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Bob Young says Linux won't rule the desktop
Wee writes "I just came across this interesting Yahoo interview with Bob Young
in which he says that Linux won't rule the desktop but will instead focus on replacing legacy Unix systems and enhancing Linux's embedded presence. He makes some pretty good points. The oddest quote: "So our opportunity is not to replace Microsoft on the PC. If you've got a perfectly good working PC, why you would go through the angst of replacing it?". Not sure where to start answering that one. My wife (a dedicated Win32 user) liked his car analogy. I need to get her to read 'In the Beginning was the Command Line'..."
Wait, the author is pointing out the fact that the average mainstream user doesn't want to work harder or relearn PC tasks and GUI's?
Friggin' astonishingly original viewpoint.
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I don't think one of the primary goals of Linux should be to replace Windows on the Desktop, but rather to offer an alternative Operating System to individuals and corporations who can't (or don't want to) afford the licensing fees and the cost of upgrades.
~.Evanrude
Complacency leads to regression. If we aren't always striving to make things better, everything will deteriorate. With a strong Linux desktop push, the price of competing software (Windows and MacOS) will drop, features will increase, and everyone will be better off.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Desktop is dead. Microsoft owns it and even they are seeing their sales growth slowing.
The future is in the palm of our hands, literally. Small devices are going to be the key to explosive sales in the coming decade. And who is positioned well here?
WindRiver (though talking to an engineer from a company who did business with them, they have LOUSY developer support)
Redhat (it doesn't hurt to be the leading Linux provider in the world)
FSMLabs (creators of RTLinux. Even if they aren't the integrators, they are poised to be exceptional support)
Microsoft (you didn't think the giant was sleeping, did you?)
Maybe it's the Life of Brian... Yeah, where the mobs of people where following him around, claiming that silly and sensible things he would say where completely something else, in the end not listening to reason? Well.. sounds like the linux community.
hehe, RMS could play the guy who sits in the pit for silence. Well, at least with looks.
Contrary to popular belief (at least here), Linux is just not ready for the everyday person's desktop. While it's true that it is getting there, why not focus on it's strengths, and let Linux grow as an OS where it fits in and is accepted?
Windows works. It may not be perfect, but it gets the job done, especially when the job is pure entertainment. That's why I have a computer at home, and I bet that's why a large majority of home computers are bought. I also have a linux partition on there, but I haven't booted into linux in over a year. I simply have no need for it, and everything I use my computer for can be done without problems under windows.
-Space for rent
Only Nixon can go to China.
Linux is a fine desktop replacement, no worse than Windows or MacOSX. If someone wanted to take on those systems, they needed figure out how to bundle Linux with hardware, attract more developers, and market it. But that isn't even the question.
The real question is: after companies like RedHat have extracted much of the value of Linux and other open source software, where are they going to go? What is their vision for the future? "Replacing X with open source software that magically appears" isn't the answer.
In fact, I doubt that in another 10-20 years, we will even have desktops in the traditional sense, and embedded devices will look very different as well. What kind of vision does Young have for that? Not much, it seems.
No, Bob is absolutely right. I will say this again and again and again, but no one seems to be listening:
The desktop wars are over. Move on to the next thing.
So Microsoft has won the "desktop" wars. So what? Do you really think that in 5-10 years, people are still going to be using bulky beige boxes to connect to the Internet? No, they are going to be using everything from home entertainment consoles to cell phones to PDAs.
Some of you may remember the days when a "personal" computer was a joke. "Computers" were those giant hulking things that took up an entire room and required their own cooling system. As Bob says, "Microsoft did not convince people to unplug VMS from their Digital VAX systems in 1979. They took advantage of a major shift in technology toward the PC, and they became the de facto standard on the new technology model, being the PC."
The shift in technology now is smaller, faster, wireless, and pervasive. The idea of 'turning on' a computer to 'use the Internet' will become old-fashioned more quickly than you can imagine. By the time a majority of people think that Linux will be ready to rule the PC world, PCs will be the passe way to connect to the Internet. Microsoft is already expanding in this field with the XBox and the tablet PC (which, IMHO, is a natural evolution of the computer.) Anything that is wireless is huge right now.
This whole desktop war is silly. Linux is its best when people don't even know or care what OS their products are running. Look at TiVo. Do I care that it runs Linux? Nope, because it works flawlessly and doesn't require me to know arcane command line tools. TiVo rocks not because it's Linux, but because it does its job and does it well. That's the problem I have with Linux zealots -- they want Linux regardless of whether Linux fits the job or not.
