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Robert Young on Linux and Microsoft
Johnny Taporg writes " I came across this article in today's Washington post, where Robert Young talks about Linux's chance of being competitive with Microsoft. He says wait a decade or so. " It's interesting he's saying this, will Microsoft is arguing that Linux is a present day competitor. How trials can so change people's opinions.
My prediction for 2003: Linux: the leading OS in the US...
The way things are changing. Compaq, HP, Gateway will be offering Linux PC Options in 1999. I don't think it's going to take long.
Who came up with that? (Or maybe I pronounce cynics all wrong?) :)
Li- should be pronounced like a long Lee as in Bruce Lee. I have to get back to you with a word for the -nux part. But it's not anything like the ending of unix, that's for sure (as I get the impression from the cynics rhyme).
And the two parts should be almost equally stressed (typically swedish phenomenon). Hard to explain... I thought there were sound clips floating around that could teach you yanks to pronounce it properly
Wonder when we see his loo paper printed on /.
/. should't focus so much on RedHat.
So he speaks against MS, how wonder. He's also exaggerating a bit, only in the other direction than MS. Just old marketing babble. No news for nerds.
p.s.: IMHO
The question you have to ask is how much does the computer industry change in a year or two. If you look back in time and see that M$'s offering before 4 years ago was win 3.1 compared to their offering now you can see large improvements (even if what they offer now is still crap) and wide distribution. And this is just 4 - 5 years! If you try to predict the computer industry even 5 years down the track you WILL be wrong. Linux will gain market share, it may even overtake Windows (more likely yes than no, especially with an easy to use GUI), but to give a timeline on this is moving into the world of fiction.
The only way to predict the future is to make the future into what you want it to be, so rather than prediction lets work on domination.
In a year, when Koffice is usable, Linux + KDE will be
ready for the masses. More and more games will be
ported, attracting more users to Linux. It will take some
more years of exponential growth and then Linux is king
of the desktop.
This is a new one: "Linux's source code -- its equivalent of the Coca-Cola soft-drink formula -- is publicly available"
I've seen a lot of these ham-handed attempts to communicate the meaning of the term "source code" to end users lately. I doubt there's any good way to explain it in under a couple of paragraphs, since source code really doesn't have any good parallels in end user experience, but as critical as communicating the concept is to the future of free software, perhaps some serious effort ought to be put into coming up with a short description for journalists to use.
On the other hand, it might be fun to hit the search engines and see just how many bad analogies we can find.
It would take much less than a decade in law firms
if some people would help me port my application
to Linux.
Its a free, open source legal case management
system, called VirtuaLaw.
Accessed here: http://dunsinane.net/bryan/
Currently only a windows version is available,
however a Linux version is in the works as
databound controls on top of QT are written.
I'd like to see how my site might respond to
the slashdot effect. If anyone wants high
quality legal software (don't know if it runs
under Wine), then please take a look around.
Because when Microsoft started DOS/Win development
there was no Internet to the public. No one has
create a Internet child like Linux before.Perhaps
and probably it all happens much faster than anyone can expect.
Lawyers, of all people, are most likely to not
like the contradiction inherent in GPLed Qt code.
At one time some people may have set out to buy applications, not OSes. However, provided an OS has a decent number of apps for it, people do develop loyalties to an OS and do buy an OS rather than an application.
The human tendancy to justify self is too strong. With computers, this is almost always to an OS rather than to apps. I use Windows. I'm not stupid. Therefore, Windows is a good OS. Etc.
Also, not long ago Amiga and Os2 were very competetive with MS in their respective markets, and the Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer year after year for quite a while. People did not buy and use these systems for a particular app, but for the overall system and its potential, which had to be demonstrated by a few good apps and games, but not buy any killer apps to attract millions of consumers.
You live it the past, but you don't know the past, or the present, it seems. No, you don't have it at all.
