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Why Linux is About to Lose
mpawlo writes "Wired ran an interesting piece by Russ Mitchell in the latest issue of the magazine. Mitchell focus on the so called war between Microsoft and Linux and why Linux will have a hard time winning such a war, and especially in respect of the desktops. The article was only available in the paper issue, but is now also available online."
when Linus Torvalds says they arent even fighting them?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
But he fails to acknowledge the reality that sometimes a linux desktop makes real business sense. Yes, that market is small, and yes if you're looking at it as a war, Microsoft has won. However, in the words of Phil Jackson, "You are only a success for the moment you achieve something."
Users do want simplicity and ease of use. And it is also true that Linux can't give them this right now. But it's even more true that this can change.
Go Lakers!
Linux is written by geeks, for geeks.
MS/Windows is written by geeks and business types, for business types... and geeks. Who controls the pursestrings in the enterprise?
Which OS spends millions on UI design? As long as Linux continues to move ahead with fragmented windowing systems, it'll continue to fail to compete with Windows on the desktop.
If you've learned nothing else from models, it's that sometimes it's better to be pretty than smart.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
This was posted yesterday or the day before on Linuxtoday, and the thing I really didn't understand is not why people keep posting articles like this that claim to explain why Linux will never succeed, but why editors don't correct the headlines.
Very, very little of this article is about why the author thinks linux won't succeed on the desktop - what it is about is why Linux isn't *currently* on the desktop.
Sure, for example, we don't have an Office killer *currently*, but where exactly does he explain why we can never have one? Nobody can seriously be so conned by Microsoft as to believe that we'll always be playing catch-up. Obviously there will come a point (very soon, IMHO) when Linux word processors have every function most users could possibly want - just because Word adds new extraneous features every release doesn't mean those are necessary, and certainly doesn't mean people use them (or would miss them in a Linux equivalent).
I'm just constantly bemused how people seem to make the inference from 'linux isn't currently on the desktop' to 'linux will never be on the desktop'. There may be some good reasons why this might be, but this article certainly doesn't offer any conclusive ones as far as I can see.
Seems to me that there will come a point where a free operating system can do everything current OSes do, so the intuitive step is to ask 'Why when that happens will people pay for an OS instead?' - surely the burden is on people claiming linux will never win the desktop to answer that, even if that time is a year off or whatever.
It seems that the article is motivated by an anger towards the fringe lunatics. This is too bad -- wiping a hard drive and installing linux on it isn't a linux problem, it's a stupid fucking employee problem.
As for whether or not Linux is going to lose on the desktop, time will tell. It's staying on mine, but I don't do any word processing that other people need to see. I do find it funny that the writer considers the competition for the desktop a bad thing, and writes it off as duplication of effort. I suppose there's an argument for that, but you might as well say that Darwinism is a duplication of effort when it comes to evolution -- the only other recourse is to accept being stagnant or having your evolution determined for you. No thanks.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
That since linux isn't there now, it can never be?
If anything is to be learned from the last 5 years of OpenSource, is that it is very dynamic and can play catch-up very quickly, usually measured in weeks.
We need an idiot version of linux. When you can fully run and configure a linux system without VI, Emacs, Pico, cat, grep - and do it all through a consistant well-thoughtout GUI will be the day that linux is ready for the corporate & home desktop.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Windows suffers in two areas: reliability and usability. Obviously, Linux is quite good w.r.t. the former, but not so good w.r.t. the latter. Windows seems to crash everytime I'm really doing something important. Linux has only crashed on me once in my entire life (remarkable, I'll admit).
However, usability is king with users. Most users who have seen Windows for the first time simply can't figure it out because it doesn't map to their mental model of how the system should work. Double-clicking? Minimize a window? Right-click to bring up "hidden" actions? Click "Start" to find the "Shutdown" command? These things are counter-intuitive to any beginner, and even seasoned veterans are confused when a new version of Windows comes out due to MS's inability to adhear to their own standards. This is an area that Linux could have capitalized on, but unfortunately developers were too interested in developing GUI's for developers... not the average Joe.
