Linux
On The Desktop: At The Linux Desktop Summit
The Linux Desktop Summit is a good place
to take the temperature of the Linux Desktop market and see just how
it’s doing. That’s
why I was attending the conference – to see all those passionate
and talented people – and hear what they had to say. They would talk about their Linux expertise, their
experiences, and their plans to bring Linux Desktops to the
mainstream market. My
job was to balance all that Geek Talk with some analyst cynicism.
Standing in San Diego (actually in Del
Mar, half an hour north), it was easy to imagine that Linux desktops
are very here and now – and they are – if you’re here and now
is one of the places where they have begun to become significant.
That includes China, India, Africa, eastern Europe, parts of
South America (especially Brazil), and some countries in western
Europe (especially Germany and Spain).
If you’d like to see some amazing statistics about the
progress of the Linux desktop, you can access a copy of my presentation
at the Summit.
But you will quickly note that most of
the action is not here in North America.
With the exception of some government agencies, some
educational institutions, the development departments of some
organizations, and pioneering individual geeks, North America is
still Windows country. That’s
largely because we were so heavily penetrated with PC’s and
Windows before Linux became available to the marketplace.
To us, Linux will be an alternative to an existing
environment, not our first computer.
In a country like India (with its less than 1% PC penetration
rate), it’s a very different story.
Major vendors like Red Hat and
SuSE/Novell talked about their current and near future products.
Host Michael Robertson of Lindows/Linspire talked about the
future of Linux for small businesses and consumers and demoed new
Linux applications for that market – LPhoto for organizing photos
in albums and LMusic for organizing and playing music collections.
Speakers from Europe reported on Linux Desktop usage in their
geographies. Technical Wizards awed us with their expertise.
I had a gleeful (and unexpected) reunion
with my colleague Louis Nauges, a French consultant and the inventor
of the French term for Office Automation (Bureautique).
Nauges does consulting for large enterprises and has
developed a measurement technique that allows him to automatically
measure a month’s work, at each user’s desktop, for an
interested client. With
the results (which include how much time is spent in every
computer-based activity and application), it is possible to
determine just what kind of desktop (PC, rich client/server, thin
client, etc.) and which applications would optimally serve the user
and his organization. It’s
a case of data speaking louder than words.
We’re hoping that Louis will allow us to publish some of
his data so we may share his opinion of just what it is users are
doing.
Robertson cleverly wound up the event
with renowned HBS professor Clay Christensen, speaking quite
topically about his work on the difficulties businesses have in
constantly reinventing themselves, The Innovator’s Dilemma.
He dazzled the audience, talking about how new innovations
almost always demand new companies to exploit them.
That certainly appealed to this audience.
Meanwhile, Linux continues to compel our
attention, while businesses around the world decide whether it is
time for them to give it serious consideration.
Considering
Linux At Microsoft
For example, shortly after the Desktop Summit,
in an annual strategy memo to Microsoft employees (which inevitably
made its way onto the Internet) CEO Steve Ballmer noted that "Noncommercial
software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a
competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they
require our concentrated focus and attention."
Ballmer
believes that while IBM’s support for Linux lends it credibility,
Linux lacks the control and support that a commercial environment
like Windows can offer. He acknowledges the lure of “free” software to cost
conscious buyers, but believes in the long run, well crafted
products, brought to market by a well managed profit-seeking
business, offer a better value.
I’d
be more inclined to agree with this point of view if I did not
believe that Linux is in a transitional phase, moving from its free
wheeling (and free) open source roots to becoming an open standard
platform, upon which commercial developers build supported
commercial software. Certainly,
IBM’s new Workplace offerings on Linux (just one of their
supported platforms) are neither unsupported nor free, nor would IBM
customers expect them to be.
A
real issue for Linux and Open Source as we move into that future
will be continuing to support the spirit of intellectual debate and
volunteerism that has made them strong and vital, while permitting
the best Linux programmers to choose to monetize their expertise by
becoming experts in large companies at well-paying jobs.
The new model could work, but it will look different than the
original one.
Companies
who compete against Open Source will need to understand that
fundamental change in order to plan their future strategies.
Commenting On The Sun Point Of View Re
Linux
Pamela
Jones, the convener of the famous Groklaw site, (www.groklaw.org)
is concerned that Sun is going to follow in Caldera’s footsteps
and create its own distribution as part of its Java Desktop.
In
some sense, her concern is related to my remarks in my article of
April 8 More
Thoughts About The Sun Microsoft Agreement,
in which we speculated about whether Sun would make Java less of an
open standard in its efforts to make J2EE interoperate with .NET.
She
speculates on whether Sun will create a distribution that will move
away from Open Source in an attempt to create protected IP.
You can’t have it both ways, she seems to be saying.
We’ve
asked Sun to comment on this article, so we’ll hope to hear from
them in time for the next issue of Opinions.
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