Slashdot Mirror
An Open Source Tipping Point?
jg21 writes "Over at LinuxWorld there's an article arguing that open source will be propelled to market predominance by the same disruptive mechanism that brought Sony, Microsoft, and others to be market leaders at the moment. 'The improbable is possible - leaders have been dethroned in the past,' writes the author, who is also apparently the producer of an upcoming documentary entitled, 'The Digital Tipping Point' to be released in September 2005. The story refers to a corroborating article from South Africa and to Clayton Christensen's Seeing What's Next which backs up this general idea."
I had whiterock networks and luminous networks reps in last week. They were demoing their new oc-48 gear. I made comments with both groups asking why an open source browser with a java plugin was not certified with their webgui. I asked the other vendor why they did not have a client server software for linux or freebsd.
I told them windows was unacceptable and solaris is not what we use. (Although the soft switch uses dual sol servers for the db.)
anyway. complain loudly to these vendors that they
need to support what we use in the data center.
Only a handful of comments and already the site's down to a crawl, so here's the article text:
Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.
Software market watchers are now taking more serious assessments of the penguin versus butterfly competition, as Microsoft matures and Linux continues to put large growth numbers on the board.
The more vocal observers' voices in this choir are typically located outside the United States. For example, Tectonic, an online open source magazine based in South Africa, recently quoted Novell SA systems engineer and business manager Allison Singh as going on record that Microsoft's Windows juggernaut will become an operating system for niche tasks while Linux takes over the mainstream desktop and server roles. According to Tectonic, Singh forecast that users who need specific applications written for Windows only will stick with the OS, but for most other users, the rapidly evolving Linux desktop will become the standard operating system. Here's the link for that story: www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=324.
But wait! Tectonic calls itself "Africa's Source for Open Source News," and Singh, a Novell SA employee, could not be called an impartial observer. Penguinistas might put stock in Singh's vision over a beer, but the kind of market observers who carry weight with Wall Street would never consider discussing open source as a serious competition for the software market incumbent, would they?
Perhaps not in such blunt terms, but renowned business scholars such as Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, the innovation guru, are taking a hard look at the prospects of open source taking serious market share from Microsoft.
In his recent book, Seeing What's Next, which he coauthored with Erik Roth and Scott Anthony, Christensen provides a sober, theoretical framework for circumstances under which companies offering modular open source solutions have a competitive advantage over companies offering the integrated architectural solutions such as Microsoft's Windows franchise.
In a nutshell, Christensen and his co-authors argue that when modular commodity products such as the Linux kernel are "good enough" for the jobs of price-sensitive market tiers, those commodity products are positioned to take market share from integrated solutions that "overshoot" the performance demands of customers in any given market tier, particularly the more price-sensitive lower market tiers.
The Christensen team writes that as companies race to meet the performance expectations of the more functionality-sensitive upper-tier customers, who are willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest, those companies will inevitably innovate ahead of the performance demands of the more price-sensitive market tiers. For customers in the more price-sensitive market tiers, performance of the modular commodity is often "good enough" to win the job bid or close the sale.
Most industry observers are now coming to see that for the average desktop functions, the operating system and the office productivity suite are basically "done." In other words, the market leader has overshot the demands of customers such as schools, governments, and businesses who only need to provide their office workers with basic office productivity functions and Internet accessibility.
It's the Packaging, Stupid...
The secret is out. The value of open source business models is in the packaging - whether you are talking about the value-add of HP's SUSE Linux nx5000 desktop, or IBM's GNU Linux blade servers, or Google and Amazon.com o
apterous.org
Desktop Linux has just published this article: The Best Free Desktop Linux . . . and how to make it better
:)
This is a great article that shows what a Desktop Linux could do. It's a great piece for Linux advocates to forward to people who'd like to switch but think that "Linux is way too hard to install and use".
0$ price it's very hard to beat, I expect that the forces of the economy will swipe MS away as soon that people realize that they could do with Linux the same things they do with Windows (only more secure and cheaper) . Good times ahead
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
I am a consultant with many small business customers. A few are pondering the use of Linux (I charge more for monthly maintenance of Windows systems because they take more of my time). But there are a few obstacles which completely prevent a few of them from using Linux (these are sufficiently small businesses not to have any dedicated servers).
