Form and Function
April 28th, 2009 by John Dragoon
It used to be you had to make a choice…do I select form over function or function over form. One might argue that feature packed and heavy laptops loaded (bloated?) with expensive operating system software were evidence of this choice paradox. In reality, it wasn’t much of a choice.
With the rapid emergence and accelerating market place demand for low cost netbooks and laptops the false choice of form or function is evaporating – at least when it comes to PCs with great form factors preloaded with a Linux operating system that takes advantage of today’s computing paradigm.
In a recent IDC study on Linux adoption in a global recession a full 68 percent of customers indicated they are evaluating or planning to increase their use of desktop Linux as a result of the economic downturn. This not only speaks to the low-cost value proposition of Linux on the client, but also to the fact that the software and the ecosystem surrounding it have matured significantly. Linux is now preloaded and supported on a wide range of client systems. And it’s taking a healthy share of the fastest growing PC segment – netbooks – where Microsoft is being challenged like never before. In fact, just today HP announced their newest ProBook laptop line would be available with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 pre-installed. A terrific marriage of form and function.
As more and more applications get accessed over the web, I believe we’ve only just begun the rapid growth of PC clients with attractive form factors with Linux as the preferred operating system.
It seems you can have it all – Form and Function.
John