“This week I’m speaking at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego
on why the PC OEMs don’t, and probably never will, fully support
Linux on the desktop. This is somewhat of a deja vu for me since a
decade ago my team made a similar presentation at IBM on OS/2 and
why it wouldn’t beat Windows in its time. For the purpose of this
piece I’m using the word ‘Linux’ as an open source OS catch-all so
I don’t have to call out every distribution or variant.“Now, as it was then, the core of the argument wasn’t the
technology, the strength of Microsoft, or anything, really, outside
IBM’s control. The reason was that IBM would simply not do what was
necessary to take the market away from Microsoft…”