Actually, I'd argue that, while Win32 apps may be around for a while, the OS that runs them could change within a very short span of time.
I've never failed to impress a Windoze user with my Linux box, but most are somewhat wary of the learning curve.
Take gnome or KDE, add a very functional future release of WINE and a very simple future installation routine and I think you'll find that most folks could give a damn one way or the other.
All it will take after that is a couple of large vendors pre-installing Linux instead of (or as an alternative to) Windoze.
Think about what percentage of Win95 users never touch the MS-DOS prompt selection on the start menu. Make Linux functional without the command-line, and you'll see a lot more people jump ship.
And what's Young supposed to say? "Yeah we're gonna crush 'em here shortly...just like MS execs said while they were trying to squirm their way out of the anti-trust lawsuit that could knock them down a notch and make my job easier."
Now we've got onto food, an even better one might be a restaurant and a recipe book. You go into a restaurant and order bird's nest soup, Bombay duck, angels on horseback, bubble and squeak, on the basis you've tried it before, and you get something you know you like. (Maybe. I'm picking less-than-obviously-named food here). But you don't know how to make it yourself. (Okay, I've asked restaurant staff before. Sometimes they'll tell you, yes :)). That'd be closed: you know what it tastes like but you don't know how it's done. And if you're allergic to eggs or nuts, you may only find out by er.. getting a bug. Or you have a recipe book, and you find out how to make it. And you can alter the recipe to produce the result you want. A vegetarian version, a kosher version, a low-calorie version, whatever. Pursuing that, I suppose Red Hat, Caldera, Debian, SUSE, Pacific Hi Tech and the rest are the sandwich shops which give you a choice of "Egg", "Egg mayo", "Egg and cress" etc..Or maybe the equivalent of the
food manufacturers in countries where you have to list all the ingredients on the labels. Please, no jokes about where spam, "flavours" of unix, and Neiman-Marcus cookie recipes fit into this; I've only just realised how many food-related catchphrases there are on the net!
Microsoft has been playing us. The halloween documents were clearly leaked deliberately to lend credence to Microsoft's claim that Linux is a real competitor.
We all know what Linux can do, and we know where it's going. We shouldn't let our pride or chauvinism assist Microsoft now.
Linux is a wonderful OS, it's a lot more stable, and it's an easy thing to love. It has lots of advantages of MS.
But at the same time, if you go out into the real world and look at what businesses are doing, it's pretty clear that in many industries, there are no alternatives to Microsoft.
I just bought some screenwriting software (I'm a diletante, not a professional), for example. The package communicates with popular scheduling tools and Avid editing equipment. It's part of a collection of tools that simply don't exist on linux. If you want to write screenplays that other people can work with, there are very strong forces pushing you towards Microsoft. Linux simply isn't an option.
I have a friend in the supermarket business. They have software that ties together their ordering, the database that the checkout scanners use, inventory control, and all the rest. It all runs on Microsoft machines. You can't run a modern grocery business on linux. Your software has to talk to your vendors software, to the scanning hardware, and to the portable bar code readers the clerks use when they check inventory in the aisles.
It's great that word perfect is out for linux, it's a huge step forward. But Microsoft's hegemony is derived from tens of thousands of packages written for almost every industry in the world. If you want to do very generic, middle of the road stuff, linux is starting to emerge as a *possible* competitor. It is possible, technically, to use linux for word processing, but I can't believe anyone who had to supervise 100 typists would want to run linux instead of MS. In the real world, no one does it. Yet. I believe they will, but it's going to take time.
It's easy to sit at home surfing the web and sending email, and to believe that's what computers are all about. There's a lot more diversity than that out there. Microsoft's got breadth and depth that linux can't approach yet.
Now linux works better, it adds features more quickly and more intelligently, and its economics are better. Eventually it's going to win, for the same kinds of reasons that capitalism beat communism. But that took half a century. Microsoft's lead and it's wealth being what they are, it's going to take an awfully long time before they come down.
