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More Linux Predictions for 2004
An anonymous reader writes "Experts, shmexperts - it's time for the Linux community's own predictions, felt the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine. Prognostications in their Jan 2004 round-up cover media players ('turning your phone into an iPod will be hot by the end of 2004'), IPOs ('Of course, LinuxCertified, Inc'), and MS ('Microsoft will start an intensive campaign to promote their Longhorn technology as Linux standards compliant') - that last is one from Samba's John Terpstra." The original story was back in November.
Sun and IBM will be considered the biggest Linux players by the end of 2004, and that Linux will be installed on Mac like numbers of corporate desktops (corporate not techy).
I also predict the return of thin-clients to the corporate environment, especially in large outsourcing contracts.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Linux, for me, peaked in usability/reliability in 1999. It's still quite useful, but I began experiencing many more compatibility problems since that point.
I have a video card whose driver is closed. I've got multiple peripherals that are only partially implemented because manufacturers for some reason are reluctant to release information to developers. It's great as-is, don't get me wrong, but participating on the Internet has gotten much harder as everybody decides to go proprietary and tug in different directions.
For example, Flash runs slower on Linux; so slow that it causes the sound to go out of sync (related bug that also seems to bite some Windows installs: this applet and those coded like it have audio that is too quiet). Java is still a real pain to get working right. Maybe the greatest thing that's happened this year is Mozilla/Firebird, but I'm running it without add-ons!
I believe only great things are to come, what with Linux having reached 2.6.0, and greatly appreciate all the developers have done for it. Now, I think it'd be nice if others began to support it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
2004 will be a year for delivery-on-promise and return-on-investment. The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged. Fortunately, linux will continue to leverage huge cost benefits, huge mindshare benefits, and a rising tide of anti-Microsoftism. that said, lofty valuation for RedHat and Novell will likely come into question sometime soon.
Seen Google's new logo?
I think the general uncertainty in the market will prevent 2004 from being any more the Year of Linux than 2003 was. Not to say there wasn't any growth in the last year or that there won't be more this next year.
I certainly think that Microsoft sending out numerous free copies of Small Business Server 2003 shows that they are taking Linux much more seriously than previously. And I think when we hit 2005 and companies have to make a big decision either way that if the Linux offerings by then for the small shop and desktop have improved their UIs so that virtually anyone can setup Linux on their current machines as easily as or more easily than a Longhorn upgrade, THEN you will see the mass migration.
FWIW...
... hired by Microsoft. RMS and ESR will join the SCO legal team. Bill Gates will get even fatter. Steve Ballmer will resign from MS and join some wicked monkey-dance group.
slashdot.org will be bought by Fox News. CowboyNeal will become a Fox News Anchor.
The world will collapse.
- Mandrake 10
- SuSE 10
- Slackware 10
- Fedora Core 2
- Lindows 5
- Gentoo 2004
- Knoppix 4
- Debian 3.1. Ooops, thats delayed until 2010
:)
Desktops- Xfree86 4.4
- Xouvert
- KDE 3.2
- Gnome 2.6
- XFCE 4.1
- More Boxes
Applications- Mozilla 1.6
- Mozilla bird collection
- OpenOffice 1.2 or 2.0
- Nvu
- Evoloution 2
- Gimp 2
- KDevelop 3
- Mplayer 1.0
Look forward to these, I know I am waiting for Mandrake 10, I am currently trying out the new snapshotAs far as hotkeys, why would you want to standardize them? I can define any key to do what I want currently with my distro (SUSE). Different people work in different ways. Why restrict them to what you think should be standard.
Your "frequent tasks" comment doesn'r provide any examples, but you could look back to hotkeys to provide solutions.
tar -zxvf is now automated by a tool called 'swaret', which is an apt-like utility, that downloads/decompresses the tarball, and then work's out dependencies, and download's anything you need. There is pkgtool for tarballs in the slackware format, however it doesnt dependency check.
-Adam
#!/bin/csh cat $0
I think we're on the brink of the collapse of Microsoft's office suite monopoly. There's a lot less lock-in with office than there is with windows, so it's much easier for people to switch to open office.
Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.
I think that microsoft is making one of the biggest mistakes in its history in the way it prices office. The strategy seems to be aimed, as near as I can tell, at keeping corporate revenues high while allowing MS to cut prices for low end consumer machines.
