They almost lost with XP. When Microsoft tried to "force feed" XP
into the corporate market, many corporations issued directives for
CIOs and CTOs to formulate plans that would allow the corporation to
stop paying Microsoft, even if it meant switching to Linux.
And it looks like they lost with Vista. In this case, OEMs paid as
much as 50% more to upgrade Vista computers to XP, and many companies
have pretty much told Microsoft that if they try to drop support for
XP, they will start putting Linux on Retail shelves. Many
corporations have not just delayed adoption of Vista, they have banned
Vista completely. Many have stated that they have no plans to upgrade
to Vista, which would indicate that if Microsoft attempts to shut down
XP, they will be ready to switch to Linux or Unix.
> The bad news: it has a lot of feet and no one seems to
> even notice or care, except for this bunch here in COLA
> and an occasional freeware blogger.
It's more like the Linux mascot, the Penguin. Remember, Emporer
Penguins lay and hatch their eggs and raise their young in the most
hostile part of the planet, to protect them from predators. They wait
until the ice melts, and by the time their young have lost their down,
they are ready to go into the sea as some of the fastest swimmers in
the world. Emporor Penguins, even young ones, "fly" through the water
at almost 45 miles per hour. These birds then spend 5 years in the
water, getting really really fat, before they make the 75 mile trek
into antarctica.
Linux is similar. Linux was developed and evolved as open source
software, free of the economic pressures, limitations, and budgetary
restrictions that limit the development of commercial applications.
Thousands of applications were generated, and encouraged to compete
with each other by the distributors, who included everything they
could in their distribution media.
Linux, and the OSS applications then infiltrated the marketplace
covertly. Linux distributors didn't promote many specific
applications, but instead encouraged users to compare and choose for
themselves. Linux was distributed freely, and the revenue came from
those who wanted support. To be profitable, the distributors had to
test, patch, and contribute to the OSS to keep their costs down, while
still providing valuable upgrades, documentation, and configuration
support, which created their revenue streams.
Linux users were often the first to use high speed internet, because
they wanted the ability to download these upgrades and distributions
as quickly as possible. Downloading 2 gigabytes worth of updates over
a 28 Kb/sec dial-up connection just wasn't going to cut it.
Linux distributors were very creative at using new distribution
channels. Getting a software product onto retailer shelves had
reached the point where a minimum of $10 million was required just to
get one cardboard box out to one national franchise. The Linux
distributors found other ways to get their product distributed.
They offered downloads, and packaged the downloads so that it was easy
and convenient to download a very robust distribution quickly, and it
could be installed easily. This also created more demand for high
speed internet.
They utilized CD-ROM burners, encouraging users to burn freely
distributable CD-ROMs and give them to 30-40 of their closest
friends. Many distributors even encouraged their customers to throw
"Install Parties" helping new Linux users get their systems installed.
They utilized USB drives and Flash memory, which allowed them to
quickly distribute their goods to lots of new customers.
They used Live-CDs and Live-DVDs, in combination with the USB drives.
This allowed Linux distributors to boot from a CD or DVD, but use the
external drive or flash drive for personal files and configuration
files.
Rather than have the OEMs create special machines exclusively for
Linux, the Linux community created drivers for every device they could
get specs on. In many cases, it was difficult to get secret codes
such as USB and PCI device and vendor codes, but when Microsoft double-
crossed it's own "partners", they often voided contracts that included
nondisclosure agreements. In other cases, the community was able to
probe, catalog, and document these codes.
The result is that more and more PC models became "Linux Ready" and
Linux was installed by USERS rather than OEMs. In essence, Linux was
like the little penguins swimming under water at blazing speeds, but
mostly not visable to the usual predators.
Even when Linux was adopted by the OEMs, it was mostly "below the
radar". The server market grew at radical rates, and today, it's
nearly impossible to use a PC on the internet without accessing at
least a few Linux or UNIX servers each access. This gave Linux a
chance to establish a very solid reputation with corporate IT
managers, and eventually even the CEO and COO. Even the non-geeks
liked the fact that Linux was easy to get, scaled well, and integrated
well with their other corporate servers. At the same time, Linux
established a reputation in large corporations of being reliable,
secure, efficient, easy to manage and maintain, performing well, and
in general having very low Total Cost of Ownership and very high
Return On Investment. With all of these satisfied customers, even
Microsoft's "Fast Facts" or "Fast with the Facts" benchmarks and
studies weren't having an impact. IT managers didn't need benchmarks
and surveys, they could look at their own budgets and service records.
