Is
There A Market For Linux Desktops?
Lots
Of Vendors Seem To Be Interested In Selling Linux Desktops
Recently,
we have been receiving a number of phone calls and emails from
vendors who have been letting us know that they, too, may just be
offering a Linux desktop soon.
This seems to be (you pick) in reply to Sun’s September
18th Mad Hatter announcement or it might just be that
it’s time for another try at desktop Linux.
We’ve
been having a great time looking at what’s around (like the $199
Lindows PC’s from Walmart.com (that’s right, hardware and
software, but you need to buy the monitor separately), what’s
coming (we expect many of the distributions to be offering desktop
bundles) and what might happen.
Sun’s
Mad Hatter Linux Desktop Offering
In the meantime, it’s very clear that what we thought Sun was
doing when we attended their September 18 announcement during
their NetWork conference in San Francisco and wrote our Flash
wasn’t quite right – and neither is a lot of what we’ve read
in various sources.
So
we’ve gone back to the source – Sun – and verified
everything. This is
what Sun is really planning to ship:
Mad
Hatter is a Linux PC, offering an –x86 processor running Sun
Linux preloaded with the GNOME interface, the Mozzilla browser,
StarOffice 6.0, Evolution, and Java 2 Standard Edition.
It also includes both a Java Card Client, software and
hardware. The
interface and browser run on the PC.
StarOffice may run on the PC in disconnected mode or it may
run on the Sun server.
Sun
is also offering a terminal version of the product, based on its
own SunRay terminal. In
that case, the software is running on a Solaris server and
Staroffice is running entirely on the server, which is running
multiple instances of the Solaris version of StarOffice.
(This is where we ran off the track before, thinking that
Sun was using the portal or SunONE Webtop version of StarOffice,
which has apparently gone away.)
Sun
notes that benefits to the customer include
 |
Affordable
alternative to Microsoft
|
|
Open
systems approach
|
|
Value
added interoperability solutions
|
|
Complete
end-to-end offering
|
|
Global
enterprise support services
|
|
Lower
TCO:
Software
development
Administration
and deployment
|
|
Application services
|
|
Training
|
|
Hardware and software
|
|
Integration into existing infrastructure
|
We’d
note that nearly all of these values (except the affordable
alternative and the open systems approach) are available from a
number of large Microsoft partners, starting with HP and IBM.
That may make this a tough sell in the competitive market.
But
Sun also clearly knows what it’s not doing.
They are not trying to sell MadHatter as a general purpose
PC nor are they trying to convince knowledge workers who rely on
the frequent use of advanced functions in Microsoft Office that
they should give it up. It
is also clearly a corporate offering, not intended for the
consumer market.
These
products are expected to be available from Sun in six to nine
months from their mid-September announcement date, which is in
March-May, 2003. Pricing
has not been formally announced, but Sun has said that it will be
cheaper to use these Linux PCs or terminals than to deploy
standard PCs with Microsoft office (based on both hardware and
software costs and the cost of support).
Speaking
at the recent Gartner ITXPO in Orlando, Florida, Scott McNealy of
Sun is reported to have said that the Sun Linux offer would come
in at half the cost of a Windows PC. Microsoft has responded that
Linux computers end up costing more in support because the
operating system is harder to use than Windows.
They also note that Linux software has fewer features and
fewer available programs (but this, of course, is being steadily
changed as more Linux software enters the market and Linux itself
is upgraded by the Open Source community and the demands of ever
more sophisticated OEMs and customers, including IBM, HP, and most
of the software development community.
We’d
say the desktop Linux race is just getting started and whether
it’s about devices or mainly about delivering function to
existing desktops is yet to be determined.
As to whether existing vendors – the Dells, Gateways, and
HPs will be the main desktop providers in a Linux desktop era –
or whether a new set of providers might arise – it’s simply
too soon to tell. In
fact, it’s too soon to tell how important the Linux desktop is
going to be, although many vendors and analysts are already
predicting that outside of the highly penetrated North American
and western European market, it’s likely to be an important
player.
Openoffice.Org Is Two
In
the meantime, Sun StarOffice’s twin sister (actually her mother,
I guess), OpenOffice.org is now two and the Open Source
Development Community, which is responsible for the code
development for both products and for the distribution and support
of OpenOffice is just delighted.
Our
congratulations to Sam Hiser, the volunteer who runs
OpenOffice’s Marketing Project and all his crew on the
remarkable job they’ve done.
We are in awe of the professional way this non-profit
organization continues to get out and support product at a level
that many for-profit companies envy.
OpenOffice
celebrated their birthday by announcing a beta release of
OpenOffice.org 1.0 for Mac OS X using XWindows (not the Aqua
interface), a major milestone on the way to a full Mac OS X
release, as well as a new developer release of OpenOffice.org 1.0
for Solaris, Windows and Linux.
There
have been 8.5 million downloads of OpenOffice since the project
started, 5 million since the release of 1.0 in May, 2002.
That doesn’t count the downloads of StarOffice (and
probably understates the numbers, according to Sam Hiser, since
there are so many download sites)
We
won’t try to list all the features or ports available.
You can find them – and download access at http://www.openoffice.org.
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