A corporate workstation with xp pro and office pro pays microsoft almost 3x what a consumer user with xp home and works pays. I don't think that reflects costs or utility to the customer.
The most useful part of what people pay microsoft for comes from xp home -- it gives you the ability to run the huge library of windows software, access to the huge array of hardware device drivers, and core networking tools. What you get, for the buck, from jumping to xp pro or adding office on to the back, provides a lot less utility for each dollar spent.
If you decide that the corporate market can bear substantially higher prices than the consumer market, and if you notice that the main differences between a corporate user and a home user is office, then loading up the costs on the office side makes sense. I think that's what they're doing, and I think it's a fundamentally unstable pricing scheme.
So I predict that we're going to see corporate workstation users going with xp home and open office. A lot of computers that have been sold with $375 worth of microsoft software on them will now be sold with $94 worth of microsoft software on them.
MS-Office still makes sense for a lot of people. If you run exchange server, and want to use outlook as a groupware client, it makes sense. Excel users who earn a lot are going to get the spreadsheet they know and want, no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet. But those types of users don't add up to a monopoly.
If the office monopoly begins to crack, it will be a really big deal. It will be a decline in a core microsoft business, and will suggest that perhaps the best days are behind them. And it will be the result of an open source project.
Windows to linux is a very wrenching change, in a million little ways. But MS-Office to Open Office is a lot more doable.
I think that's where MS's empire will first start to crack.
...Steve Ballmer gets drunk and decides to open source all of Microsoft's products.
It looks normal now, but I assume you mean the 2004 new year's image that has now been archived with the other holiday logos.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Which distributions will show the greatest growth in 2004?
I was surprised that Mandrake didn't make the list. Mandrake in my experience is one of the easiest distributions to install and use and has made some impressive contributions over the last year (9.2, MandrakeMove). Still I have to admit I haven't tried SUSE so maybe I'm missing out on something...
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley
Are you sure you installed it correctly?
Our brainy heroine and penguin loving paralegal babe, PJ at Groklaw, posted an article covering some New Year's trend spotting. Some of the goodies:
/., but I like the compilation of them as a converging threat to Microsoft's paradigms that may cause significant rethinking in 2004.
:-)
1. Invester's Business Daily makes up its Top 10 Tech Stories of the year without mentioning Microsoft in any context.
2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.)
3. The example of Smart Displays, where per-user licensing inhibits even Microsoft's innovation, as cited in a Register article:
"The final nail in its coffin was Microsoft's absurd decision to kow-tow to the tin god of its licensing agreements. If you took your smart display downstairs, nobody in the den with the computer could use it. Single user licence, repeated Microsoft marketing droids. 'We can't compromise our standard licensing policy."
4. From the counter example of what can be, in the MagicBike project of the Parsons School of Design, PJ muses: "The idea is, when everyone gets to play, innovation is the result. Innovation doesn't come from money or walled-in projects, although money can help implement ideas. Innovation comes from people, and as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, talent can show up simply anywhere, where you least expect it. The lower the barrier to entry, the more likely you are to get wonderful ideas. It's one reason I keep it possible to leave anonymous comments on Groklaw, despite the down side to that."
5. Vince Cerf's vision of the ubiquitous net is cited, reaching even to other planets.
PJ concludes: "Yes, [Microsoft] must adapt in order to be part of the future. I think it's a given that no one wants a wireless product that can only legally connect to one PC predetermined during setup. Not after somebody sent the mayor an email from a bike in Union Square station in NYC. Or even read about it. Once you have the concept and you see what is possible, you know what you know, and Brand X doesn't work for you after that. Like the song says, there's nothing like the real thing."
I know most of these points have been previously featured on
Besides, I think I have a crush on PJ...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
What Linux standards ? How many differnet "Linux" distros are compliant with these standards ? what are they ?
Furthermore, how would it benefit Microsoft to tout that "longhorn is compliant with xx". Microsoft already has source level compat with much free software via the Services For Unix Interix SDK. Windows can be an NFS client or server with SFU. CIFS interop between linux and windows could be better I suppose, but my feeling is that samba needs to move upwards, and microsoft has little incentive to move downward to acheive this.
I guess i'd just be curious to know where this statement came from. It sounds mostly like a "wouldn't that be nice" without a lot of thought behind it.. like an emotional victory rather than something of technical significance..