Linux also became very popular with smaller OEMs who produced Linux
"Appliances". Companies like D-Link, LinkSys, NetGear, Nokia, Belkin,
started creating Linux powered routers, hubs, firewalls, WiFi hubs,
printer hubs, and storage controllers. Even though they didn't have
the little penguin on the box, the industry was aware that these were
Linux boxes, and the consumers were buying.
Soon, Linux and Unix were being integrated into new consumer products
including DVRs, HDTV tuners, HDTV TVs, Digital cable tuners, Digital
Satellite devices, DVD players, and even VCRs.
A nice side effect of the success of Linux is that Open Source
Software became more widely accepted and trusted. Mozilla, FireFox,
Gaim, Pidgin, Open Office, and numerous other Open Source applications
have been ported to Windows, usually by using Red Hat's cygwin
compatibility library (lets Windows users run Linux OSS apps) and
platform independent Java.
Of course, these new OSS apps are establishing open industry-wide
standards and many companies who have gravitated to industry wide
standards, such as those that made the Internet a universial medium
for business. New standards such as Open Document Format are becoming
popular largely as a result of the success of Linux, OSS, and Internet
Open Standards.
> Viruses? No problem; just buy AV software.
Not exactly. Keep in mind that globally, businesses lose as much as
$300 billion per year in primary and secondary damages related to
viruses. Antivirus software and AntiSpyware software actually catches
the malware AFTER it has been pulled in. But when you do a little
root cause analysis, it turns out that most of these malware programs
are pulled in by ActiveX controls, MicroViruses, and embedded OLE
objects embedded in MS-Office attachments. A company will spend
$millions, even $billions setting up firewalls, antivirus,
antispyware, spam filters, other security measures, only to have the
entire security system breached by someone who uses Outlook e-mail to
preview an e-mail file that contains embedded HTML which contains
embedded ActiveScript which pulls in ActiveX controls or Attachments
with embedded malware OLEs, and suddenly you have a highly secured
workstation sending out confidential company information via e-mail,
smtp, or http.
Microsoft keeps promising better security, but they absolutely refuse
to give up their back-doors. Vista was supposed to be totally
secure. Instead, Vista has turned into a Nightmere.
> Deficiencies? No problem; get some shareware.
IT managers are getting much more touchy about shareware. It seems
that most of the copyright violations found by watchdogs like BSA -
are unregistered shareware. All it takes is 10-20 people downloading
WinZip and not paying the registration fee within the 30 day time
limit to leave yourself open to the choice of 20 years in federal
prison, or signing a BSA settlement, and a blanket agreement with
Microsoft that covers everything they publish. In essence, it's
blackmail. The CIO is being threatened with prison for the acts of
the company's employees.
Open Source, on the other hand, with Licenses that explicitly state
that the software can be downloaded and used, and can be freely
distributed, often gets loaded into a corporate archive, so that
employees can load it directly. The corporation then usually makes a
donation to the organization that supports the sharware, or gets a
support contract from a company who will forward a portion of that to
the OSS supporters.
Many companies are also doing "give-back" by allowing, even
encouraging, their employees to submit and support shareware. They
are encouraged to do it as individuals, to avoid liability for the
company, and they are warned not to pirate someone else's software and
submit it as OSS, but they are often rewarded for their "Give-Back" or
"Industry Leadership".
> Sluggish machine? No problem; get a new
> one with a more "modern" OS such as Vista.
Appearantly that isn't working so well. If you buy a bigger machine,
with 4 times the RAM, that's 4 times faster, and has 4 times the drive
capacity, Vista will end up being SLOWER than XP on the older machine.
If you get a DirectX-10 card, you might get some nifty graphics, but
it won't be faster than XP. Vista won't be more secure than XP with
3rd party security software from McAffee or Symantic. Vista won't be
more reliable than XP, and third party software will probably NOT run
as well on Vista.
Perhaps this is why so many PCs, even when they are displayed on the
retail shelves with Vista Home Premium, are being purchased with
Windows XP. Perhaps this is why so many machines displayed with
Vista, use cards that DON'T support DirectX-10, but use cards that
support OpenGL instead.
Even the game writers have opted to use wrapper libraries that convert
OpenGL calls to DirectX calls on XP, than write custom applications
written directly to DirectX. In many cases, if the Video card
supports OpenGL natively, the game can bypass the wrappers and go
directly to the card driver via the OpenGL library.
> Isn't setting people's expectations wonderful?
The problem is that there is nothing that will make a mob turn ugly
faster than unfulfilled expectations. If you promise them bread and
give them gruel, they will behead you.
> Oh, don't forget to
> register your copy of Vista, citizen; it's for your own good.
How many fingers do you see on my hand? Four? Bzzzzt.
Now that you have finished screaming, try again. Five? Bzzzt
That's correct, but that's not what you actually see is it? IT's only
what you think I want to hear.
Orwell's 1984. I particularly liked the movie. Richard Burton was so
good as the thought police.
> As for the C-64...I played with it for 5 minutes or so once.
My dad had one. Of course, by then, I was programming for CP/M, and
shortly after that I was using UNIX. C-64 looked SO Primative in
comparison. When I finally got a PC with MS-DOS, all I wanted to do
is switch it to UNIX somehow. Unfortunately I had to wait almost 10
years to convert a PC to UNIX.
When Windows 3.0 came out, I was using a Sun SparcStation as my
primary workstation. Windows was stone-age compared to SunOS 4.0. In
fact, even Windows XP doesn't have many of my favorite features of
SunOS 4.0. And by the time I got to Slackware 2.0, I liked it better
than Solaris.
> I can't say it was that impressive except that
> it was instantly on, ready to go from the moment one hits
> the power switch. (The same could be said for many other
> machines -- the TRS80 and the Apple ][ also come to mind.
It was ready if you didn't have a floppy drive. If you had a floppy,
it took a while for it to get up to speed.
> The Amiga didn't quite make it but was very close.)
I liked the Amiga, and the Atari ST. Both were great computers, but
didn't have memory management units, so they couldn't run UNIX or OS/9
68K. The DRI/GEM system was very nice, but the resolution was still
very low for a windowed system (it was better than MS-DOS, but still
only 640x480 in Color. It had a black and white 1024x768 mode, but it
was interlaced at 70hz and many people disliked the jitter that came
from the interlace.
DRI released GEM for MS-DOS at the same time, and Microsoft freaked.
They were still trying to get the bugs out of Windows 1.0, and here
was GEM, fully operational, and could run on top of either MS-DOS or
DR-DOS. I think DR-DOS even had real multitasking by then.
> ASUS finally has partially replicated that experience for
> the masses, allowing a browser within 5 seconds or so on
> the P5E3, as I understand it.
You get a "hot" display in just a few seconds, but at least the OLPC
still seems to take a few seconds to load applications from the flash
into the RAM. Still, both Linux and Windows have good "sleep" modes,
which makes it much easier to "fire-up" without having to go through a
lengthy reboot process. The difference is that Linux actually LIKES
to go weeks between reboots. Windows still has memory leaks, file
lock-outs, and other issues that make it almost mandatory to reboot
your PC every 2-3 days. I was surprised when I got a warning because
I hadn't rebooted Windows in 48 hours.
> Presumably Microsoft is still working on it. We'll see
> this "innovation" maybe a few years from now.
I think they said that was supposed to be in Vista. They were also
working on getting it into the PDA operating system. They are
supposedly working on some sort of OLPC type operating system as
well. The problem is that they can't come up with an operating system
that will only need 4 gig of flash storage, including all applications
and personal data.
> Never mind that Linux already has it, as a proof of concept.
Linux can boot from USB flash drives or SD-RAM drives if you have them
and your computer supports booting from them. Since there is no
latentcy and access times can be as fast as 20 megabytes/second
sustained rate on Linux, (as opposed to 40 MB/sec burst 300 KB/sec
sustained rate for Windows on a 5400 RPM IDE drive).
> --
> #191, ewi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Rex Ballard
http://www.open4success.org
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