Intel and Novell take aim at Android with Moblin
Google's still-nascent efforts to dominate the mobile market, already reeling from Apple's surging iPhone platform, were dealt another blow on Thursday when Intel and Novell announced that they will collaborate to promote Intel's Moblin operating system, a rival Linux distribution for mobile devices.
Whereas Google is initially targeting smartphones with Android (though an Android-based Netbook has apparently been released), Intel is targeting Moblin at Netbooks.
Additionally, Android and Moblin aren't simply two different Linux distributions, in the way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server are. Android and Moblin use Linux in different ways, as Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open source technologist, suggested to me:
Moblin is Linux for mobile devices, (and its) first focus is on Netbooks. Android is an (operating system) for phones that uses a Linux kernel...very different.
Novell's Justin Steinman, vice president of solution and product marketing, said in a follow-up conversation:
Moblin 2.0 is the first open-source Linux software stack and technology framework designed from the ground up for the Netbook device type. Essentially, Moblin plans to start at the Netbook layer of the stack, and then work its way down to the smaller mobile devices. Given Novell's strength in delivering desktops based on Linux, it made sense for us to collaborate closely with Intel to deliver the optimal user experience on Netbooks.
Given Apple's rising dominance in smartphones and Symbian's lingering power in other mobile devices, this seems like a smart, strategic move. The Netbook market is still wide open, with Apple currently disdaining to enter it and Microsoft bleeding cash to hold its ground against Linux.
Though Ubuntu made the first forays for Linux in the Netbook market, could it be Novell and Intel that end up dominating it?
Maybe. Maybe not. The one sure thing, at least for now, is that Microsoft may win the short-term Netbook war, but it still needs a long-term, winning game plan for mobile.
The mobile market is fascinating because it is uprooting long-held beliefs about how and where to compete in software. Intel, Google, and Apple, each fiercely contending for dominance, share a common strategy: they're investing in the operating system but planning to make their money elsewhere (Atom chips, in Intel's case; advertising and revenue-sharing with application vendors, in Google's; hardware and revenue-sharing with application vendors, in Apple's).
Such strategies stand in stark contrast to Microsoft, which persists in trying to monetize its mobile Windows platform.
Small wonder, then, that Microsoft is losing the mobile battle. It's fighting with the wrong ammunition.
Back to Google. While it seems clear that Intel's Moblin initiative is an attempt to fend off Google's looming Android threat, there's probably enough time for Intel and Novell to stake out a strong position in Netbooks that Google will struggle to overcome.
Regardless, the one player left out in the cold in all this activity is Microsoft. Google, Novell, Intel, and Apple are each putting hefty resources into winning the mobile market, but doing so in a way that undermines Microsoft's traditional approach of licensing only the software. Microsoft's Xbox experience suggests that it can do hardware right, but will it be able to catch up if it starts chasing its competition?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Some quotes from the article:
"Microsoft may win the short-term Netbook war, but it still needs a long-term, winning game plan for mobile"
"Such strategies stand in stark contrast to Microsoft, which persists in trying to monetize its mobile Windows platform."
"Small wonder, then, that Microsoft is losing the mobile battle. It's fighting with the wrong ammunition".
"the one player left out in the cold in all this activity is Microsoft."
Does Cnet enjoys bashing MS, just for the fun of it? Why to focus on MS when the title mentiones very clearly that Moblin is going against Android?
Unless I'm mistaken, Moblin is mainly aimed for netbooks and not smart phones, at least at the beginning: "Moblin plans to start at the Netbook layer of the stack, and then work its way down to the smaller mobile devices."
So, why do you feel that it is going to compete primarily with Windows Mobile or Android? It seems to me that it is going to compete primarily against Win 7 and Ubuntu, and not as much against mobile OSes.
But I might have got it wrong...
I've commented on this many times in the past. Matt Asay is fine when he sticks to FOSS topics. However, he completely loses objectivity and focus whenever he brings MS into the picture. I've left precisely this comment for him in the past -- that he should recognize topics where he's unable to overcome his prejudices and stay away from them.
If this functionality is added to Moblin, then it might be a decent contender, for the kind of netbook I am looking for, since it would also be able to run full desktop apps like OpenOffice, etc.
