Opinion on Vista and Dapper delays

[Shawn McMahon]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 07:46:09PM +0700, Chanchao said:
> 
> > > The only question is can Canonical sell enough
> > > of them for it to be worth the bother, 
> 
> Ah. :-) The point is not to get loads of profit in high sales, the point
> is to OFFER it in the first place. It adds to the desirability factor of
> the OS as a whole.  Apple does this very well.

It has nothing to do with profit.  If Canonical can sell five of these,
it's not worth it.  If they can sell a million of them and lose no more
money than they'd lose on a million CDs, it's worth it.  Everywhere in
between those numbers is open for debate.

That's why the ability to be in the neighborhood of the competition on
pricing is important; if it's a lot cheaper to just buy a Dell and
install Linux yourself, there's little reason to buy the Ubuntu-branded
laptop, except for a small audience of enthusiasts.  If, however, they
could sell it for within a hundred bucks or so of Dell, and break even,
it might be worth it.  Of course, if they can sell a million of them at a
profit, and pump that into the other projects, that's pretty cool too.


-- 
   Shawn McMahon    | Ubuntu: an ancient African word meaning "I am sick
   EIV Consulting   | of compiling Gentoo".
 http://www.eiv.com |                       - Jeff Waugh (paraphrased)
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