This open letter by François Bancilhon CEO of Linux-maker Mandriva does a lot of complaining and innuendo about the Nigerian government evidently going with Windows XP on at least some Classmate PCs that its receiving. Supposedly, the machines are being purchased with Mandriva and being reformatted with Windows. Bancilhon calls foul.
Bancilhon needs to look at the bright side: Mandriva gets paid for a product it doesn’t have to support. I’ve been in small companies where this happens all the time. In some ways, if the customer never gets around to using the product–for whatever reason–it’s kind of a blessing. No support issues, which can stress a small business. I say, take the money and get ready for the next customer. I’m guessing what Mandriva has lost out on is support contracts, which isn’t so hot, but at least they made the initial sale, which for a small company is not a bad thing. Move on.
And on the customer side, we know too little. Is there an app which the school system wants to use or already owns that’s Windows-based? Maybe they want to use Silverlight, which doesn’t yet run on Linux. Who knows? Bancihon doesn’t tell us much about the customer–which is where the real action is. Instead, he gives us innuendo. That’s good for a flash on Slashdot and Digg, but not good in the long run. As a developer, that is authoring apps for devices like the Classmate PC, a little more focus on what the customer is thinking would help.
Oh, and one last thing. Notice we’re talking about XP here. To me, that’s the biggest thing. I’m telling ya, XP has a viable life here with small devices. I hope Microsoft updates XP to keep it going for situations like this. Otherwise, let’s all hope that Flash drive prices drop twice as fast as they are now.