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Red Hat Invades Washington
Paul Coe Clark III writes: "I caught Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, in Washington yesterday and grilled him about the DMCA, the SSSCA, the Sklyarov case and the future of Linux."
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I'm impressed. Very good interview. I thought the most interesting part was about the PC being dead, and the question as to whether or not Microsoft has killed the market. It really is a good question to ask, and I think they are partially responsible. People don't feel the need to buy new machines because the old one does everything they think they want. But that idea ignores the fact that competition is all but ignored. Thank God Apple is doing such great things right now, I think they are the ones who will have higher growth than the rest of the industry simply because they are offering really compelling reasons to upgrade.
;-) but I think that perhaps we need to push beyond what's out there in this space.
I think the other factor is that the machine itself doesn't seem to be a limiting factor anymore, it's the connection to the internet. Most people can't take advantage of their fast processors, because everything these days is focused on the pipes to the network. I've got to give McNealy at least partial credit for the whole "the network is the computer" deal, it's become very true. People seem to just use their machines as emailers, browsers, and muedia downloaders/players. True, all the other stuff like word processing is there too, but the fact that communication has become the real killer app of the industry shows where improvements need to be made.
I think he's right to focus on the devices that need embedded Linux, since those markets will continue to grow through phones, PDA's, and whatever niche devices people will come up with for specific industries. However, to say that the PC is dead is a little shortsighted. It's just stalled and waiting for the bandwidth to catch up.
Speaking of which, I think the big killer app for linux, if someone can come up with one, will be a new, or at least cheap and easy, way of communicating. Apache, PHP, and SAMBA are all focused on this, and they are the apps we always point to as big successes. I mean, the whole movement is successful because of the ability for us to communicate and cooperate to make an OS! Shouldn't the apps really reflect that? Maybe it's that we're all geeks and not so good at communicating (just browse -1 to see that
I don't know, this is all pointless rambling. I'm obviously no better, or else I'd have some actual idea in mind rather than half-baked theories. Still, I believe that the PC is now a tool for communication rather than productivity. The productivity is still there, but it's not the primary purpose any more.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
All OSes are evolving towards the same ultimate endpoint: An embedded control system for TVs.
Somehow, I am disappointed. I had thought that computers had more potential than that.
First off, this comment was moderated as "Funny". I don't think it's funny nearly as much as it's poignant and interesting.
And I'd like to make a counter-statement. I won't discredit Waffle Iron's opinion; it's a valid one that many people share. But my vision of the future of computing is different.
Nowadays, most of the family units with disposable income have a TV and entertainment center in their living room, family room, or den, and a TV in their bedroom. They also have a spare bedroom, office, or a nook in the same room as their TV that has a desk with a computer on/under it. Often, older children still living in the household will have their own TV in their room and a computer under their own desk. Most of the time, the home computer will be used primarily for entertainment, much as the TV is used.
That's a heck of a lot of devices devoted to entertainment in each household. In many of these rooms it would make sense to combine the units, but there are some primary issues that we, as consumers, can't decide on.
The question that needs to be answered is whether we would prefer to have the TV move to the computer, or the computer move to the TV. This is the same as asking whether we want to sit in a desk chair and watch our scheduled content and videos from three feet in front of a 17" screen at 1200x800 resolution or whether we want to sit back on our couch in order to type our e-mail on a 540 scan line CRT.
Time and technology changes all things. Over the next decade, most of these people will replace their TVs for a new one with 1080 or 1200 scan lines. That's adequate resolution for computing. And User Interfaces are much more accessable from the couch nowadays. But I can't ever imagine wanting to watch all of my entertainment from a desk chair three feet from a 17" screen.
In the end, there will be computers and TVs, separate, for purchase by consumers like Waffle Iron, because he represents a market that would buy such products. I represent the market that would buy a unified product, and I believe that my perspective will become more ubiquitous as time and technology advances, so eventually we will see all of our computing technology being built (modularly) into our TVs. I don't find this the least bit disappointing, I see it as an inevitable reality.
Convergence has been an occasionally surfacing buzzword for years now. Its been attempted by shoe-horning a PC in an entertainment center. Its been tried with internet appliances / set-top boxes. Meanwhile the technically elite have been changing the face of entertainment media and attempting to shoehorn better hardware in to their desktops to match. In every case, the interface ultimately fails. And its obvious why - all tasks do not work well with all interfaces.
This is why I believe you've arrived at the wrong conclusion. A "TV" does not make a good computing interface.
The folks at Moxi have taken a step in the right direction with their Moxi Media Center product. It basically becomes a central hub for entertainment media / data. Everything else (TV, speakers, etc) become satalite devices feeding off a wireless link. It even becomes a central hub for your data connection. So how does this solve the "computing from the couch" interface problem?
Moxi has made the first step. TVs will stop being TVs and become remote monitors. Strip out everything else. Slap it on a flat screen - a big flat screen. And then also create smaller versions of the device - webpads. The more personal size for handling email, taking notes, web surfing, etc. A slightly larger (something simular to the new iMac perhapse?) version provides an interface that's comfortable for desktop computing / work. Keyboards, pointers (mice, trackballs, etc), game controllers, and other such peripherals could talk to all such devices to create the right interface for any environment from balancing a spreadsheet to console gaming.
In short, computing (a centralized media server) absorbs all other devices (desktop, console game, TV, stereo, etc). Convergence moves away from the TV. And your experience is defined by what modular components you use to communicate with that central media server.
Not much meat on the bones here. It seemed the interviewer was lobbing softballs and accepting facile replies without followup or pressing any issues. Frankly, I was not at all impressed with either the interviewer or the RedHat CTO answers. He might be brighter than he sounded, but one could not tell it from these interview responses.
I mean, RedHat's not about the desktop, OK? Did this interviewer not know it going into this? Where were the deeper questions about RedHat's working with IBM, HP, Compaq-Alpha-et-al, even Sun in the server space? Where were the clustering, scaling, fault-tolerance, instrumentation (performance and capacity monitoring) questions? No question about RedHat's broken GCC 2.96 compiler and what they're doing to fix it in later releases? This was just a joke, a parody of a real interview. What a shame.