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IBM's Upcoming Linux Ad Campaign
Chris Soghoian writes: "According to a Wired News story,
IBM is going to feature Tux as part of it's 'Peace, Love & Linux' ad campaign. Apparently, the campaign is going to kick off with a 6-story Tux billboard in Times Square next week." I'm looking forward
to seeing the CG Tux TV ads.
One of the marketing guys here at work (we resell for IBM) got some of the promo materials for the campaign, and I have to say the bumper stickers at least rock. I don't have a scanner, so I'll describe them: There are three different bumper stickers. They're completely black and white, with the funny e in the "IBM e Server" logo red. The background is black, and there are three white circles with the peace sign, a heart and Tux's head on them, respectively. On one of the stickers, Tux is huge, no logo. One the other two, the white circles are all the same size, and they say either LINUX LIVES or LINUX POWER in huge letters.
:-).
Still, they're very plain and non-detailed. There's no flower power feeling. In fact, the impression I get is more making fun of the sterotype of Linux hippies, especially on the one with Tux dwarfing the peace and love signs, kind of a manic celebration of the fact that yes, Linux was founded on the principles of sharing and goodwill, but it makes a damn good solid OS right now for your business.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it
Still, the one with the big Tux is going on the car.
The PHB IT mantra:
"No one has ever been fired for buying IBM, Intel, or Microsoft"
IBM's reputation standing behind Linux will have a profound effect on decisions made in the board room, especially combined with other factors:
It will effectively neutralize Microsoft's eternal strategy of ignoring the IT staff and concentrating on the managers to sell their products. Here IBM will offer, in the eyes of management, a serious comptetitor to Microsoft offerings, particularly in servers.
IBM will build upon support from administrators. Should decisionmakers have to choose between to viable solutions, the preference of the IT staff may actually be taken into account
Cost, cost, cost, and cost. Given two solutions, both backed by solid and reputable companies, management will tend to gravitate towards the cost effective one.
Overall, this ad campaign will do for Linux what IBM's adoption of MS-DOS did for Microsoft.
IBM Linux commercial. It has got Captain Cisco in it but I haven't seen it on TV with that line of commercials with him in it. I guess they've been saving it.
It's nice that IBM supports Linux in general, but I've said it before here, and I'll stick by it... IBM should do a Linux distro. They should probably buy RedHat, which already seems to have close ties to IBM at RTP, and the stock is cheap now anyway (and no, I'm *not* a RHAT stockholder).
:) This already happened with IBM's name on small PC's which were still seen as curiosities by management types when they first appeared years ago. Once you get this kind of acceptance, the momentum builds, more folks get involved, and things get even better.
First of all, an IBM Linux distro would become sorta like the "IBM PC" in that it would be a quasi-defacto standard that everyone rallies around, but IBM doesn't really control. This already happened with the PC. The GPL would ensure it further, and IBM's emphasis on being a *hardware* company would also help ensure it's impartiality even further. I believe IBM would be a good citizen with it's own Linux distro.
Secondly, IBM's good name would help it's acceptance with the PHB's
Finally, let's face it.... there's really only one company big enough to stand up to M$'s bullying and that's Big Blue. I'm sure some of the older OS/2 engineers at IBM don't need to be reminded about M$. Without any *major* competition, M$ will just do whatever they please. A very successful IBM Linux would keep them in line. M$ also has the advantage in that it has one standard API for developers to shoot for whereas there's still a bit of fragmentation with Linux with a variety of packages and little discrepancies. I really wouldn't mind a "defacto standard" Linux distro that an IBM could provide as long as it's GPL and open standards compliant. There would still always be specialized distros like Debian and Slackware.
I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work, but should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?
They aren't running the servers but they are the ones telling the server jockeys what to run. They are the CTOs, CIOs and CEOs. They are the ones who need to be convinced that "Linux is ready for the Enterprise" and who better to do that the the behemoth from their earlier years, IBM, the Microsoft of their generation
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
IBM decided not to make their own distro because they were concerned that the community might suspect them of "stealing Linux" as the Gartner Group suggests is already happening. IBM could do this by becoming the de facto standard and then extending the standard with proprietary componants. The GPL doesn't allow such modifications to source code, but it does allow the addition of non-GPL componants as in tools and such. That's all it would take.
Besides, supporting multiple distros helps IBM market the product to fans of all the various distros, to join those companies in the IBM Partner Program, and to allow software for any of those distros to be easily ported from laptops to PC Servers, to Risc Boxes, to the AS/400 to the S/390. This helps them sell expensive hardware and keep old customers by having massive amounts of software for those systems.
Licensing schemes of IBM mainframes are annual payments for each software application or tool based on the CPU size of your mainframe. Therefore, UNIX competitors have been pulling away market share by writing applications to take over sub-tasks of the large mainframe applications, hence reducing the mainframe software licensing fees significantly. For example, a PKZIP utility for our OS/390 Mainframe costs $10,000 a year to use.
--Matthew
"Peace, Love, and Linux"?
That will go a long way to getting rid of the "hippy" stereotype that comes with GNU/Linux.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/linux/passpor t.swf