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Cringely's 2004 Predictions
somethinghollow writes "Cringely's 2004 Predictions are out, and he makes a very interesting claim concerning Linux: 'The SCO debacle has created a crisis within the Linux community. They pretend that it hasn't, but it has. This will come to a head in 2004 with either the development of a new organizational structure for Linux or the start of its demise. Linux has to grow or die, and the direction it takes will be determined in 2004.' With a claimed 70% successful prediction rate, you at least have to listen..."
1. The PS2's VU was pretty hard to write software for, but who is winning the market right now?
2. Nintendo have not announced what proecssor they are using, so how can it be the Cell processor? Who said that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft were releasing now consoles this year? At this time, they are all gunning for 2005.
3. Apple are not going to release flash iPod's, instead they are going to release HD based iPod's with 2 or 4gb capacity. This is a solid rumor.
4. Apple have made no announcement of how many G5's they want to sell, so anything is not what they are hoping.
5. Chances are the G6 will be released next year as the Power5 is being released next year.
6. Linux die? How? It's not a company, its a conglomerate of programmers. It's marketshare is rising, not falling. Case in point, OSS such as Apache is only growing in popularity.
7. How is Microsoft continuing on their normal ways a prediction? It's a fact.
8. Walmart are going to have some serious issues with their online music store simply because its not easy to use. I agree that Apple at this rate will not be in the lead though.
9. The Burst case is interesting, but I can't see Apple and Real being punished if Microsoft loses/or buys Burst.
All up a rather silly set of predictions that is all too vague or missing facts. I can see why he gets 70-80% success.
I think what he means is either more corprate structure or less corporate structure.
For example, currently driver support in linux is horribly broken. Worse yet, it is horribly broken *by design*. The kernel developers refuse to freeze a driver api for the kernel (like MS did with win95/98/me and win2k/xp) or make a DDK (to my knowledge) instead changing the api every major release and sometimes on point releases. They have a point -- doing so encourages the development of open source drivers instead of binary only drivers. Unfortunatley this is one area in which corporate interests might superceede the interests of the individual kernel developers. Possible.
Another area we might see is with regards to linux on the desktop. Progressing, yes, but not as fast as it might if - say - sun or ibm decided to make a serious commitment to linux and either extend kde/gnome/x or replace them entirely. If they come up with a desktop replacement that is far better than the current offerings they will win by default, thus placing the future of linux on the desktop in corporate hands, at least for a short while.
I think this is what cringley was getting at -- changing linux to reflect the fact that alot of the development is funded by major corporations now instead of hackers working on their free time.
"As for old fashioned spam, it will continue to cram our inboxes, making a good business for third-party anti-spam products and services while making e-mail pretty much useless for reliable communication. Microsoft will see opportunity here and propose new protocols to replace SMTP and POP3."
Why replace POP3 (and IMAP)? These work fine and are completely separate of the SMTP delivery engine. The smart thing to do would be to replace SMTP MTAs with something that does server-to-server authentication, and leave POP3 and IMAP for the MUAs.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This is just an old trick, popularized by horoscope and fortune cookie writers, applied to the computer industry. There's almost no conceivable course of events during the next year (especially given the certainty of more SCO-related headlines, at least on Slashdot) that couldn't be described as at least provisionally consistent with this prediction. If Cringely provided some analysis or insight, I guess there could have been an interesting point here. But it's really just a throw-away.
As an exercise, review the years to date for Linux. Each year has seen some significant movement towards both growth and death. Lately there have been interesting maintainer changes, which would probably qualify as changes in organizational structure. It's hard to remember a significant period of time during which Linux hasn't confronted something that could be loosely described as a do-or-die challenge. The same could probably be said for most if not all organizations in the tech industry. If Cringely really wanted to make a non-obvious prediction, and this was the best he could come up with, he probably just didn't give it much thought.
When they do that, they would lose probably more than half of their revenue and Bill Gates' and Ballmer's stock would become a lot less worth than it is now.
I predict Microsoft will continue to do selective discounts, or to put it in another way: To offer great rebates to possible defectors while ripping off their loyal userbase.
If I understand it correctly, Wal-Mart's core competency is using its size to negotiate down the costs from distributors and producers. I suspect that if Wal-Mart is offering their music for less, they are paying less to the record companies. The nexus for the agreement may very well be the more restrictive nature of the consumer's use of the Wal-Mart music files. There may even be co-op money for Wal-Mart from Microsoft for promoting the WMA format.
As this is the entertainment business, I'll just point out that when HBO started to look like it could be a success, other companies started movie channels. And within a few years all the major film studios had exclusive deals with the channels for the right to be the first channel to show the studio's releases. Something similar happened when others saw MTV's success and they followed behind. Deals for 90 day (IIRC) exclusivity proliferated between the channels and the record companies. I wouldn't be surprised if exclusivity doesn't begin to appear this year, and not to Apple's advantage.
Cringley makes one of the classic tech-punditry blunders, which is to confuse Linux with an operating system while simultaneously confusing it with a religious movment and/or trade association.
It's none of the above, of course. It's a free software kernal, rolled into many operating systems like Red Hat and Debian, but still just a kernel. Pretty much useless by itself, unlike Free, Net and OpenBSD, which are top-to-bottom OS projects, with a central organizational structure that takes care of everything a user could want or need in their Unix system.
Free Software/Open Source has not one, but two religious movment/trade associations, complete with Famous and Glamorous grand high pooh-bah charismatic heads. Richard Stallman on the one side, and Bruce Perens on the other. Both men and their organizations are pretty much ignored by everyone involved with Linux, save to incorporate their software into the Linux-based OS projects or to toss obscene amounts of cash at them to help them kick Microsoft out of the datacenter. Overall, they're mostly just good for really entertaining flame wars.
Linux will continue to grow unchecked because there is no organizational structure. People are free to take and use the kernel however they see fit, so long as they share the source code to any modifications, so it will wind up in spacecraft microcontrollers and kilo-processor supercomputers, wrapped in the software needed to get the job done.
Linux-based desktop operating systems will put in more effort to be interoperable with each other, though it's unlikely they'll all get together and decide to have someone be their collective boss. That's not neccesarily a bad thing, and coprorate customers will be more comfortable knowing that the organizational structure in charge of their Linux-based OS is "IBM" or "Red Hat" rather than a nebulous organization of hippies and geeks... gives 'em someone to sue if it all goes wrong.
SoupIsGood Food
As a member of the Linux community...
Ever noticed that those who have to say it, aren't?
Pros: "I know a little about computers."
Also-rans: "I'm a computer expert."
Pros: "We'll do our best."
Also-rans: "We deliver quality."
Pros: "I'm OS neutral." (though would probably recommend specific OS for specific job)
Also-rans: "Linux is like a god."
Pros: "Life always picks up and goes on..."
Also-rans: "Linux could be threatened! Everybody should worry about it!"
I'll bet that:
90% or more of what we worry about, in life, doesn't happen.
90% or more of what we hope or dream about, and really work at, happens.
The reason to Panic is not that Linux may be declared illegal itself, but that the Open Source development process behind Linux may be declared to be "unable to ensure the legality/authenticity of the produced IP".
This would not just require replacing the Linux kernel. It would make any software based on the Bazaar methodology potentially illegal and kill both commercial creation and commercial/professional use of such software.