That whole "pardigm shifts" every six months thing is bs. Legacy apps exert a powerful force in this industry, and they're going to continue to do so. And that force is almost completely MS in direction.
What a lot of people don't realise is what can be achieved when a group of people have a DREAM. Anything can be done! Even a young student from Finland could lead the world into a new computing experience and threaten one of the most powerful organizations on earth!
So forget all this "get back to reality" stuff. Reality is what we make it, and there are a hell of a lot of people out there who have a hell of a big dream vs one or two nerds in Redmond who have a big dream.
One super successful person once said "My only mistake was that I didn't dream big enough".
Do you really think the average Windows user will be readily proficient to set up accounts and groups to protect their (home) systems?
MS has a large installed base, inertia alone will preserve a large fraction. Consider this: AT&T retains 66% of the long distance market.
Another factor to not under estimate, is the stupid, sophomoric opinions of those that think that Linux is their personal toy. Many will be put off, even MS stupidities no not come off as offensive as some (self appointed) protectors.
If Linux can take a major fraction of the corporate server market, (which depends upon other factors than price, performance and reliability) I would be quite satisfied. The desktop will be a much harder sell, unless MS persists in pushing NT onto the unsupported home users, then Apple or BE might be the more logical winners.
Coded in Visual Basic and employing Access database (small installations?).
Are you aware that all version of Access back to 2.0 has a flaw for large tables where a deleted record can cause an edit to be misplaced when some weird conditions are met? Supposedly this has been fixed, but the patch (for Office) has failed for a number of installations. That was weeks ago, has the new patch been released?
My last check of Wine showed VB 5.0 would not even load, so it would have to the exe file of your application that must be checked.
Basically, I am confused on the plans to port to Linux using a closed development tool and database.
I could not fit in partially.
I would like to have an email address to converse with you more directly. If you see this contact me by email.
I have some interest - Herschel
Posted by gruv:
There may be dominance in the server arena, but it will take quite awhile for Linux to replace the 90 percent of wintel boxes out there. Come into reality please. And you can't leave out BeOS and Mac OSX server and consumer OS's...it's not just Linux and Winblows here people....
Posted by gruv:
My company runs on NT and NT alone. We cannot afford to uproot and start using Linux. TIme is money. We have to many specialty applications that won't run on linux from data entry to archiving. We do have alot of IT guys who love Linux and wish it were different. But our WAN is NT and NT it will stay. All of our customers run NT. It would take quite a long time to switch it all over so everyone could talk to everyone else. Face it, Microsoft saw the opporitunity and took it. People adapted well and they made some critical moves to their benefit early on. As much as I can't stand to work on this NT box, there is really no alternative for us and thousands of other companies. Does this piss me off? Does this make me want to throw my computer out the window? Yea, sometimes. But I go home to my computers everynight and relax and not worry about the crap that goes wrong with NT.
I love Linux just as much as the next geek, but the hard cold reality is, Windows is here to stay for a long time to come...pretty lame huh.
Posted by gruv:
there is an accent factor here. Linus's name is pronounced LIH-nus, not like LIE-nus from Peanuts. The correct pronounciation is with the short i. I've even have spoke with relatives back in the homeland, they say the same. WHat you are hearing is Linus's accent.
10-20 years for Linux to become a competitor ?
What a load of crap. I seriously doubt that microsoft's lawyers believe their arguments, but they are correct this time all the same.