What they don't get is the fact that the O/S is only just the vehicle where you drive your customers to where you really want to make money from them.
Does it make sense to charge for the vehicle? Not a bit - its a complementary service(or should be).
In the end the cost-free O/Ss will win out.
Arthur
You write a OS consisting of millions of lines of code and tell me how much you enjoy not making a dime from it.
ha ha ha, arthur you are so funny, microsoft still charge for their OS, well it made bill richest man in the world, he's certainly not complaining"
Yeah the Rockefeller family was up there too... But their business model eventually passed....
Ubuntu was NOT the first netbook linux OS. Xandros was pre-installed on Asus EEE machines well before Ubuntu.
Why is it that you seem to consistently misrepresent the history here with regard to Canonical..and everyone else...following what Xandros was able to accomplish with its Asus EEE pre-installs. Xandros/Asus created the consumer netbook market.
Why the revisionist history? You know better...or at least you should.
-jef
I do not doubt for a second that the work done to bring OLPC forward by everyone involved in that project.. including Red Hat engineering staff... was the genesis for the commercial netbook market. OLPC was probably the first Fedora remix.before the remix term was even fashionable to use.
But that being said I put the OLPC project in a separate category as its by definition not a commercial enterprise. Its different, its special, and has the potential for still far wider impact than mere commercialization of a new device form factor. I don't want to lump it in with the Dell's and HP's and Acer's of the world..because its not a fair comparison. Dell and HP and Acer are just trying to sell pieces of metal and plastic in select locations of the planet... OLPC is trying to be an ubiquitous global education platform that every single child can pick up and use.
From a commercial consumer product standpoint... Xandros/Asus were the first to come out with a retail product and really bring the issue forward and attack the demand perception created by the birth of the OLPC XO. It doesn't take anything away from OLPC to say that as the OLPC is not a retail consumer product and it was never meant to be one.
The work that has gone into OLPC is going to bear fruit for years I think. Some of it weird fruit to be sure. I think you'll see the concepts originally brought forward as core elements in the Sugar interface being worked with as part of GNOME 3.0 for example. The mesh networking tech which was central to the OLPC collaborative networking is another thing to watch mature outside of OLPC. Sugar itself is now available as an interface choice in Fedora right now (and I think in Ubuntu as well)
-jef
If it turns out Moblin beats Android and Windows, Google will be quite happy. The browser won't be IE. Things like "Live" won't be built in. Etc.
Also, I doubt that Android was designed for netbooks unless Google was really prescient. So if they "only" do well in cell phones, fine. With Novell describing this thing as "someday" a cell phone thing, it's probably only like 5th on Google competitive list, anyway, at best. Look at how long it took Android to start showing up. And how much clout does Intel have currently in the cell phone space? Or how much resources does Novell have? Finely, if it's this OS instead of Apple's and Microsoft's, again, Google will be happy.
I think Intel just wants the sub $300 or $200 netbook. If Windows is $25 to the hardware vendor, it's probably $40 at retail (since both the vendor and the retailer mark things up). At $200, that's 20%. That's the basic issue here: lower priced devices and more money to Intel not MSFT.
On cell phones, Linux has a better chance, because not many people expect to run Windows applications on their phone (see: iPhone, Blackberry, plus countless other non-Windows Mobile cell phones).
If Moblin drives sales of better netbooks, Google is still likely to benefit.
- by jabailo May 8, 2009 9:09 AM PDT
- Ubuntu is winning the Netbook war.
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- by Seaspray0 May 8, 2009 11:29 AM PDT
- I don't think the war is over yet, nor do I want to see either one win quickly (I like the idea of having a choice). I'm glad you posted on how happy you were with it. There are some regulars around here that have consistently refered to netbooks as "cheap pieces of c**p". Maybe they will read your post and finally understand that a good value doesn't have to mean a high price.
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(18 Comments)I was looking at the Dell mini 9 purchase page and I noticed that whereas they used to have one Ubuntu option and 3 XP options, they now added two more Ubuntu buttons.
Obviously people are screaming for Linux options.
Now Moblin...the perfect distro for me a long time Novell/openSuse user!
(BTW -- I bought the Dell mini 9 two months ago...with Ubuntu and it's the best money I've ever spent on technology in a long, long time! )