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Usabilty is also good. There are some fancy advanced features, many of which have been introduced to windows to compensate for other flaws, and some of which are geniunely useful. However, most of these just lead to potential confusion when dealing with an average user. For instance, if a gesture opens an application, then the user must be careful not to make that gesture. Anyone who has worked with casual users know the importance of not overloaded the system with redundant features.
Which leads to three important conclusions. First, most users do not want to do installations at all. like Windows and MacOS, *nux machines must be already pretty much set up at the factory, and only require minimal setup by the user. This is hard to do right now due to lack of *nix demand and MS licensing, but, as Sun has shown, it can be exploited. It is not that installation is hard, it is that it is required at all.
Second, *nix has to be usable by people who now use windows. The basics have been in the marketplace for 10 years, and are largely implemented. The bells and whistles are good, but cannot be confusing to the new user.
Third, corporate is the taget. Many people get thier experience from corporate. Many people get thier tech support from corporate. Many people get thier software from corporate. If the office runs *nix,it is much more likely the home will as well. If the home can buy a machine that already has *nix installed.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
*sigh* Yet another post claiming what Linux needs to be and where it needs to go, seemingly without understanding the seperation from Linux and the desktop.
/. ideallists telling it what and where it should be.
"First, the linux installer must be as easy as windows."
I suggest you try actually installing RedHat or Mandrake compared to Windows. Windows installer is not anything ot be proud of. If you really want to see the example of how an installer should work, try letting Lindows just do it for you. Apart from looking much better than the windows installer, all these installers provide more flexibiliy while retaining an even more user friendly install that Windows. Gentoo and Debian and the like aren't made for being easy to use, basing your idea of a Linux install off of these just shows that you either don't know what is out there or are just trolling.
"Second the linux desktop has to surpass Windows XP in usability"
Again, this is not something that Linux needs to do, because it has already been done. I find my fluxbox desktop infinately more usable than a Windows desktop (or a gnome or KDE desktop for that matter).
A standardized hot-key interface already exists. It's pretty much the same as it is in Windows. Alt-first letter of the menu item. Some people choose not to implememnt this in their applications, same goes for the Windows community.
There already are programs to launch programs or perform other tasks using gestures. Take a look at xstroke. It doesn't come as default in a distro, because most people don't use gestures. This includes advanced users. A great deal of us Linux users try to use the mouse as little as possible, as a keyboard is quicker and more precise, and with customizable hotkey functionality can pretty much make your rat obsolete, which is a perfect reason NOT to force any standard hotkeys. Why include stuff only a few people are going to use? Just because it makes you happy and might impress a PHB who will still never use that functionality? Gesture users are a definate minority. I have yet to use the gestures plugin I downloaded and installed for Firebird, even though I took the time to customize my gestures.
If these are thing syou truly beleive Linux "needs" to become successful in your eyes, then build your own damn distro. Quit screaming that Linux's "needs" are identical to your own, because they are not.
All Linux "needs" to do is stay open and free in the same spirit it has always been, and the community will tailor Linux to suit their needs. It sounds like what you want is a free and open Windows. Linux was and is not created to replace Microsoft Windows, it has it's own goals which it will complete in its own time, and is doing fine without the 20000
Sorry for the rantings, but every time a comment like this comes along it boils my blood. Linux in my eyes has far surpassed Windows in every arena except for gaming, and the blame there lies with Game Developers, not Linux. Yes it took me some time and effort to get my ultimate desktop, and no matter what, it will take individuals time and effor to get the ultimate desktop, because it's a very personal experience. If you just want something that's standardized across platforms, pick a distro and a desktop and stick to it, but you will always have to make sacrafices.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Open Source, on the other hand, works according to another economic model, one which is not limited by profit-loss ratios and ROI. If you have people interested in it, you can create an internationalized version of a package for any audience. Now, there are still complicated technological issues (such as some of the really complex scripting systems in many of the smaller markets like SE Asia), but once we get past some of the difficult hurdles of creating truly flexible font and glyph servers and text rendering systems, we will see Linux and FOSS expanding into places where MS cannot hope to go. True, these won't bring in gobs of cash for Linux developers and ISV's, but I think we will see steady progress made. We will soon see Linux as the foundation for technological, and ultimately economic freedom for the majority of the world's governments and citizens.
Your Servant, B. Baggins