Red Hat Develops Online Desktop

pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

Comments

Competing with Microsoft?

[Otter]

"To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users," Stevens added.

And therefore they're reimplementing the Windows 98 Active Desktop...?

Re:Competing with Microsoft?

[Bogtha]

Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.

What about when you are offline?

[deragon]

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm? What about when you go to your country house, in the woods? To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

Re:Lemme boot the terminal

[korekrash]

At about 50 cents a gig, I'll stick to speed and security rather than trying to save 500 megs of drive space.

Online services == less freedom

[Wesley Felter]

Storing your own data locally on your own computer and manipulating it with local apps may be "old thinking", but at least it puts you in control. Just when a critical mass of free (as in freedom) software is emerging, Red Hat is talking about services. I suspect it's impossible to make these services free as in freedom.

Google partner?

[PineHall]

... to have discussions with customers and partners and will tackle key technologies on a case by case basis.

They may not end up competing with Google, rather they may end up partnering with Google. Google has a lot of the apps available right now.

Re:Is Red Hat really relevant anymore?

[kripkenstein]

I mean, they do a lot of development, and they are the OSS company most trusted by Fortune 500's, but I think they lost their leadership position to Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.

You're joking, right? I mean, I'm using Ubuntu right now to post this, but Ubuntu are still getting action mostly with enthusiasts like me (and perhaps you). Corporate/enterprise users are virtually all using Red Hat, and Red Hat give them an excellent product (with a quite recent release full of new features).

Re:Competingwith Microsoft Google?

[jbarr]

If only they could work WITH Google to provide the offline client component.

Google's online offerings have matured, and are quite powerful, but there's still the disconnect when going offline. Not until I can work offline and seamlessly integrate/sync when I go back online will it be really effective.