This is why Linux will "lose the battle." You can point to monopolies and such as long as you want, but in the end the user makes the decision what he or she wants, and the user will say that the switch to Linux doesn't offer enough benefits to justify a shift.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
But what that article fails to take into account is the very rapid rate of development happening in the Linux desktop community. Very soon Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3.0 will be released, which are both major steps in their respective projects. What has Microsoft put out lately? Windows XP with the Luna interface, which after having played with, I can definitely say I'm not impressed (Mac OSX is still the best eye-candy).
The point is, Linux is usable, but still in development. At the rate that support for linux is snowballing and more and more people get onboard, Linux will be as good or better than M$ in, I'd guess, about two years.
I heartily advise anyone, who hasn't already, to listen to Bill Gates give a speech. He is a megalomaniac and a charismatic one, besides, buy you really have to pay attention to what he says between the lines. It is very intimidating to hear his version of the future, one in which there really is no competition, but a utopia run by your best and well meaning friends, microsoft.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Microsoft will beat Linux on the desktop because they control the way PC's are installed at the manufacturer. Linux will Never surpass Microsoft, unless their grip over the Major manufactures, with the secret OEM licence, is broken.
Eg, hypothetically, Microsoft could just about to release a new OS, called M$ Shite - This will be worse than MSDOS, Take ages to boot, be non-gui, bugger up the HD's boot patition table so that only a Low Level format will put things right, and only run MS branded crippleware, and not allow any other software installs. Unfortunetely, they are also strongarming the Manufactures to preinstall this next generation software, so that every PC sold from BESTBUY, or PCWORLD, without exception, will come with it pre-installed.
I wonder how many people will still stick with the OS their PC came with, in this situation regardless, 30%? 40%, maybe even 50%. Many people do not know the difference between the OS and the Computer, and don't even realise that they can change, and wouldn't even know if they would want to.
Ten, twenty years?
In the future when we think ``computer'' we won't picture a big beige box under the desk with wires running all over the place, and another big box with a beam scanning back and forth across a piece of glass.
If Linux lost the desktop PC, that's fine, 'cause the days of the desktop PC dinosaurs are numbered.
The computers of the future are smaller, faster, and cheaper--Three words NOT in Microsoft's vocabulary.
The guy has no clue. On page 1 or 2, he says that you can't get drivers for linux. It's sooooo hard. (never mind the fact that any real distribution these days detects just about everything right on install).
Then later (page 4) he says "Linux is effectively a commodity and can be made to work on any hardware system."
Reconcile those two, if you can. I can't.
Heh. I like chicks who dig Linux. That's why I married a physicist. :)
About the "hope" that you speak about, well, yes and no. Yes, Linux on the desktop will never "lose" as such 'cause there's nothing to lose. We write desktop software for Linux because *we* need it. If I want a native KDE Gnutella client and there isn't one available, I code myself one. That's how Linux software gets built. And that's why stupid "what ifs" like the one in the article (What if the Linux community put an end to all the desktop nonsense right now and built on its strengths in global enterprise computing) are pure nonsense. If I want a gnutella client, I will damn well code a gnutella client, not frickin' enterprise software for which I have no use. And no, Linux will never outdo Microsoft on the desktop market, pretty much for the same reason. When I design a program, I design it to fit MY needs. If others find it useful, that's OK with me. But frankly, I couldn't care less about Joe AOL and what he expects from a software package, therefore my software will never work for him.
So I guess if for some strange reason you want all the world to run Linux, you'd better write commercial software for it. Not necessarily proprietary, but commercial. When the world finds a way to really make open source commercially successful, that's when Microsoft should start worrying.
If we Linux folks give up on the desktop, we will eventually have to give up on the server, unless the states and the DOJ get really wise about remedies.
As it stands now, the biggest single factor, by far, driving Microsoft server technology into the enterprise is the fact that Microsoft desktops want to talk to Microsoft servers. Jeremy Allison made this point on the LinuxToday talkbacks for this article, that the reason Exchange gets pulled into companies is because Outlook (part of office, and so bundled everywhere) has to talk to Exchange to do calendaring and scheduling. Exchange 2000, at least, needs to talk to ActiveDirectory. ActiveDirectory and Windows 2000 really, really want to absorb the DNS function (or else you're stuck with either a lot of manual overhead to manage the SRV records, or else you have to enable Dynamic DNS updates with a total lack of security because Microsoft doesn't support any open DDNS standards, they simply use the ActiveDirectory ACL's for security..)
