The PC Gemilang 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.
Microsoft is offering free training, with their marketing dollars (or ringgit). Microsoft is however, not offering media – these machines that go out with RM149 Windows XP Home (Malay edition aka XP-Lite) 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, we can’t install a more usable browser like Mozilla or a full-featured office app like OpenOffice.org on Windows.
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 are getting on the bandwagon. And even Sun’s coming up with “pricing for the people” 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.
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 on the entire project.