Ubuntu, its time has come
The VAR Guy has a great post explicating why Ubuntu's time has come. I was going to write "finally come" but Ubuntu has never demonstrated anything less than continued momentum. It has always grown, expanded, and become more interesting to enterprises.
But now, as Monsieur Le VAR suggests, the stars may have aligned to take Ubuntu into the enterprise big time. How will it find room in an already crowded Linux market?
Both [Red Hat and Novell] bet heavily on the server. Red Hat completely ignored the desktop for years. Novell had some success on corporate desktops, but continues to ignore consumer systems.
As Microsoft stumble on the desktop, Canonical was the rare Linux company that actually stepped forward and pursued a consumer-centric design that even The VAR Guy's young kids quickly mastered in a few hours.
Simplicity, thy name is Ubuntu, as my grandma will tell you. But this isn't necessarily about the desktop.
It's about the ease-of-use and consumer appeal that Ubuntu has learned from focusing on the consumer desktop. These are the exact same traits that made Microsoft successful off the desktop. Ubuntu has the right credentials to make inroads off the desktop precisely because of its history there.
The VAR Guy walks through a few other reasons, all of which are valid and which Ubuntu is even further along with than has been reported in the media. Intel has a team working on Ubuntu to ensure its chips work flawlessly with Ubuntu. Sun, IBM, and others are also actively developing for Ubuntu.
Microsoft's stuttering desktop performance helps, but let's give full credit to Ubuntu. Canonical has built an excellent, easy-to-use distribution of Linux. It has done a fantastic job with branding. It is closing big deals with hardware vendors and increasingly with enterprises looking to take advantage of its low cost and high functionality.
But all this stems from a focus on wringing simplicity out of complexity. Just as Microsoft used to do. As Microsoft adds more features in order to justify its existence/maintenance renewals, watch for Ubuntu to fill the gap.
It all starts with grandma. It ends with world domination. Or is that liberation?
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. 
* The hype is out in front of the delivery, or at least Canonical's current ability to deliver. Alpha geeks are seeing serious issues of 'robustness' - a collection of issues around QA, bug fixes, failed upgrades, stupid Ubuntu policies etc. Some of the issues are generic problems, and the over hype exacurbates, and others are just structural issues with Canonical / Ubuntu development process and understaffing.
* A realisation that relative to other players, e.g. RH, Novell, or even Sun, Ubuntu don't really contribute anything back into the various communities (kernel, GNOME / KDE, Firefox, OOo). For example, for a company that is supposedly 'ignoring the desktop' RH have quite a big desktop team that dwarfs Canonical's team - same for Novell and Sun. Ask yourself this: Of all the great features in Ubuntu, which were developed by Canonical? Easy wireless setup - RH/Novell (mostly), OpenOffice - Sun/Novell (IBM?), Firefox - Mozilla/RH/Novell, F-spot - Novell, Evolution - Novell, Totem - RH, Accessibility - Sun. Of course all those projects had varying levels of community contribution. Granted, Canonical have done a great job making all that easy to install and setup and adding some polish, but people are starting ask: What are they contributing back?
Now tihs doesn't mean much for Ubuntu / Canonical in the short term. They have a huge fanbase and positive press and momentum, plus none of this is unfixable. But if they continue to lose appeal to alpha geeks (many of whom are migrating back to Debian, or trying out Fedora, now that RH are screwing that up less) then their longterm picture isn't so rosy.
Ubuntu itself has mainly been about taking what already exists and making it easier to use, which is something I've always thought we could do with a great deal more of, this 'polish'
If other distros can easily take this ease of use and integrate it back into their own efforts then that would be a contribution worthy in and of itself.
But yes, stability has been an issue over the last year; when I select that I have a 1680x1050 screen I explicitly do no want to be limited to a 1440x900 max resolution, the stupid just burns. User friendly interfaces are all very well, but they're no use if you're having to fight the computer just to get it to do the most basic things.
http://tech-talk.biz/2008/04/21/microsoft-apocalypse-2018/
- by kiwibuntu April 27, 2008 2:27 AM PDT
- It would be a shame if some "alpha geeks" felt they couldn't continue working on Ubuntu. But it should be remembered that the popularity of Ubuntu is boosting Linux as a whole (not least of all Debian). The more widespread Linux is, the better the hardware support we can expect, the better the documentation, and so on. And Ubuntu/Canonical represents the best hope for Linux long-term in my view.
- Reply to this comment
-
(5 Comments)