On Nov 11 2003, at 12:32, Chris Gehlker was caught saying:
> On Nov 11, 2003, at 9:24 AM, Craig White wrote:
> >Where did you get the idea that Red Hat abandoned the desktop market?
> 
> From the many reports that said just that.
> 
> >They have changed the methodology of their packaging and distribution.
> >That they have abandoned the desktop market is your own nexus and 
> >simply
> >not fact.
> 
> Yes, it is plain now that they are still in the enterprise desktop 
> market. They simply are out of the consumer market.
> 
> >Did I miss something - what did Nautilus demonstrate?
> 
> That it is very hard to make money selling an OS in the consumer 
> market. Even MS struggles.

Umm no. Nautilus demonstrated that having just a shiny desktop to sell 
is not enough to grow a business. Nautilus' whole business plan
was flawed IMHO from the very beggining. You can't just sell a desktop
to either the consumer or enterprise market, you need a whole package
of applications around it. It would be akin to M$ selling the explorer 
shell and requiring purchase of a separate set of base applications to 
actually use. Hence Ximian/Suse/Novell.  A linux distro w/o a viable
desktop is useless without apps. And apps/desktop is useless w/o a
stable distro underneath. No consumer/manager in their right mind would
pay a support fee to RedHat for the desktop and then go pay another 
support fee to Ximian/Nautilus for another desktop.

~Deepak

-- 
Deepak Saxena - dsaxena@plexity.net

"To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things - products,
 packaging, and systems - from the very beggining on the understanding 
 that waste does not exist" - William McDonough & Michael Braungart,
                 from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things