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About once a week, Michael writes on his companies, technology, his Broadway debut, lawsuits ... basically whatever he feels like. His aptly named "Michael's Minute" started as a forum posting back in the MP3.com days and now reaches an audience of several hundred thousand. And he really writes them all himself! Sign up here for the Michael's Minute.
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July 2nd, 2008 This week Xandros Inc. is buying
Linspire. Xandros has done more than
any company to put Linux in front of users by powering the innovative eee PC
so I'm excited to see the Linspire, Freespire and CNR technology go to
a
worthy competitor. Linux is going through some healthy and necessary
consolidation which will give resulting companies greater assets and
size to deliver on larger initiatives so Linux can touch more people.
I started Linspire several years ago to bring desktop Linux to the mass
market and some much needed competition for Microsoft. To accomplish
this we made an easy to use Linux without the religious zeal and crazy
terminology which spooked new users. Non-technical people
could install it in about 5 minutes on common PC hardware and have
it immediately be on the Internet, playing videos, music, etc. (The 5
minute
install is still an impressive achievement - checkout freespire.org
to witness it.)
One deficiency of Linux is that it's difficult to find and install new
software. To address this shortcoming, Linspire built CNR
Technology
which I'm more excited about
than ever. CNR is a marketplace where users can browse for software
programs (free and commercial), download and install with a single
mouse click. More than 10,000,000 Linux software programs have been
installed via CNR which now works for Ubuntu, Debian and other Linux
versions. New systems like eee PC need CNR which is why Linspire
marrying Xandros makes sense.
I'm proud of what we tried to accomplish at Linspire. We spent
considerable money and supported important initiatives
like Mozilla, KDE, Wineconf, Gaim (Pidgin), Nvu, Debian and more.
Although there's a loyal Linspire and Freespire audience there's no
denying we did not succeed in bringing Linux to the masses as we
intended to do. Even with Ubuntu's success, Linux on the desktop is
still the
domain of software engineers and technical people.
Over the last 2 years, I have come to know Xandros CEO Andreas
Typaldos. He's an impressive businessman with considerable success.
Most impressively he came from the humblest of beginnings as a Greek
immigrant unable to speak the language. Now he's running Xandros. He's
shared with me his grand plan for Xandros -- it's ambitious and goes
far beyond the operating system to applications and management. I'm
confident that Andy will lead Xandros to success and that is why the
sale
of Linspire makes sense. I believe Xandros will maximize the value of
Linspire's brand, engineers and technology such as CNR.
--MR
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