See how that works? It's like dominoes, and Microsoft is supremely willing to set them up and knock them down.
Even though we spent 5+ years developing Ganymede, we're getting massive pressure on us to adopt ActiveDirectory because that's what Microsoft says Windows 2000 really needs, and because the protocols that Windows 2000 uses to talk to its directory services are proprietary and non-documented.
Microsoft is like a cuckoo bird, that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. The eggs hatch, and out pop the baby cuckoos, who then proceed to shove all the other eggs out of the nest.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Actually, what I got out of the article on Wired (print version) is that he works extensively with Linux (he worked at RedHat), and thinks it is technically superior. But he thinks that OS wars and flames, and (he specifically mentions) /. Rage are counter productive to the movement.
He says that if Linux slowly eroded the MS base, it would win. But instead you have guerilla IT departments go through and trash peoples computers, and make linux-ites look like a bunch of freaks.
He specifically mentions an incident at RedHat where a biz. person had some Excel documents. The documents had some heavy duty macros and whatnot which would not work under any of the linux competitors. She installed Excel. She had an issue with her drivers or whatnot, and when she got the computer back from IT, excel was gone, along with her documents. The IT guy said it was her fault for being a traitor to linux.
Summary of article : Linux is great, but the long haired freaks are gonna make it lose.
open source is an alternative that gives users more power to control their computing environment than closed source software does, but it is *NOT* a war!
We need to stop describing stuff in such combative terms. That's part of what turns businesses off and prevents them from trying open source software. Businesses view people who talk about software choices as war as a bunch of loons. If you want to get linux on the desktop, point out that it is a high quality, low cost alternative to the software they are currently using. Give specific examples that match their current products.
Remember, this is not war, noone will die over this.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
This is one thing that MS is still working on after 20 years, with occasional interferance from marketing, and which they occasionally get right. Of course, their marketing department has often shaped what people want, but that is another story.
If Linux evangelists insult the people they are trying to convert, then people will not convert. If they ram it down the throat of someone, then they object, just like people object against MS.
Remember, to do better than MS you do not have to be as good as MS. You have to be many times better.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Some people just don't get it: Linux is not about market share, Linux is not about wining anything, Linux is not about profits.
;-) ) but it is there for you to try.
Linux is about choice.
The day one gets tired of MS you can try something else: it can or can't be what you want or need (I don't need an spell checker for instance, you people can suffer my English
Does it work for you? Great, you are welcome. It does not? Bad luck, let us know and we will try to help. Can you program? Can you translate? Can you write documentation? Then would you like to help improve the thing?
And what is the brilliant alternative? Do nothing? Is this person suggesting to abandon the project of desktop computing in the hands of a company that has been deemed acted ilegaly? Uh, no thanks. In particular poor countries can't afford this alternative.
If there are companies and individuals out there trying to make a living out of Linux, great. If they can't make money that means their busniess models are flawed, not that Linux is flawed.
It is really an insult to the intelligence of many brilliant people to assume that the Open Source programmers will never manage to produce something "user friendly" (like if Windows was, all those "Windows for Dummies" or "Learn Office in
24 hours" books are telling the real history: MS products are also difficult to use).
Dismiss this thing as mostly nonsense. It has some marginal value for any company that
wishes to make money with Linux in the user's desktop. For anybody else it amounts to little more than a rant written by somebody that is angry at an incompetent IT person in its company.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are far too many applications companies who have a vested interest in a vendor neutral operating system. They all know that Microsoft has totally taken over the desktop and that they are slowly infiltrating the server market. And since Microsoft likes to bundle applications together, they slowly drive companies like Oracle, Sun, and IBM to the periphery.
I'm certain that if any of those companies could have Microsoft's dominance of the O/S, they'd jump at it in a heart beat. But since they know that won't happen, having a standard that nobody dominates is a far cry better.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Go down to the seashore and declare a war against the sea. Bill did that just as the tide began to recede, so it looked as though he was winning. But after a while, you realize that how matter how much you kick at the waves, it has no effect.
