On Mon, Dec 03, 2001, Schlomo Schapiro wrote about "Re: Local SuSE mirror":
> 1) Israel is very RedHat centric (we are soooo American !), therefore
> there are not so many (almost NIL) people who would buy SuSE
I think that SuSE has to realise three facts (at least, I think they are facts):
1. A person that installs some distribution and is relatively-satisfied with
it, is likely to continue upgrading this distribution, rather than
reformatting the disk and installing a different distribution.
2. A person that starts out with Linux will prefer to get a copy of their
first distribution for free, rather than pay $130. People who can't
find a friend to copy from or don't have a CD writer (this used to be a
big issue, but is less of an issue now) look for the cheapest cheap-bytes
$2-$5 like option.
3. When someone considers to buy with actual money a distribution (e.g., this
is common in the business arena, where time is also money), they usually
prefer to get the distribution they already know and like.
So as long as SuSE continue their no-official-and-latest-free-distribution
policy, I'd say that they have no chance of large market penetration. That
is, unless they have some other major strong point, such as hypothetically
having much better Hebrew support than other distributions.
I once used Slackware, and moved to Redhat when I saw Slackware was slacking
(pun intended :)). At no point did I ever consider SuSE...
Does anybody know why they have a large market penetration in Europe? Did
they have better German support than other distributions, or what?
> Situation in Cyprus or Poland is not much better than here. It's just our
> bad luck that we got an "Israeli" SuSE importer.
This is so silly - to bind themselves to one importer in the days where
shipping a CD from abroad is only about $5... The first distribution I
ever bought (as opposed to downloading for free) was Redhat 6.1, which
I bought from cheapbytes - I got 4 copies, at 20 shekels each (including
shipment and everything). No wonder people hesitate paying $130 (500 shekels!)
for SuSE...
--
Nadav Har'El | Monday, Dec 3 2001, 18 Kislev 5762
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