Why is it necessary to force people to relearn something? Instead of parroting Microsoft, let's be innovative. Let's put Linux into the greatest, coolest new devices (TiVo, PDAs, cellphones.) Let's look at where the market will be in 5 years instead of being hyper-focused on beating Microsoft today. Otherwise, Microsoft and the rest of the world will move on, and Linux will be left behind.
(More about this in my journal.)
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Think about that for a minute before you answer. Think about where desktop computing is and where it's going before you answer.
Today's desktops are stressing ease of use and wide application arrays more than anything else. Stability is in there somewhere, but MS has gotten pretty darn good with Win2K and XP, especially if you stick to their office suites.
Linux is NOT easy to use. Sure, it may be easy for US to use, but imagine a secretary, an HR guy, or (God forbid) the boss trying to use it on a daily basis. Give them XWindows and they'll be somewhat happy, but even the best XWindows setup pales in comparison the features and eye candy you'll find on Win2k and XP. And before you belittle that, remember who the end user is. You and I may not care for it, but the vast unwashed masses out there DO. They will demand it, and they don't give two damns about how configurable your window manager is. They want a box that's pretty and functional. Linux does not currently fit that mold very well.
What does Linux do well? It's an awesome server. It stays up longer than Ron Jeremy and Peter North combined, and a competent admin can tweak and tune it all over the place for practically anything. Trying to force that into the desktop market is the classical definition of fitting a nice, sleek roung peg into a very square hole.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Linux may one day dominate the desktop, but it will not much resemble the Linux we know today. Do we really want that? I'd love to see Linux succeed and trounce MS, but I don't want it to compromise the core principals that make it so good today.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
RH is not exactly helping to bring Linux to the desktop. I am typing this right now on a RH box and I can easily say that - out of the box - it is not an easy system for a newbie to configure. Where are the GUI tools to set up the resolution, install fonts, set your PATH? Yea, I like this desktop a whole lot, but there needs to be a bit more end-user polish before it goes anywhere. I have looked at ELX and it looks like they have the right idea - maybe RH will see this as a sign to spice up the end-user experience in their OS.
Another thing worth mentioning was the tinge of arrogance Bob Young seemed to show towards the garage-type hacker. Alienating your hard-core developers might not be the best thing to do - but, them again, most of the hard-core Linux developers have probably moved onto other distros.
Someone should point you to the fact that macosx is a real competitor for windows, and that it is wisely not based on Linux (just to remember its based on freebsd) in order to make things have more sense.
Bob Young doesn't say Linux won't be on the desktop, he just says that it won't directly displace Windows. I believe the jist of his argument is that Linux will become more important and Windows will become less relevant as users move away from the traditional desktop and towards the internet... Providing that .NET doesn't win. If .NET wins, then the battle is over, and user choice and value will be the losers.
thank you for your input, bob.
......
it's all about alternatives - if you'd like to use MS products, that's your choice. if you'd like to use your apple, that's good too.
However, if you try to force me to use one of these options ( say, by not allowing me to access certain content unless I'm using an MS blessed application ), I will cry 'FOUL!' (like sending me WORD documents, or blocking my opera browser).
It is our complacent acceptance of MS's evil (yes, unethical is evil) bullying practices that will be our problem.
it's OK to say the MS desktop is widespread - it's not OK to say we should stop other developments. and no one should break other projects.
There's nothing lost - there's only gain.
-m
parseError@yahoo.com
BTW, Linux + Gnome/KDE won _my_ desktop several years ago, and it's OK that my wife is still running the XP that came on her new computer - it works fine for her.
thank-you samba team, KDE team, GNOME team, linux kernel team, those guys that made the original 'configure script', mandrake,
I personally like Linux the way it is. To rule the desktop it would have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It would need to have a standardized interface. This defeats the reasons we run linux. We don't all want a vanilla operating system with Internet Explorer integrated when we are running Netscape or whatever. To beat Microsoft the Linux community would have to change in ways that would not be good for the community as a whole.
Where do people go to get support for Linux? The user forums? Those are all populated with two types of people: the newbies trying to get help, and the uber-geeks that look down at the newbs and loose interest half way through a fix to a problem.
How can people find out what is installed and where is it on their computer? There are ways to do this, but no one has made it easy.
What about uninstalling those programs?
Until the ease of use issue is dealt with, Linux won't rule the desktop.
Time to throw a little karma to the wind.
I don't understand why everyone complicates this so much. If you want to capture the desktop market, then you have to cater to what the desktop market wants. That can be summed up in three words: Easy To Use. Here are a few examples of things that aren't easy to use:
- So many configuration options that you don't know where to start, and need a year's education to finish
- A selection of desktop environments, each with a corp of zealots telling you that theirs is better
- A broad base of information that you have to (a) go out and find on the internet, and (b)search through to find your answers.
