Hi, SuSE has a strong position in the German (and European) market for the following reasons (my personal understanding, nothing official): - Very good localization (German, French, Spanish) - Pedantic distro (as opposed to all kind of small "oversights" in RH setup for non-US configuration) - really large software selection on the CDs - till 6.x relatively cheap - localized phone & email support - And, last but not least: It's a German distro and Germans of course like to buy German (just like we buy blue-white etc)
And: There where several other German distros that are now more or less dead (the most famous beeing DLD). FYI, Schlomo On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote: > 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... > > -- Schlomo Schapiro Senior System Administrator MobilEye Vision Technologies Ltd. 24 Mishol Hadkalim St., Jerusalem, Israel Telephone: + 972-2-586-6989 Ext. 131 Mobile: + 972-55-767898 Fax: + 972-2-586-7720 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.mobileye.com ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
