Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[Evan Leibovitch]

Rick Tomaschuk wrote:

>I travel a lot through the US and Canada and am frustrated that after
>the last 10 years of working to promote Linux (it) is still largely
>invisible in the market place especially when compared to the Apple 
>and their pirated lookalike copy called Windows produced by the convicted 
>monopolist Microsoft.
>
Hi Rick,

I understand what you're saying but I can't completely agree with it for 
a couple of reasons.

1) Since you're talking Apple, you seem to be talking about the desktop. 
Please keep in mind that Linux has only really been usable by non-geeks 
on the desktop for a few years. It's only now, with post-version-1 
releases of Firefox, OpenOffice and Thunderbird, that the open source 
desktop has been really suitable for non-technical users. What's 
happened in the last 10 years is that Linux has indeed been building a 
reputation for stability, cost effectiveness and reliability, but that's 
been mainly on the back end. Major vendors such as Red Hat and 
pre-Novell SuSE produced Linux desktops more as a courtesy and a tool to 
sell servers rather than competitive products in their own right.

Arguably, today it is a new generation of (with the notable exceptions 
of Mandriva and Red Flag) Debian-derived products such as Linspire, 
Xandros, Knoppix and Ubuntu which have concentrated on the desktop 
experience. These companies are babes within an entire field that's 
still immature in both technical, business and channel-building aspects. 
So while you say the Linux world has been around for a decade, IMO it's 
more accurate to say that the Linux desktop has only really been a 
mass-marketable product for less than a few years. And even so it's 
still very much a business-oriented system, far behind Windows and the 
Mac in areas of home multimedia and games. Sure there are embedded Linux 
components such as the open-source Tivo clones, but those can grow in 
popularity and still perception is that "Linux" isn't getting to desktop 
PCs.


2) "The market" is not just North America, which is probably the slowest 
region on earth to be adopting open source. The fight is toughest here 
because our region is the one that exports most of the world's 
proprietary systems software. Other areas of the world import their 
operating systems, providing significant macro-economic and 
self-sufficiency incentive to consider open source. The Munich win came 
in large part because the city government thought they were buying a 
homegrown OS (oops!).

You wouldn't share the same views of invisibility in big chunks of 
Europe, Asia and South America. Countries like China, Bulgaria, Malaysia 
and Brazil are using Linux to create domestic systems software 
infrastructures, open source is practically becoming a matter of public 
policy.

The trend is changing here too, but this is the enemy's home turf; the 
battles will be bloodier because there's more at stake. Witness the 
filthy politics at play simply because the government of Massachusetts 
wants to enforce open standards for documents. This crap simply wouldn't 
be tolerated in most other countries today; indeed, the arrogance of the 
proprietary vendors at play in Mass would work strongly against them in 
most other countries.

In the case of most proprietary systems software, the primary market is 
the US and then export versions are made. Despite the major presence and 
influence of Red Hat and Novell, this cycle does not extend to the world 
of open source. Note that the three largest Linux technical conferences 
each year are held outside the US (OLS, LinuxTag, linux.conf.au). 
Internationalization isn't a feature, it's a fundamental component.

3) Linux is making inroads across the board, not just on the desktop. 
The OS is making its way into some of the world's fastest 
supercomputers, and some of the most ubiquitous embedded devices. In 
China and Europe there are now Linux-powered smartphones that compete 
head-on with Microsoft and Symbian, and the new owner of PalmSource is 
committed to evolve that OS into a Linux platform. Major players such as 
Sharp and Motorola make well-known Linux-based devices that aren't sold 
on this side of the Pacific, where "Linux inside" doesn't have the 
appeal that it does in Asia.

That's hard to compare to the Mac, which has traditionally been a single 
type of device (though Apple has been trying to get into server space 
now that OS X is based on a more unix-ish platform).

4) Personally, I think the Linux "brand" (which is really a more generic 
term encompassing a lot of non-Linux-kernel applications) is doing just 
fine, given its youth and maturity in both technical and business areas. 
Linux desktops have quietly surpassed Apple as the number 2 desktop 
worldwide, despite their lack of commercial application support. But 
some people just can't do without their Photoshop (or Quake, or Quicken, 
etc) and that will continue to be problematic so long as Wine continues 
to track a moving target.

To people who see computers as a tool rather than useful in their own 
right, the OS is far less relevant than the application. It's no 
coincidence that in its most recent promotion campaign for Windows XP, 
Microsoft emphasizes not the features of the OS but the range of 
third-party apps that run on it (see www.windows.ca). Sure there are a 
ton of apps in open source, but we're still at a maturity state where 
most of these apps are more comfortable to people who like computers. 
This may change, but maybe it won't and we'll just have to live with 
that; it's not the end of the world. Linux may become more visible, but 
that doesn't make it will be the best answer for all need. And inertia 
is still a formidable obstacle.

- Evan

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