Still, he's trying to do a Bill Gates, twenty years after. He's taking an OS that he didn't invent, put slick packaging and marketing on it, and calling it a revolutionary breakthrough.
I wanted to try out LindowsOS, just to see if it might be worth using, but you CAN'T get it for free download AT ALL, unlike Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
You can only get it by purchase.
I don't know if that's going to work, but I believe in the free market. However, his attempt to hijack the industry is going to rile some folks up, I think.
The industry needs a second choice in PC OS's, but the timing is bad.
Hewlett Packard is a company in need of direction. After their acquisition of part of DEC and their merger with Compaq, they now have several competing technologies and stakes in several competing operating systems.
Ten years ago H-P was the number one Unix database platform. If you wanted to run Oracle or Informix, HP-UX was the leader. Secondarily DB2 on AIX, and thirdly SunOS. Around the 1995-1996, however, H-P announced that they were going to end-of-life all their PA-RISC chip fabrication as well as their HP-UX AT&T unix derivative. The announcement was timed with Intel's announcement that Merced was nearing production, and the also announced that they were going to standardize on an Intel Unix, such as SCO or Solaris on Intel.
Within one year of that announcement, H-P publically retrated the announcement due to angry protests from their customer base. However, reversing themselves didn't help. Withing another two years, IBM and Sun had both surpassed H-P as a database platform, and MS SQL Server made some in-roads into the smaller end of the market. Since then, H-P has never recaptured the market lead it lost. They still make good office products, but their server product offerings never commanded the market share they once did.
Fast forward eight and we have H-P buying the Alpha CISC processor and fabrication plants from DEC, while DEC's personal computer business is bought by Compaq. When H-P merged with Compaq/DEC they ended up with two totally different and competing 64-bit CPU technologies, PA-RISC and Alpha (CISC), as well as three totally differnent operating systems, their own HP-UX and OSF1 or Tru64 or whatever it is being called this week, as well as DEC-VMS.
The long and the short of this is that H-P is competing with itself on a variety of fronts, and they should do well to remember the mistakes of the past. I would be very suprised if they were to be able to successfully integrate all their different lines as well as IBM has over the years. IBM offers a variet of products and platforms, but they've never been fractured as H-P's current lines are. H-P will sell you PA-RISC boxes, Alpha boxes, Xeon, and now Itanium-based servers. Recently, they've ported HP-UX to the Itanium, and they still support Netware and VMS.
I think they have some good products, but it is very difficult to be all things to all people. They advertise support for Linux on Alpha, Xeon, and Itanium, yet at the same time pull out of this trade show? Sun, IBM, Microsoft and Intel have all done some brain dead things at one time or another. H-P's problem seems to stem from a lack of focus or direction. To their credit, they have also announced a migration path off of the dated Alpha towards Itanium, including Itanium support for VMS!
Strange days.