“GNOME has achieved significant acceptance from the Linux and
Unix communities. Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard are
announcing their adoption of GNOME as the future default user
environment for Solaris and HP-UX, respectively. The GNOME user
environment is the default for RedHat, TurboLinux and several other
leading Linux distributions and is available for all major Linux
distributions. As a result, this initiative will unify many
variations of Unix under a single user environment. It creates a
cost-effective framework based on open standards and open source
that will enable developers to write solutions for many different
platforms, while competing on implementations….”
“If GNOME is successful, this will be the first of two (or
maybe the second of three) key steps to make Linux a viable desktop
market competitor to Windows. If a software desktop image is
standardized, and is easy to use, that will go a long way toward
negating an issue traditionally raised by Microsoft, i.e., the
Windows desktop is essentially the same, and it’s simpler to use
than any Linux desktop. Whether we agree with that contention is
immaterial, the market believes it to be true.”
“The other key to Linux desktop success is, as we’ve said
before, getting enough useful desktop applications ported to Linux.
In this case, we continue to believe that the key application (at
least for business users) is MS Office. Sun’s StarOffice, with more
than 3 Million downloads to date, is a good starting point, but MS
Office is the big dog in the desktop space.”