On Thu, October 2, 2014 9:14 pm, Neil C Smith wrote:
On 2 October 2014 11:48, Patrick Shirkey
<pshirkey(a)boosthardware.com>
wrote:
I've seen those reports too. They are
optimistic but potential growth is
not the same thing as actually growing. It's more likely to be corporate
buyers replacing existing stock.
eg.
http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/PC_sales_rebound_in_Western_Europe.news…
Would suggest you're correct in being *mostly* about corporate buyers,
but not entirely - still +2% in consumer sales, which isn't declining!
Is that "potential growth" or actual though?
Still, "88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot" :-)
Will Linux Desktop professional or consumer
multimedia ever become a
growth market?
I'm intrigued to see what effect developments in the gaming arena may
have on consumer Linux usage over the next couple of years, or on
general commercial attitudes in other sectors.
If SteamOS becomes a fully fledged distribution on the scale of
Ubuntu/Fedora then it might have an affect on adoption rates for LAD
software with the "young" crowd. NVidia is putting a lot of effort into
expanding the use of GPU's with CUDA/OpenCL API's so that might also have
a positive affect on adoption but only if we build the tools to take
advantage of the hardware.
FFMPEG developers are doing a great job of keeping things progressing on
that front. But LAD'ers could do more to build out tools that leverage
GPU's.
We could get some more wind in our sails if some well known
companies/artists/producers actively promoted their support for Linux OS
and encouraged adoption. That has to be a two way street though. For
example famous artists usually give endorsements for something in return.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd