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AOL Considers Linux?
News.com is running a story about
AOL Considering Linux,
although its fairly hazy on the details. Talks about
Netscape turned AOLs investment in Red Hat, Linux in
Consumer devices (seems to say its a bad idea, despite
the mention of the empeg) and other assorted rumors
with little solid claims from anyone beyond 'no comments'.
On http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,35463,00.html?st .ne.fd.gif.d, Mr. Card is quoted as saying:
"Linux is simply too muscular for that space, and even without the Windows licensing fee, a hardware company would still have to pay the relatively high prices for Intel chips."
Mr. Card really shouldn't be allowed to talk to the press, because he just made himself and your company look like complete idiots.
Linux runs very well on many non-Intel chips. For one thing, it runs on chips from AMD, which are much cheaper than Intel's chips. Second, since Linux is so fast, it can run better on low-end chips than other operating systems (like Windows) on higher-end chips. Third, Linux has been ported to other architectures, such as StrongARM and PowerPC.
I suppose the real blunder was made by the author of the article, Stephen Shankland, who should have known better than to quote someone completely unqualified to comment on the subject. It would have been smart if Mr. Shankland had actually verified the statements of the people he was interviewing. Nothing makes a journalist look more stupid than when he quotes someone who is completely wrong without pointing out the error.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
This could really change the whole way people look at computers in their lives. "Hiding Linux from the user" is not as hard as this article makes it sound. Infact, I don't see what is hard about it all. Computer's in themselves "hide" things from users. Your average computer user doesn't know how the CPU works, what's on a motherboard, nor really cares. The average population just wants practicallity in a device. Writing a slick GUI on top of Linux does not sound real complicated at all.
I don't even see why Linux is "not an OS for consumer devices" either. Why not? Is there something glaringly obvious I should be aware of? Hmm let's see here - portability, reliability, performance, low cost. Stripped down to it's core functional enviornment it makes the IDEAL consumer device OS.
AOL could basically make "AOL Appliances". With the current pricing of electronic components, I'm sure you could package a cute little computer capable of running the GUI I mentioned above on bare-bones hardware. Linux has the potential to be a breakthrough in the way we use machines. Companies need to "think outside the box".
What OS were the columnists considering for a set-top box that would have fewer requirements than Linux? They rightly mention that Java has high memory & processor requirements. (Sun's proverbial "toaster" applications won't run Java until the average toaster has a P100 and 8 megs.) But surely no journalist would think that Linux is more demanding than, say, any embedded OS Microsoft could come up with?
Hey folks,
Of course, I can't reveal anything that I know, but let me make one thing perfectly clear. Netscape developers who are doing AOL projects run Linux. I'm no where near the HQ, and just a lowly field Systems Engineer, trying to make a buck. It's the developers who have helped us get Linux up and running on our corporate laptops.. and those developers are the ones that are working on AOL projects. Don't underestimate AOL.
I really liked "America On Linux", that I saw in this thread!
Here's how it works with analysts like Card: they get paid partly according to how many times their names (and their company's) appear in news stories.
So it's more profitable for someone like Card to say something brash like "It's a really dumb idea," a very quotable comment, than to really consider the question.
From the writer's point of view: Shankland needs a source, in a hurry, with a title suggesting industry knowledge. Jupiter and its ilk (Forrester, Gartner, IDG, Meta, etc.) are supposed to be specialists in tech. From experience, I can say they're better informed and more accessible than the Wall Street equity analysts.
Card should know better, and maybe Shankland could have dug a little more under Card's hasty assertion, but that's how the press/analyst machine works.
"Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry." -Tristan Tzara
AOLserver (the freely available web server) has been available on Linux for a couple of years now.