LinuxCon: Some advice from Uncle Dirk

“Dirk also spends a fair amount of time outside of Intel,
advising the community on how it can work better with vendors, with
customers, and with itself. His thoughtful talks on the topic are
usually well worth hearing. In two separate talks on the first day
of the first LinuxCon, Dirk had some fairly general thoughts on how
the next steps toward world domination can be taken.

“When ASUS created the netbook market, its disruptive new
machines all ran Linux. The development community welcomed this
news, which seemed like a [Dirk Hohndel] validation of much of what
we’ve been doing all these years. But it did not take very long
before Microsoft was announcing that the vast majority of netbook
systems were now shipping with Windows instead. How is it, Dirk
asks, that Windows is able to displace Linux on systems like
netbooks?

“Part of the problem, certainly, was the second-rate
distribution which was shipped with the early netbooks. It suffered
from what Dirk calls the “three click problem.” When the system is
first turned on, everything looks great. But, by the time the user
gets three clicks into the system, it’s clear that it is an
unfinished product. Obvious problems – configuration dialog boxes
for applications which do not fit on the small screen, for example
– are everywhere. So it does not take long for users to feel that
they have not gotten what they really wanted.”

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