{"id":58,"date":"2004-03-05T02:42:47","date_gmt":"2004-03-05T07:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=58"},"modified":"2004-03-05T02:42:47","modified_gmt":"2004-03-05T07:42:47","slug":"meetings-policy-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2004\/03\/05\/meetings-policy-meetings","title":{"rendered":"Meetings, policy, meetings…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The PC Gemilang<\/i> meeting thing happened. Discussing support, training, roll-out plans, and so on. I had a little agenda written up, and by the time a couple of hours was over, things seem a lot clearer now.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is offering free training, with their marketing dollars (or ringgit). Microsoft is however, not offering media<\/b> – these machines that go out with RM149 Windows XP Home (Malay edition aka XP-Lite<\/a>) and Works 2004 Suite will be images that are pushed out on disks. If a virus eats up your system, take it back for support. Seems a little arcane to me, no? And since we can’t touch the images<\/a>, we can’t install a more usable browser like Mozilla or a full-featured office app like OpenOffice.org on Windows.<\/p>\n

Novell, with their recent acquisition of SuSe and Ximian are making inroads in Malaysia too. They tried for the PC Gemilang campaign, and failed due to cost reasons; now two colleges\/unis<\/a> are getting on the bandwagon. And even Sun’s coming up with “pricing for the people”<\/a> with their JDS. There’s an advantage of support here. If Red Hat rests on their laurels, they’re going to lose a large market here.<\/p>\n

For this to succeed, we need support from the other manufacturers in the Malaysian market – Dell, HP, and so on. Red Hat should look at the roll-out of Fedora and support it to some degree – because an additional 400,000 could be RHEL, no? Imran has a nice rant<\/a> on the entire project. <\/p>\n

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