- Installations with prerequisites that you have to figure out how to find and install yourself
- User account management
- Video, sound, and network card installations that require you to know the model of your card.
If you're attempting to create an operating system with a broad selection of options, you should remember to include the option to not have to mess with these little details.
Unfortunately, this requires the programmers to figure a few things out for the user, and most of us just don't want to do that. Somehow we're always surprised to find out that the user doesn't want to do our work for us.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
The battle is won, but not the war by any means.
.Net and Microsoft. As long as I know my competitors are sending money to Redmond, I know when times get bad, thier customers...
You are obviously not aware of the poor bastards in our faultering economy that have to deal with the license or upgrade taxes from Microsoft.
IT managers had a taste this year of a slow economy, and when things are bad, the Microsoft tax treadmill on say, 200-300 desktops is a significant piece of money employers would like to use to pay raises, bonuses, health insurance and business opportunities to expand upon. Which, I would like to note, their competitors can't if they have to ship that money to Microsoft.
My entire company in fact, BETS that my competitors will buy into
WILL BE MY CUSTOMERS.
The desktop battle, was won by Microsoft, true, but anyone who says the war is over has never worked in a all IT Microsoft shop in a bad business climate.
The server room battle is now going on, and Linux is winning this battle. Once Linux is firmly entrenched in the enterprise server room...
THEN we will turn our expertise and knowledge and better value all around, towards the desktop.
Uncle Bill and Stevey boy are going to wake up one day and find themselves in a world dominated by Java virtual machines that run everywhere and typically more than not, servers, pda's, cell phones, etc are also running some form of Linux underneath them.
It is already happening.
Those companies that refuse to follow suit will not be able to stay in business against those companies who adopt open source technologies and processes.
Ultimately the new business model for IT is based around people and not hardware or software like it has been for the past 10 years. That is what open source is about.
People/technology not a gadget or a widget.
It is comming, be ready for it.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The real place Linux needs to be on the desktop is in organizations that revolve around Unix.
_ __
I am not talking about the secretaries and the suits. Too many times I have seen programmers and even sysadmins fire up Windoze and then spend the rest of the day inside of a telnet window.
Linux distro folks are missing out on selling Linux to the world of Unix hacks whose organizations simply cannot afford a fleet of Unix workstations. Yes, I know the Sunblades are only $999 but Sun seems uninterested in advertising this fact and most IT orgs already have plenty of PCs so the cost of conversion is nothing.
The last place I worked the corporate IT side told engineering after much bitchin' and moaning that they could use Linux but they would get no support. All the folks programming for the web stuff and the complete systems engineering group went to RedHat.
Right now, I work for an organization about to move both software and systems engineering to SuSE linux the hold up being corporate buy-in.
You might not think this market is that large but think really hard about it. There are many IT groups that use Unix as their primary Server OS. Within those organizations they have many developers and admins who work primarily in those *Nix environments. If there was no market for these groups then companies like Exceed would have died years ago.
_______________________________________________
ACK
Ok, i've said it a few times on slashdot already, and i'll say it again. Get the right tools for the right job. if you're griping about a file manager that allows you to right click on a file with an extension and then perform an operation on it, then download the best filemanager ever, emelfm. You can do everything with this that you can do with explorer and so much more. Christ, stop comparing functions in linux to those in windows, if you have not spent a couple of minutes searching for the tools.
I hated the lobotomized Windows explorer when I actually had Win installed on one of my boxes, and had to replace it with some third party software that I cannot remember the name of now because it was so long ago -- maybe powerdesk or something like that.
Anyway, the point is, that linux can be as friendly as or as esoteric as *you* want it to be. Not like that shite windows, where everything is made for the lowest common denominator -- the dumbass.
And you make it sound as though dropping into a shell is a bad thing. What's wrong with the shell? Don't you want your kids to learn to type fast? And with word completion in almost all of the shells typing commands is downright simple!
edit your profile with the following:
alias packup "tar -czvf"
alias unpack "tar -xzvf"
As long as there is no main stream applications for Linux OS the windows will rule
by mainstream apps I don't mean word processors, spreadsheets, presentation etc
What I mean is accounting applications for small business, proprietary database applications
I work in a small accounting office and would like to make the change however spreadsheets, word processors just don't cut it
I need Accounting apps (Accpac, Simply Accounting, Quick Books etc.), I need information databases (CCH, Carswells) I need tax apps (Taxprep, Taxbyte) and many many more that are only made for proprietary OSes
Till those are available on the store shelves from all the major vendors Linux will never take off in small businesses