It's a waiting game and we don't have that long to wait...
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
If you're talking a 50 year outlook, then *surely* there will be something mucb better than Linux by then? Linux is and has never been the pinnacle of computing technology. Even Linus freely admits that.
> Maybe Windows will stay ahead of Linux forever... but that will take a lot of running from a horse that will surely get tired.
And Microsoft has to run with a very heavy load on its back: profitability.
MS has to develop and sell Windows in ways that maximize their share prices. Linux developers are bound only by what they actually want in an OS.
Ultimately, profitability is in direct conflict with consumers' interests, so over the long haul the game would seem to be stacked against Microsoft.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The Red Hat techie who erased her files was irresponsible and stupid - you don't win people over by switching them without consultation, and particularly not by erasing people's data. However, it's unlikely that this would ever happen outside a Linux-only culture, so it's hardly applicable to the rest of the world. One idiot does not make a trend...
Linux evangelism needs a lot of work on subtle and effective techniques (as opposed to flaming), but this is not really a good example.
The biggest stimulus to Linux on the desktop is Microsoft's recent squeezing of its installed based for more revenue through changes to its licensing model - there are several local government and police organisations in the UK that are going to save millions of pounds through switching to Linux.
Another point to bear in mind is that although Microsoft controls the American desktop market and to a large extent the market in other western democracies, most of the people in the world do not live here.
That leaves a very large market unexploited. While it may be difficult to imagine your average camel driver as a computer owner, it was even harder 30 years ago to imagine the average American as a computer owner.
At some point, international aid agencies are going to start distributing simple inexpensive computers to thirdworld villages. If the Linux community is alert, they'll see that these machines are running Linux, and it shouldn't be a hard sell. Linux will run on very inexpensive hardware, is free, and even more important, Linux users are not charged for upgrading their systems in the way that Windows users are.
The consequences of developing a base of users several billion strong could be enormous. Bright kids are just as likely to be found living in mud huts as in gated communities, and if Linux recruits these kids into the Linux development fold, they will vastly outnumber the developers in the Microsoft camp. The most important asset in the OS wars is sheer brainpower. Microsoft may soon be overwhelmed by a tide of thirdworld coding geniuses.
So, Linux zealots... join the Peace Corps and spread the Linux meme to the world.
Now keeping this in mind, when you see such a person zealously proclaim that The Gimp is superior to Photoshop for graphic arts work...
:) * End of rant *
First, I know a professional graphic artist, and the problem he has with the Gimp is mainly the UI. I'd imagine any "zealot" who recommends the Gimp is probably a fan of GTK and has no trouble getting around. Sorry, I don't use either program so I can't really can't elaborate. Second, how many people actually own Photoshop? Everyone recommending Photoshop is completely ignoring the fact that it costs hundreds of dollars. Maybe because no one pays for it? Hardly a fair comparison. It's funny how many people use Windows 2000 as their home desktop (and recommend it) yet did not pay for it. My theory is that it's a close second to Photoshop as the most pirated program. Folks, cost matters and should be part of your final decision. If someone can save hundreds of dollars by using the Gimp, then maybe they just might want to get used to the UI. Don't just toy with gimp for 30 seconds and say "ugh, I can't stand this. Time to reboot back to my pirated Win2k and Photoshop". Give it a chance.
Phew.
B: Bah! I don't _need_ to go to sites that that! F**k em!
Then I realize that "B" isn't someone who uses computers.
And what is a person supposed to do then? There are certain sites that you can't access if you're using a Mac. Should the person just throw the computer out and get a Windows box? People use what they use.
yes. Microsoft has won. Definitely. And the war is over. Anyone can see that. They won that war. But Linux was not their enemy, DR-DOS was.
The problem is that the market is saturating and Microsoft cannot compete with Free Software (or Open Source, for that matter) as this futher develops. They will HAVE to charge subscription licenses, while we do not. So this war is not over so much as not begun. Both sides are mobilizing, but shots have yet to be really fired yet.
