Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4? by Chris Duckett and Alex Sherpo of ZDnet (Australia). They go onto a Sydney street with KDE4 telling people it’s a demo of Windows 7. Take-away from responses may be that people really dislike Vista (that’s not news though ;-)

But for me, the point is really that people don’t give a stuff whether it’s Windows or Linux as such and don’t spot the difference. This has been proven before, and means that giving someone a LiveCD with Linux that brings up a nice desktop and a browser, wordprocessor, spreadsheet and so on, does not sell. It’ll look similar to the desktop people already have, and thus asking them to switch is eh… silly? People resist change!

There has to be other motivation. Price tends to not be a great driver (might change though), and “freedom” definitely isn’t for most (it’s a vague concept for most people). Annoyance with the old/existing platform can be a driver, but I wouldn’t focus on crashes and bluescreens as Linux and Firefox can crash just fine also, no Vista may be an angle particularly since people themselves bring this up. The alternative could start with a free disk, and the cool thing about the Ubuntu LiveCD is that it has some OSS apps for Windows on it so people can try things without replacing Windows immediately. That again is a comfort thing, it makes the steps smaller and thus overcomes the resistance to change.

Now is actually an excellent time for Open Source and platform change. Not directly because people and companies have less money to spend, although that might help also. No, the real news is that Microsoft is cutting its budget for local user groups and related activities. A vital factor in Microsoft’s success is its vibrant ecosystem, most of the activity comes from value adding little local companies and usergroups that bind the developers. Reduced commitment to the ecosystem will hurt Microsoft more than anything else, and may just be the tipping point. If I were Microsoft, it’d be one of the key things to focus on now, not reduce spend. Anyway, that’s my little prediction. We’ll have to see how it plays out, but in the mean time I think it’s really important that all the OSS related user groups (local and online) show fab activity!