Whether Linux takes 2 or 5 years to overtake MS is a worthwhile question. The process is 80% complete already http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm
There will be a dip in rate of increase as early adaptor market reaches saturation, but Linux is nicely into the bowling alley (read "Inside the tornado"). I doubt whether even Linux will make sense on the computers we have 20 years from now (how do you write a kernel for a quantum computer ?).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The Linux growth rate has gone up from 100% to 212%, this year, apparently. I predicted Linux would overtake Windows in 6 years, from 1998, at 100% growth, from Red Hat's 1997 figures. This year's growth, alone, cuts the estimate to 4 from now, which takes it to 2003.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Microsoft is trying hard to make it look like they have a competitor. But be careful what you ask for Billy G, you might just get it. Even MS says Linux is good. It baffles me why there are still Trolls out there who believe otherwise. Linux is nowhere near the desktop, but it is closing in on NT. Once it takes the server market, the desktop will surely follow.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
It's the test sound on RedHat :) Still wonder why people can't get it right, myself. I Americanize it a tiny bit, but only because I feel like I'm straining when pronounced as Linus does (when using the accent.) BTW, a word for the vowel in the -nux part: spooks.
You're missing something here, though.
As more and more vendor support rallies behind Linux, critical mass will soon be achieved and vendors will be forced to write both Linux and Windows versions of their software, especially since Linux is seen as the next big thing.
Vendors will have to consider that they can increase the number of sales significantly by porting or writing for Linux. Once that happens, and Linux can compete more fairly with Windows on the desktop, Microsoft will lose on the subpar quality of their operating systems.
Even with such a tiny desktop installed base, Word Perfect took off (500,000 attempted downloads in one month), because there is a demand for desktop applications for Linux. A demand will create supply, if not from the current large software companies then from somewhere completely new, and new companies will start commanding a growin market share as Linux grows.
Perception is behind us. Linux is almost seen as inevitable, just like Microsoft was. Linux is heading in the right direction, if we can keep the FUD from overtaking us.
Once you fix this, you might want to post a notice back to this forum that it is fixed.
It is also a good idea, if you want people to be able to reach you, to give out your e-mail address broadly.
...Just how many of you know how to pronounce cynics?
hehe..
--
"I am Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Leenooks."
Of course, I still call it Lie-nucks.
Until this interview, I'd always wince at the photos of him wearing that goofy red hat. Now I understand. He's a scary guy the same way the young Steve Jobs and W.H. Gates III were. Hold on tight, folks, and get ready for an interesting couple of years. This is going to be a fun ride.
True, Red Hat Linux is 10 yrs from threatening MS, but by then everyone will be using Debian. :-P
People seem to have the misconception that by applications, one means only Office rip-offs. As you correctly point out, there are hundreds of vertical markets where nothing exists or is likely to exist outside of NT.
I think the reality is, Unix in general is ill-suited as a desktop replacement for Windows. I love BSD, and use it at home and at work, but I can't see giving it to non-techies. If it was ever made easy enough for them, it would have to be crippled so much I would no longer find it useful.
Linux will replace NT in server room functionality - I think NT Server is clearly on the extinction list. NT Workstation will leave a long fruitful life - Win32 is how 95% of users in the world run their day to day apps. Readers:please, don't respond "Use WINE!!" because I will burst out into laughter. No one who has used it would recommend it as an NT Workstation replacement.
I agree with you, but I can kind of see why Redhat wants to play-down the Linux threat to Microsoft. I would envision Linux' success to be more similar to the explosion of the Internet than the rise of Microsoft. For example, look at what Linux was just a few years ago, versus what it is now. I *doubt* any other software product has matured so quickly.
We're also at a critical point, where there is enough stability, features, and even commercial software available to push the platform forward.
I blatantly predict that in December of this year, everybody is going to look back and say Wow!
...though it embodies much of what characterises the enemy.
The enemy is closed software and proprietary protocols.
Even if Microsoft is around 10 years from now it won't matter. We just need to succeed in banishing closed software and proprietary protocols.
Perhaps 10 years from now, Microsoft will be reduced to supporting NT after releasing it as open source software. Perhaps Windows will remain the most popular OS. Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn't matter what Microsoft does, as long as the important protocols of the industry remain open.
It won't matter to me if the majority of users use NT - what matters to me is individual companies holding the industry to ransom. If NT were made open source (unlikely as it is) and the API made non-proprietary, it wouldn't matter if they retained 90% of the market.