This Wired article is pathetic. If he really is a former Red Hat employee, I would think that he would have some concept that Open Source is not a singlular business any more than proprietary software is. Open source can go every direction at least as well as proprietary software can. It is not a business, it is a business model.
If we substitute "Proprietary Software" for "Open Source" everywhere it appears in this article, we can see how truly insane his point of view is. Should "proprietary software" companies all focus on building server-side software? What makes is appropriate that a much more diverse group of developers similarly restrict themselves.
Again, have we lost? No. We have not begun to fight because the time is not ripe.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The perception of some silly "war" is in itself part of the problem.
I like Torvalds' take on it. Just work on what you're working on -- make it better because then it'll be more useful to YOU, or your friends. They say in business that one of the surest ways to fail is to be always watching the competition. It turns you into a follower. A true leader, be it a CEO or an OS, works on making the best product possible. Though he's cognizant of the competition's moves, he doesn't make them his preoccupation, because then he'd be thinking about what THEY'RE doing, not what HE'S doing.
Mr. Torvalds gets this. Most here don't.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
I expect "Linux" will not be "Linux" in 50 years or at least not the OS we use today. Linux is an evolving OS. The kernel is becomming more robust and the applications on top of it are becomming much better. It also has something few other OS's have at the moment: A large *community* of developers and users who have a personal AND commercial interest in seeing it thrive. Remember that when MS was 10 - 11 years into the PC OS bussiness, they were still peddling DOS and windows 3.1. Linux has had a much better progression when looked at that way.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Imagine you worked at a company that had standardized on Windows for the desktop, and you went to the helpdesk because you couldn't get your KDE themes on your Linux laptop to work. Would you be surprised when the help desk folks simply formatted your hard drive and reinstalled Windows?
If you are going to use non-standard software, then you are going to have to support it yourself, that's how every helpdesk I have ever heard of works. Now most aren't pricks about it. They wouldn't simply format the drive and tell the user to lump it, but they wouldn't help her out either.
Users get stuck using software that doesn't do the job very well but is the "standard" all of the time. Why should RedHat be any different?
Besides, switching your OS because the spell checker doesn't know the correct spelling of "web site" (which was the example the article gave) is ridiculous. Especially if you are the web master. Geez, if your webmaster doesn't know how to spell web site, then you truly are screwed.
Besides, when preparing text for a web site (especially one that would be serving a lot of Linux users) you don't need a word processor, and you especially don't want to be using MS Word. Imagine how the "real" webmasters felt having to pass all of this lady's text through the demoronizer so that it would work with Netscape. And she wondered why they formatted her hard drive. A real BOFH would simply have allowed her to post stories that would be full of '?' for many of her users. Someone should have set up Emacs for her so that it would automatically load flyspell and told her to write her columns in plain text. Using Emacs for this sort of thing is no harder than Using MS Word. In fact, it would be easier.
Besides, I haven't used Applixware for a while, but it's spellchecker worked fine for me (4 years ago). The whole premise is bogus.
Either way, you can't expect the helpdesk to support non-standard software, and you can't expect RedHat to standardize on MS Word.
I mistakenly equated configuration/installation with use. I apologize. It's all those years of working with windows boxes that have blurred that line for me, sorry.
Go Lakers!
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
The thing that made Windows 3.0 great for it's time was that it offered so many things in one easy to use package. Microsoft hasn't forgotton that lesson. They could bundle other people's products with Windows, but then they would have to deal with all the licensing hassles, and be responsible for bugs in other companies software. They've bundled stuff in the past, and probably will bundle some stuff in the future. I'll have to wait until I see it myself before I dedide if they are really forcing thier services down my throat or just making services I may find useful available to me without me having to download or purchase something seperately.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily.
Never heard of this one, but this would really piss off business customers, I believe it when I see it.
Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software.
SUN shares a lot of the blame on this one. If the JVM isn't exactly what SUN wants from it Microsoft would spend years in court. When two giants like SUN and Microsoft squabble, the users usually get screwed. Microsoft should make it clear that their extensions to Java are extensions, but SUN wasn't exactly playing fair either.
Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
Unless I misunderstand something the same activation code you used the first time will work when you reinstall. You can even upgrade several pieces of hardware. You just can't install it on a significantly different PC thant the one you first installed it on without proving you own it.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are complaining about Microsoft. Thera always are. A lot of these same people would bitch about Microsoft XP if it were a near perfect product. I've become numb to all the bitching and moaning. CIOs are blaking at the changes to the volume licensing, because it looks like it's going to cost them more. Microsoft appears to be yielding to the pressure, and those plans may be changed to make CIOs happier.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I don't like to spend a lot of time patching my computer, or dealing with compatibility issues. Because of this I buy quality hardware and don't use beta drivers if I can avoid it. I use my home computer mostly for games, and its simply a lot easier for me to keep a windows gaming system running well than a Linux one.
For web servers it seems Linux is the one that requires less patches and is simpler to keep running. Maybe that's why Linux does so well in that market.
It's real simple for me. I value my time at higher that the price the Microsoft software cost me, and Microsoft's software suits my needs better. MacOS might be more appealing if the hardware weren't so expensive, and more games were available on it. After dealing with Linux on a Mac at work, I wouldn't recomend it to anyone who isn't very familiar with Linux. Linux on a PPC is still needs some time before it becomes a mature platform.
I agree. The tech was an idiot. Changing someone's OS, even if the software is unsupported is amazingly stupid, and almost criminally inept. He deserves to be fired.
But his actions are completely irrelevant to the meat of the argument. That doesn't mean that RedHat's help desk should support MS Word, and more importantly it does not mean that Linux is not ready for the desktop.
In fact, it illustrates how far Linux has come in a relatively short time, and how ridiculous the author's assumptions are. Applixware was really the only useable Office suite when I started using Linux, and now there are several Office suites that are much better. Saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because Applixware sucks is like saying that Windows wasn't ready for the desktop because WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows was so bad (after all Word for Windows was great). If Applixware doesn't cut it Linuxers can easily use OpenOffice, Abiword, or KWord, and if you don't mind using commercial software you can use WordPerfect. All of these will happily teach you to spell web site.
I strongly suspect that Russ Mitchell's whiney apologia for failure wouldn't have had a prayer of seeing print if he weren't -- let's see, isn't it brother-in-law of the managing editor?
Anyhow: Mitchell was one of the lightweights brought aboard as part of the short-lived San Francisco Web operation. I suspect he was with Atomic Vision, the Web design house, when Red Hat acquired it and then tried and failed to get them to produce useful work: Wide Open News started out fairly pathetic, and never got better. And for that botched job, Mitchell got a hunk of San Francisco real estate? Hmmpf.
Speedie needed to use Microsoft Word because the Linux word processors at her disposal were saddled with spellcheckers so abysmal they caused more problems than they solved, skipping over misspelled words and offering bizarre alternatives for words spelled correctly.
Such drivel. Even the system's built-in ispell utility provides excellent spelling checking.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000.
This is of course the time-honoured pastime of playing games with numbers. He's almost certainly quoting some uncredited source (if any) on preload sales, which tells you nothing at all about the amount of Linux actually in use on desktops.
PC makers are concluding that consumer Linux is too small a market to mess with: Dell Computer recently dropped Linux from its desktops and notebooks.
Actually, Dell never did support Linux in any meaningful way: You even had to pay a sizeable premium to get a Red Hat preload, compared to getting the much cheaper bundle with Win32 crud and then loading the Linux distribution of your choice. Smart people did the latter. All that's changed is that Dell dropped a basically worthless configuration option, and simplified the conversation scripts that their telephone support people are allowed to follow. And guess what? The number of Dells with Linux on them, despite vendor neglect, continues to climb.
The charge is obligatory in this genre of article, but, honestly, the place you hear the overwhelming share of anti-Microsoft ranting is from that company's captive user base, not from those who've eluded its grasp.
A decade later, Linux is lauded as a technical success. But as a business, it's a flop.
Notice how, here, he completely changes the subject of conversation. The article was purportedly about why Linux cannot "win the desktop" (tra la), but now he's talking about the fortunes of companies. Not the same discussion at all. (Probably, the unstated assumption is that development of worthwhile software requires well-funded companies devoted to them. Which is not obviously the case.)
