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

Competingwith Microsoft Google?

[jaavaaguru]

Are they really competing with Microsoft at this point? As far as I can see Google offer replacements for an increasing amount of desktop software at the moment (Word processor, Spreadsheet, Email, Calendar, Photo management, IM, and various browser integrations such as their note-taking plugin for Firefox. That's a bit more than Microsoft has to offer at the moment.

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.

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:What about when you are offline?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm?

The mozilla team has already talked about Firefox 3's upcoming support for running online apps while offline, as a sort of hybrid, but still within the browser. Just do a search for "web applications offline' and you'll find dozens of articles including how-to sites from tool providers for making Web apps that will function offline right now.

To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

I'm not sold on Web applications. I'm not sold on a strategy of bypassing MS by building everything on top of them. I'd rather see cross platform applications with internet capabilities, or hybrid solutions, that still allow me to take advantage of the benefits of the OS. From a practical standpoint, however, my automatic bibliography formatting service allows me to automatically format bibliography references right now using Google Docs, but I can't use the same functionality in Wordpad or in MSWord for that matter; so in some ways online apps are already allowing me to bypass the limitations of Microsoft's OS.

Re:What about when you are offline?

[nytes]

No internet access while on the subway???

But you're sitting right there, in one of the tubes!!!

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.

Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED!

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm...will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED!

Re:Quick - someone tell Apple that they're DOOMED!

[elrous0]

Now way. Apple can't be doomed. It's been a whole week since someone released an "iPod killer."

took the words right outta my mouth

[JCOTTON]

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead.

I love it (ironic) when some CIO or other bigwig perports to talk for me. Actually, not only is the desktop still not "dead", but on my desktop is a Mainframe running COBOL/CICS/DB2. Still not dead. Not by a long shot.

Hello, world.

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.

Yeah

[crush]

Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are great. They spread non-Free firmware and drivers. Awesome. That's what I call leadership. What's this deal that Canonical is doing with Linspire, Microsoft, Dell and Novell?

Order a free CD from Ubuntu and bin it.

The right step ... will the implementation work ?

[HW_Hack]

This is absolutely the right step for our increasingly connected world - but the devil is in the details as usual.

The desktop isn't dead but its damn stale - what I would envision is a bi-modal operation: if you have wired or wireless access your "desktop" seamlessly includes your "on-line" resources - applications - data files - links - IM buddies - etc. all integrated into your applications - disk volumes, When offline you would have what you have right now. Of course you would need a method to mark certian files as bi-modal so they would reside in a file cache and be available offline - the OS would handle file sync'ing etc. Or a thumb drive could be a file cache

On the flip side where the desktop is really dead (as in "Dead to You" ) --- I could see you carrying a USB thumb drive that launches a mini-linux session and then you connect to the "server in the sky" to access all your docs - email - applications - etc.

Both ideas are step in the right direction for Linux ... just doing "XP the right way" is not a path to success for Linux. The Linux industry is very nimble compared to Microsloth ... lets see what this baby can really do !

No interest whatsoever

[evought]

I have no interest whatsoever.

When I was actively doing business travel, online collaborative apps were a supplement to applications on the desktop, given that the online apps were trustworthy (controlled by my own business). I never had any desire to get rid of local applications, especially since I had to be able to do office work, development and other tasks on the go, with no network access, expensive network access, insecure network access, or unreliable network access. If the "network applications" are downloadable and cached for off-line use, then you have nothing new, that's just semi-automated deployment and update. When it comes to that, externally controlled auto-update is a bad thing in many environments. I want to control when I upgrade, after I know the update is not going to break something. I don't want to log on, find out I can't access an old file, and have no way to restore the previous version of the application. Web services are continuously in beta.

Currently, I have absolutely no need for remote apps. I do all of my work locally and live rurally. Why would I want my applications and/or data externally controlled and unaccessible if I don't have a connection? I have full-featured applications (which would take considerable time to download). I pay for them once (if I have to at all). I have low latency. I can pick and choose which applications I use. I can have multiple versions installed if I need to for compatibility reasons. I control encryption and backups when I need it. What advantage does a "network desktop" get me?

Why bother?

Doesn't seem to slow them down any...

[Kadin2048]

suggests to me that online applications would need to have similar or identical security access to locally installed applications. This seems, uh... possibly problematic.

Oh, come on ... Microsoft's been doing that for years!

Emerging markets...

[MatrixCubed]

FTFA: "The Linux desktop market has been limited to single function devices such as cash registers and applications in emerging markets." I've heard this term 'emerging markets' for so long now, you'd think they'd have emerged by 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).