It doesn't really matter if Linux takes over either. It doesn't have to be Linux... it could be a BSD, it could be Hurd, it could be an open source MacOS or an open source BeOS... the important thing is that the dominant OS which sets the pace for the industry remains open so it can be peer reviewed and is not locked by individual companies.
RedHat says it'll take decades for Linux to overtake Windows. I have my suspicions Rob Young said this with his tongue firmly placed in his cheek. Regardless, it is a meaningless statement, because not only is it impossible to predict where the industry will go six months in advance - it is also impossible to predict that Microsoft will remain the champion of closed APIs as it is today.
Get it? Microsoft is not the enemy, though it is currently the champion of closed APIs and proprietary protocols. Conversely, Linux is not the end-all, be-all. The battle between Linux and Windows is a mere side-issue, a shadow of the real battle. The real battle is between open and closed software.
And that battle is almost already won - even if we don't know what will happen with Windows and Linux 10 years from now.
...boring reiteration..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
You're not thinking ahead.
There is a great drive now to push Linux out onto the desktop. Moreover Linux plus GNOME or KDE is fundamentally technically superior to Windows by virtue of being designed carefully from the ground up with the knowledge of all the mistakes in microcomputer and minicomputer OS design over the past twenty years. Sure GNOME and KDE are still immature but they are still only about a year old. Where the hell was Windows when it was a year old?
Technical superiority under the hood will not win the desktop directly, but the concomitant stability, security and performance benefits are already proving themselves.
It's not easy to extrapolate forward, but given the current rate of development it is almost unthinkable that Linux could fail to equal Windows by every criterion of usability within three years, even if the size of the developer pool doesn't expand from where it is now. And yet as more and more people are still piling in to contribute to Open Source projects, it could happen in even less time than that.
The sheer potential of Linux is not even the only important factor. Microsoft can't even manage their own code base any more! Windows 98 was a flop. NT 2000 has slipped yet again. More and more people are getting completely pissed off with their computers glitching, crashing and locking up several times a day. It's clear that it is beyond Microsoft's capability to rectify this situation or they would have at least shown some signs of attempting to do so.
I'm not saying that Linux machines are devoid of the odd software problem but in my experience it is rather less serious, even with fully-loaded systems. Right now, on the Linux system I'm sitting at this minute I am running 72 different processes, and the 20 windows I have open are three or four layers deep. If I ever tried to do that on Win95 it would grind to halt or die! On this system there isn't even any performance degradation. Given that as a starting point, its obvious Linux will beat Windows on every criterion in a very short time. The only difference that mitigates against that is Microsoft's marketing clout. And even with a public composed of frightened sheep, Microsoft can only go on peddling the same tired old lies for so long.
Hmmm, I thought that 30-some percent of the installed base still runs DOS or Windows 3.1. In the server market, there are still tons of Netware 3.x boxes out there.
Migration is a *slow* process, and it certainly might take 10 years for linux to displace WinNT for applicaiton servers. On the other hand, linux can sneak in *now* for apps that NT isn't good at or doesn't run (Oracle, proxying, firwall, DNS, etc).
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It's just like the black jewish lesbians.
MEEPT!!
I mean, if the baby has a rash, I'd rush out to Robert Young. I mean, he's such a convincing family doctor. But who does he think he is pontificating about desktop operating systems?
Sheeesh.
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
pardon me, but I think you could run a grocery store all on linux.
I think RedHat is just sandbagging to help screw microsoft. Im o.k. with that.
I too have a feeling something big is coming for Linux. A scary feeling. I just cant get the image of trying to help people (who can never connect to the internet because of their caps lock) try to connect using Linux.
God help us.
Ya.
The sound test in Redhat has Linus say it as
lee-knucks. Hmm. I sometimes prounouce it lie-knicks. Its the whole tomato thing.