Wombat Diet

Jason Hiner penned a provocative article with this subject in Tech Republic.

Taken individually, each of the four shortcomings of Linux he identifies has some merit, but altogether the whole thing seems not unlike a Mission Accomplished banner draped on the foredeck of the USS Microsoft.

1. It’s still too much of a pain

Whether this is still true is debatable. Linux gets palpably better every few months and it’s not giving up; it’s improving relentlessly. To get wireless networking and a correct screen resolution right out of the box was not an everyday experience a year ago. Such things are becoming non-issues.

If you enjoy pain, try moving to a new version of Windows. The hassle of this was one of greatest reasons for Vista’s market failure. Overall, it just wasn’t worth the pain.

40 hours is Microsoft’s estimate of the time to migrate from Vista to Windows 7. For me it was more. Part of that was re-evaluating every application, deciding whether to reinstall it or not; checking for updates and, in some cases it meant paying for upgrades.

How much simpler things become in the world of the application store. Apple is there already, Ubuntu is following. Meanwhile, check out appnr and getdeb for a glimpse of where software installation is going, with one-stop installs of one’s preferred applications.

2. The divide and fail strategy

There are many Linux distributions and half a dozen popular graphical interfaces. This is harmful for branding and marketing. Or is it?

Would it be sensible to think of the divide and fail strategy of motor manufacturers? Of phone manufacturers? I’m unconvinced that fewer Linux varieties would have resulted in a much greater market share at this point.

One variety of Linux, Ubuntu, is increasingly dominant anyway. See the graphs at Tuxradar here, on the rate at which Karmic Koala, alias Ubuntu 9.10 is being adopted;  those who use it switch to new versions very rapidly.

Mainstream newspapers now publish articles on Linux quite often, e.g.,  Ubuntu the Complete Beginner’s Guide (in The Times) and newsagents, here in London anyway, carry more Linux magazines than Windows magazines.

Yes, competition is good and too much of it can hurt, but Ubuntu is emerging by natural selection. And if something better comes along it will be adopted as quickly as Bing would oust Google if it were as much of an improvement as Google was on Alta Vista.

The IT industry has never respected apparently impregnable monopolies and they’ve fallen hard when they’ve fallen, and quickly.

3. Not enough innovation

Linux distributrions  are secure, stable and free. These are not small innovations, nor is customers having a choice. On top of which Linux evolves every few months, not every few years, like Microsoft offerings. The diversity of Linux, with its Red Hat, Fedoras,  Debian, Ubuntu and other varieties points, perhaps, to a lot of needless variation but also to a great deal of innovation. Much of this is portable between distributions, with a kernel that is adaptable to run on just about any hardware.

The Linux innovation I like most is the ability to update the system without rebooting. The BitTorrent protocol started on Linux and several things, like virtual machines and bootable CDs, first became mainstream on Linux. The crushing dominance of Linux in supercomputing using clusters of systems (89%) testifies to its near foundational importance for much scientific innovation.

Which operating system had which innovation first is inconsequential. Nobody buys a car from the company that invented windshield wipers when every car has them. It’s better to ask what innovations Linux lacks in assessing whether it’s come up short or not.

Offhand, I can think of only two that I would like to see  if it were possible to provide them tomorrow: implementation of Apple’s TimeMachine backup and Sun’s ZFS file system.

However, there are alternatives for Linux, there usually are.

Flyback can substitute for TimeMachine.

Btrfs looks like it will be a reasonable stand-in for ZFS, if the innovation continues. (ZFS and Btrfs are file systems that help make it much harder to lose data even in the event of hardware failure and which scale far beyond the desktop.)

Far more important than operating system innovations is innovation in the area of complementary products. The iPod did more to turn Apple around than OSX ever did. Linux hasn’t had an iPod yet.

The next version of Ubuntu will have a music store. Therefore, in less than 6 months there will be phones that sync…

4. Businesses want someone to blame

The claim that IT professionals don’t dare risk deploying Linux because without it they have no vendor to hide behind when things go wrong strikes me as trite (credible in the case of servers, but that’s not the topic).

Businesses want the path of least resistance when dealing with non-core business functions, anything else is a distraction. If the local employment market offers, say, secretaries who know Word Perfect and Word Perfect has 85% of the market for word processing software, you need a good reason to use something else and to train them how to use it.

The switching cost of retraining staff and the risks of low productivity without enough of that training are the reasons most businesses go with market standards when it comes to desktop software. It’s why most of the world’s typewriters read QWERTYUIOP.

But

The desktop is no longer the be all and end all.

The mobile phone with a web connection is replacing and complementing it, and it will be supplemented by e-book type devices that are like netbooks without keyboards — and, quite likely, without Microsoft operating systems in most cases.

Shift will go on happening (I like this article in the Huffington Post on this and have been amused at how far ahead of business schools some K-12 teachers have been) and my guess is that Linux today is where the cellphone was 20 years ago, at the beginning of an exponential transformation.

The space I would like it to occupy more aggressively is the home server appliance. Amahi is a sleeper there and taking a look at it is on my to do list. If someone were to offer me an Amahi-based appliance with Asterisk and a PSTN line card ready to go… I’d replace the house phones with VoIP devices, add wi-fi phones as clients.

We haven’t really shifted out of first gear.

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