The largest obstacle is that many of these businesses depend on vertically targetted web sites and programs which may not work on Linux. Yes, we could get many of these to work probable with Win4Lin or Crossover. However, the uncertainty and supportability is an issue.
But other clients of mine are already committing to Linux. In one case, we saved $20,000 for a customer in license fees alone, not to mention the support costs in network simplification by using Linux-based VPN appliances rather than an equivalent on Windows. In another case, we have a very successful Linux desktop deployment. In another case, we have a customer thinking about switching so he doesn't have to pay me to swing by every month to run a spyware/virus scan.
It will happen, but slowly.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The XBox, I hope, is Microsoft's way of weening children off of the Wintendo and onto a machine that is intended for gaming. XBox 2 sounds like it's trying to be the all-in-one digital entertainment center. So, either Microsoft is realizing they should focus on things other than their OS, or they're just trying to get a monopoly in a new market. But given that their OS is many, many years behind in terms of security and stability - and always will be - I hope that they start encouraging people to move to better platforms... but I think that migration will happen slowly on its own.
-agent oranje.
I'm sorry to say that Linux will not win over Windows as long as you can't play new games like The Sims 2 or do simple things without opening a console. Yes, I know that DirectX is closed-source and I know that Linux is a very smart OS. But Linux is way to hard to learn and configure. I've tried many times to convert to Linux and everytime I'm missing a game or simply don't want to read the telephone sized FAQ's. Doing simple tasks like changing screen resolution should not involve opening a console and typing in obscure commands. I know I'll get modded down, but seriously Linux guys. Face it, Linux is to hard for normal users to use. Mom users like their puzzle bubble and surfing the web with Mozilla, but as a Joe Smoe user I can only say that using Linux for everyday tasks is still way too hard and I don't want to invest years just to learn Linux when Windows simply work with a click of a mouse.
Strongly disagree. Linux is much easier to deploy than windows. With windows NT, if you make a system image, you can't deploy it on (typically) even a slightly different system or you will get an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error at boot time. I've heard people say that you can use the generic IDE drivers but that doesn't work with all systems, and you will then have to go manually change the ide drivers to suit the new system. With Linux, you can either compile in support for everything, or use a big initrd and use modules, either way your system will come up and "just work" provided you follow some simple rules between machines, like making the hard disk the primary master.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't expect they'll publish any more of Ms. O'Gara's articles. But all the other sites owned by their parent will continue to do so. So the ad revenue will flow.
The LinuxWorld editors tried to apologize, blaming it on the LinuxBusinessWeek editors and mentioning that several LinuxWorld editors threatened to resign in protest. Since they're both owned by SYS-CON, both infact running basically the same site, they're expected to cross publish certain articles.
http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46821.htm
The LinuxBusinessWeek editors on the other hand say they disagree with the LinuxWorld editors about the quality of the article, and that LinuxBusinessWeek stands by that article and look forward to publishing more of Maureen's works. But "We will no longer provide news content to LinuxWorld Magazine's accompanying Web site."
http://www.linuxbusinessweek.com/story/46854.htm
So the ad revenue will still flow to the FUD flingers (parent company), but if the LinuxWorld editors have their way the FUD will stop appearing on LinuxWorld, or they'll resign, or they'll get raises.
Most of this article just extrapolated corporate WishThink. The "inevitability" of the end of MS blissfully ignores the dependence of hardware manufacturers at one end, and the GUI-dependence of users at the other. Nor is the OS a done deal, and most of the "commoditization" of office apps is still Microsoft OS-based, whatever the attractions of OpenOffice/StarOffice.
I can't hammer this point enough: MS has a gatekeeper mentality because it IS the gatekeeper. That is what needs to change. If MS could shoot down the GPL, it would not hesitate to sell an MS shell over a linux core, if it can justify dumping the NT asset. Okay, that's two if's but they're realistic if's. Otherwise, MS will stay put and strong-arm everyone.
What linux needs is shrink-wrapped POS systems. Shrink-wrapped accounting/stock-management. Take out those dependencies and you'll get a huge slice of market share.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
What's the equivalent in Windows? What I've seen in large corporations is using a dozen no-education-past-high-school MCSE certified kids running around to manhandle each machine to install each patch. Yeah, great "centralized system management".
Linux won't become the king. Most PC are bought and used in a large part to play games. Most games are not going to be for Linux because of the driver issues. DirectX games rule the world.