. Not that their contributions aren’t welcome.

If Canonical really wants to conquer the desktop it will need to seriously invest in applications software development and marketing. It will need to develop partnerships with third party developers and OEMs. IBM and Dell are good starts. But they’re playing the wrong end of the field.

Everybody involved in OSS and FOSS should ditch the fanatical ethos that a Linux OS must run on a 286 with 64KB of RAM. We live in the modern world. People who live in the third world want to live in our modern world. They don’t want to be patronised with something designed for yesterdays technology. Even if that is all they have. They want to feel like they’re on par with the rest of us. Which is why they foolishly hold up Windows as the gold standard to beat. So we need to stop selling Linux short.

Yes it can run on old machines. That’s not such a great marketing slogan though. It might be what many people want. But it doesn’t inspire people to buy into the dream.

It might not strictly be a third world concern. However the gaming industry has repeatedly expressed an interest in Linux. Every now and then a games developer dips it’s toes in the Linux waters. But there’s no corporate entity for them to engage with. To partner with. Canonical certainly aren’t embracing them. So they wander off to another platform.

They adopt the Xbox or the Playstation or the Wii because the vendors of those systems bend over backwards to make them accessible. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo court developers and establish lucrative deals and relationships. In return games developers develop games for these platforms.

Key to getting Ubuntu accepted on the desktops of the third world will be acceptance within the business communities of the first world. Software that is useful to first world business leaders will be equally useful to third world business leaders.

After all, if we’re really trying to develop third world economies and markets. Why are we treating them like dumb apes?

For example of how I think you can get a better visualization look at this:
fedoraproject.org/maps/all.png

In Fedora we are generating unique IP address density maps..heat maps..from our MirrorManager logs in an effort to give a global picture of where Fedora is being actively used. I’ve gridded unique ip address clients counts based on a lat/lon grid and then projected that back over a global map.

One of the reasons I did the client density heat map was because the simple scatter plot of geoip markers was too crowded to really say anything significant.

If the Ubuntu forum people are interested adapting our map generation script.. it can pulled from our Fedora infrastructure git repository so they can produce similar heat maps from their forum connection logs. I’m more than happy to help with the adaptation if they run into any problems.

The 2006 map is probably a very out dated picture. I’m much more confident in the Fedora usage map image I’ve included, which tells a somewhat different story. We are seeing significant pockets of usage in India and in South America, to the extent that we can trust the geoip conversion. I’d very much like to see the Ubuntu community use a similar approach so we can get a more comprehensive view of global linux adoption that we can trend over time.

-jef

MS’s strategy has been a no-brainer: look the other way. And wait for the economy of the country to pick up to crack down on people. In many cases they do go after commercial users (businesses). It is in their best interest to keep the monopoly going, whatever it takes.

The big missing factor here is Governments and businesses. These should be the targets for Ubuntu/Linux. Governments need access to the source, they need openness, transparency. They get all that with Linux. Business need to look at costs even more than in developed economies. Again, Ubuntu should have an edge.