What if all the effort that's gone into writing desktop drivers that peripheral outfits don't care to support were redirected toward drivers for corporate environments?
There are no such thing as "desktop drivers". This passage is gibberish -- but it's obvious that Mitchell is entirely clueless about the technology.
Linux has been on the industry's radar screen since the mid-'90s, yet the vast majority of applications available for Windows and Mac don't exist for Linux.
The trick when you're making a non-sequitur argument like this is to carefully avoid stating it explicitly, but instead only imply it. Then, people probably won't notice that you've just pulled a fast one.
To wit: Mitchell is implying that the only way productive and useful software comes into existence for Linux desktops is to be ported from Win32 or MacOS. Which is, of course, completely false. But he's preaching to the choir of people who've never heard of any other software, and who refuse to believe that such software exists unless they see it shrink-wrapped on the shelf at CompUSA.
I would wager good money that, in the year that Mitchell impliedly attempted to use Linux, that he made no effort at all to truly attempt to acclimate himself to the thousands of packages that Red Hat's IS Dept. undoubtedly handed to him on a platter. Instead, I'll bet he sat back and whined about how much he wanted back his MS-Outlook, MSIE, and so on, not caring about the security exposure to his company or really anything else.
[Michell has a passage where he complains about alleged lack of hardware support.]
You'll note that Mitchell's idea of where to look for hardware support is, invariably, to visit the manufacturer's Web site. Consider: A full year of working for a Linux company, and it never dawns on him to start with the Linux Documentation Project or with Google. Simply amazing.
Nontechnical users continue to have a hard time installing Linux.
Guess what? Non-technical users continue to have a difficult time installing Microsoft operating systems, too. But I'll bet that Mitchell has never actually installed any OS in his life. He probably thinks he has, harking back to the day that he put his name and S/N into a preloaded Microsoft "welcome" screen, and then (of course) rebooted.
Matthew Butterick, a former member of Red Hat management who ran Web operations from the company's 35-member San Francisco office, disagrees.
Right: The Atomic Vision Web weenies are clearly expert on OS technology and strategy. {cough}
Frankly, KDE 2.2.x strikes me as a good bit easier for naive desktop users to learn and become productive with, than are Microsoft Corporation's messy and inconsistent desktop offerings. But Mitchell and Butterick's yardstick is, predictably, people like themselves who will settle for nothing other than exactly what they're already useful, and will whine until they get it.
Serious technical issues must be resolved, the biggest of which is scaling.
Yet another subject in which Mitchell is clearly out of his depth. Scaling can occur in any of several ways, not just the SMP approach Mitchell discusses briefly. In the latter area, with the 2.4.x kernel's ability to scale well to around eight CPUs on a motherboard, Linux has surpassed all but a couple of OSes, without the sluggishness on uniprocessor systems typical of, say, Solaris. But one can also scale by switching to faster CPU architectures, or through one of a couple of different varieties of clustering. And guess what? Linux is a leader in both areas.
Gartner's Weiss understands Linux's appeal to IBM.
It's not surprising that Mitchell digs up quotations from Microsoft Corporation's chief shills in the IT industry, Gartner Group. (It's usually analyst George Weiss, these days. It's unclear where the formerly ubiquitous Rob Enderle has gotten off to.)
So: You won't learn anything about Linux from this article, but Red Hat's early closure of its San Francisco Web office becomes suddenly much clearer.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
The reason why the war has not begun is that the marketplace is changing. Microsoft's business model has historically been based around the idea that if they sell lots of copies of the software they can cut their prices AND provide greater profit. I am not bashing Microsoft here-- this was their greatest innovation and without it there might not be ANY open source software. Certainly the Intel platform would not have gained the ubiquity it did without a common OS marketed through a company that is not tied to a single hardware vendor (as is IBM).
/. crowd). So Microsoft will have to go to subscription licenses in order to maintain revenue.
This market has been immensely successful but it only works when people are buying software regularly. This is breaking down as the hardware market saturates (and few people actually upgrade their software regularly outside of the
In other words, past performance is no guarantee of future profits.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP