In the server market, Linux and Microsoft were supposed to be mauling each other like jackals by now. Instead they are contentedly polishing off the bison of Solaris, IRIX, and other proprietary Unix server software. Linux and Microsoft Windows have both grown in the server market--Windows faster than Linux.
Linux on the desktop is a similarly confusing story. A conference on desktop Linux, the first of its kind, was held in the Boston, Massachusetts area on November 10. The forum allowed the leaders of Linux and free software development to evaluate the progress these have made on the desktop.
Linux as an end-user system is at an early stage, but inroads are impressive. One statistic puts annual growth of Linux on the desktop at 44%. It is already in heavy use as a limited, kiosk type of application (point-of-sale terminals, for instance) and as a technical workstation. More general use is expected to come within the next couple years.
By now, free software office utilities are perfectly satisfactory and largely compatible with Microsoft Office; if they lack certain features of Office, they also lack certain bugs, and compensate with their own features and bugs. A sizeable base of knowledgeable administrators has emerged. And installation shouldn't be such a big issue. Windows installation can be hard too, and people often turn to professionals for installation.
So why hasn't Linux made big inroads yet among ordinary computer users? Let's look at a few theories--two that are relatively commonplace, and one of my own.
The first theory is that Linux's advantages will eventually overcome corporate and government conservatism. A roadmap was even laid out in the Desktop Linux Conference (described in my weblog from the conference). In fact, the tipping point could be so near that we may all soon be laughing about the time we were worried about Linux's difficulties. Japan and China, combining one of the world's most important established economies with one of its most important emerging ones, are pouring huge amounts of money into Linux. IBM is no slouch either. People are getting it: Linux is a solution to many current computing ills.
A second possibility is that Linux may not catch on at all for Mr. and Ms. Average Schmo, at least not for the foreseeable future. But is that so important? Linux could meanwhile become dominant for servers, embedded systems, and kiosks. It could also reach the Average Schmos on large organizational networks using Linux Terminal Server Project.
But we should also consider a third theory. Nat Friedman of Ximian (now Novell) explained at the Desktop Linux conference that the highest barrier to Linux adoption is the cost of rewriting applications. This was the conclusion of a consulting firm brought in by the city of Munich to determine whether it should replace Windows with Linux. The consulting firm warned that application migration costs would override the savings in licensing fees, and Microsoft came in with a stunningly low counter-offer. Munich decided to move to Linux anyway, for strategic reasons. But it's a hard decision to make.
Friedman and the Munich consulting firm were not the only ones to point this out. Back in September, the well-known consulting firm Gartner reportedly told companies that it would cost them money to move to Linux--precisely because they'd have to rewrite their applications. For desktop users, "migration costs will be very high because all Windows applications must be replaced or rewritten." And this is the same Gartner that had warned companies to get off of Microsoft Windows because of security flaws! (Before Gates and Ballmer started to make grand promises about putting security at the top of their priorities.) Despite Linux's advantages in the areas of licensing, stability, and openness, Gartner believes companies would lose money by switching.
Another article is more hopeful but suggests that it would take five years to see financial benefits after a switch from Windows to Linux.
And that leads me to my theory.
For Linux to reach the ordinary user, it has to offer more than good office suites and The Gimp and other free software implementations of common applications. Most people won't make the move just so they can keep doing what they did before. Security and freedom mean a lot to a few of us, but they are not enough incentive for the vast range of Average Schmos. And we need those Average Schmos; the median is the message.
People will move because they feel forced to--because there is an entirely new way of working that the old system cannot offer, and the new system can. It must be a shift that sweeps up millions of adherents and becomes a perceived necessity.
Historically, graphical user interfaces were just such an innovation (although if you were around when they first came in, you might remember how many ordinary people stubbornly stuck to their old command or full-screen utilities for years). The Internet was another: Microsoft, AOL, and others had to really scramble to avoid being swept into the dustbin by it.
No single new application is enough to cause a switch. Microsoft is perfectly capable of writing applications, so if somebody thinks up a neat utility on Linux, people will soon get something like it on Windows. What we're talking about is a new paradigm (pardon that word); a whole shift as big as GUIs and Internet use. What could it be?
Let me break my chain of reasoning here to point out that Microsoft itself is not afraid of changing the way people use computers. It's forging ahead with initiatives such as Longhorn and SharePoint which, if they live up to the hype, will put people in new relationships with their data and with each other. Microsoft has put tremendous energy into separating data from presentation and creating frictionless chutes that carry the data from database to office application to Web page with minimal user intervention.
As usual, one can get snowed when presented with Microsoft's lists of audacious upgrade features. But what emerges for me, as the basic Microsoft vision for the computing future, is an impressive pervasiveness of data--data that can instantly be viewed and tabulated by anyone who wants it using the most convenient tool at hand, without fussing over conversions and conscious transmission from place to place.
Microsoft is not stuck in the past; they're pulling as hard as they can to move their users to these upcoming innovations--trying to make them seem indispensable to staying competitive--because otherwise the company will have to stand by and watch the hose that gushes license fees gradually diminish to a trickle over the next couple years. No, Microsoft is pushing ahead. If any developers are stuck in the past, it's the free software programmers diligently recreating what's been done before.
But the kink in Microsoft's hose is that its business plan is a plan for business, not for end users. On the whole, Microsoft's initiatives revolve around corporate data use, and depend on adoption by corporations. And corporations are naturally conservative. They're afraid, for instance, that the grand SharePoint achievement of integrating office applications and corporate servers will lead to more bugs and security problems with both. They're not likely to budge.
Individual users, by contrast, are not conservative. History has shown them to be, if anything, quite reckless. Look at what hordes of ordinary people did when they get their hands on Web server software in the early 1990s. Look at the current popularity of instant messaging, and now SMS, both of which started as novelties. Look at the millions who signed up for the original Napster, and then slid over comfortably to current peer-to-peer systems.
So Linux has a natural user base it can appeal to. The very people advocates are trying to reach--individuals at home and in school--are the people likely to drive radical innovation in computing.
The area where Linux excels is services. Apache, Samba, MySQL, and mail transfer agents are practically household words thanks to Linux (although of course they run on many other systems too, and are found on Windows more often than people give credit for). Anything that you need to do that requires running a service benefits from the state-of-the-art network stack and security offered by Linux. This includes peer-to-peer applications, as I explained in a talk I gave back in 2002.
What's the advantage of running an application as a continuous, background service? Many find it hard to remember, because the division between server and client has become so commonplace (and the second-class citizenship of the Average Schmo, exiled to the client side, has been enforced for so long). Advantages include:
You're more in charge of your own data. You don't have transmit it to some remote system under somebody else's bailiwick or beg for someone to put it up for you before others can access it. Immediacy opens up whole new dimensions, such as the ability to provide dynamic, instantly customized content.
You're more in charge of your own processing. You can choose when to process information in tiny chunks and when to postpone processing and do it in batches. You can choke off access or open up new threads to accommodate more. The simple, synchronous connections clients have may work for small amounts of communication, but when you get busy it's critical to have the flexibility of a server.
You're more likely to be able to support multiple users. Many servers recognize the idea of an account and offer access controls.
But running a service on your computer is socially disruptive. It puts control in your hands rather than in a central professional staff, so it's suspect in large organizations. It also bothers Internet providers because you need potentially more bandwidth, a static IP address, and perhaps a domain name. But accommodations have been made for activities as diverse as file-sharing, Web servers, and chat. The practice may grow, and that's where the arguments against migration to Linux break down.
Andy Oram is an editor for O'Reilly Media, specializing in Linux and free software books, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.
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