The Open Road

Linux users are known for being a somewhat finicky lot. Despite broader application support for Windows and a better user experience in Mac OS X, Linux "desktop" users swear by the open-source operating system (and sometimes swear at its competitors).

It's therefore somewhat telling that Linux users overwhelmingly choose Google as their preferred search engine, according to data released today by Chitika, an online advertising network. Chitika analyzed data from 163 million searches across its advertising network between July 30 and August 16, and came up with the following:

Despite the concerns about Google and privacy and despite Microsoft's rising relevance in search through its Bing "decision engine," Google wins over Linux users 94.61 percent of the time. While it's not surprising that Linux users would shun a Microsoft-sponsored search engine, it is surprising that they so heavily congregate around just one search engine.

After all, this is the crowd that has created (literally) thousands of Linux distributions. For a community so devoted to choice, it's telling that such a disparate community would unify on Google search. Perhaps Yahoo's apparent willingness to prostrate itself before Microsoft has turned off the Linux crowd, but there are other alternatives.

Open source, after all, is all about alternatives. There are open-source alternatives to Google Analytics (Piwik, Open-Tube, etc.), Google Search Appliance (Lucene/Solr), Google Docs (OpenGoo), Google Earth (World Wind), and more.

But for search, the Linux contingent of the open-source community seems settled on Google.

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As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn't help but agree with Larry Dignan's assessment of the Nokia deal:

Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They're big. They're winded. And they could knock you over--if they could only catch you.

I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.

Sure, it's still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn't seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It's as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.

So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on Mac announcement "like they've been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X," as ZDNet's Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple's do.

But Microsoft doesn't wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn't seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.

And perhaps that's the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don't need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.

The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google's Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.

Google may be resorting to some of Microsoft's most frustrating practices, using its strong products to prop up weak siblings, but at least those siblings promise a different mode of computing.

Apple offers a premium "desktop" experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the "desktop" with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture's Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?

It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.

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Google becomes more like Microsoft every day. It used to be that only Microsoft could pre-announce a product to mass hysteria (and mass exodus of start-ups dabbling in the area), then proceed to under-deliver for the first few iterations of the product and still make billions in the process. With Google Chrome OS, Google has signaled that it, too, can over-commit and under-deliver and still mint billions.

Perhaps equally dismaying, as Anil Dash suggests, is that Google may be having "its Microsoft moment" and starting to develop software to work nicely with its other software...rather than actually building software that its customers want.

But let's step back and strip away the frenzied media response to Google Chrome OS to determine what, exactly, Google announced: Google announced that it was shipping Ubuntu.

No, Google isn't calling it Ubuntu, but Chrome OS is nothing more than the promise of an Ubuntu fork. Given that we have Ubuntu and plenty of other Ubuntu forks today, what's the big deal?

Heck, for that matter, we also have Jolicloud, another Linux fork that promises to be an "Internet operating system" for Netbooks, just like Chrome OS. (Ubuntu makes largely the same claim.)

The difference, of course, is that you can actually use Jolicloud today (alpha version), unlike Chrome OS, and I'm actually typing this on an Ubuntu-based Netbook. (Incidentally, you've got to think that Jolicloud's investors were kicking themselves last week when Google announced Chrome OS a day after they announced Jolicloud's funding.)

So, Google will ship an Ubuntu fork, but one that presumably will come with its own secret sauce. Why? Well, as CNET's Rafe Needleman generously suggests, because "The stakes are big enough that it's worth the shot for Google."

Maybe. Maybe not.

Let's assume "Maybe." This still leaves Google with the stated intent to tackle a Lilliputian market that only the Linux crowd seems to get excited about, which is why Barron's slaps the idea around:

I think Google misunderstands the nature of netbooks, which simply are small, cheap, lightweight PCs. Early versions ran Linux, and didn't sell. Once the netbook companies loaded them with Windows, sales picked up. On its last earnings call, Microsoft noted that the attach rate for Windows on netbooks had reached 90%. The people have spoken. Netbooks are a misnomer; while people do use them to connect with the Web, they use them for a lot of other things. Customers want netbooks to run standard software, including Office. And I doubt there will ever be a version of Office for Chrome OS.

Of course they won't support Microsoft Office. They're going to support Google Docs! (See "Microsoft moment" above.) Much as I like Google Docs, and much as I like OpenOffice and a range of alternatives to Microsoft Office, the reality is that if you don't support Microsoft Office, you automatically limit the market appeal of your operating system, a lesson Apple learned. Apple's support for Office was the beginning of its rise within enterprise computing.

It's just incredibly hard to overcome the inertia of an incumbent in an established market. Google looks smart when it is changing the rules for computing (giving search away and charging for ads, moving e-mail to the cloud, etc.), but when it competes with Microsoft on its terms...it's likely going to lose. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler gives a hint as to why. (Spoiler: It's the installed base, stupid):

New markets on the Web can emerge and grow really quickly. There's lots of opportunity for something like Facebook to take over in just a few years. But that's not really the case for PCs and desktop software. The installed base is just really, really large, and the growth and upgrade cycle are much much slower than with Web services.

Firefox has been the most successful piece of desktop software to ever challenge Microsoft's offering. We started the effort 10 years ago and finally arrived at a successful product 5 years ago and in the 5 years since we shipped that product, we've managed to gain about 300 million users and a quarter of Web browsing usage.

Apple has been the most successful operating system to challenge Microsoft ever and they've managed in the 8+ years of OS X availability to grab only about 5% of the global OS installed base.

It's just not fast or easy to move a market that's more than a billion large. Anyone that thinks that major change can happen in months, or even a couple of years, doesn't understand this space very well.

Google came out with a new browser (Chrome) some time ago, and still barely scrapes 2 percent market share. (Fake Steve Jobs says this is because "Chrome is [crap]," but I think it has more to do with the difficulty of changing consumer behavior.) Firefox has done better, but even Firefox is an example of just how hard it is to fight an incumbent on its terms, particularly when the incumbent is perceived to be "good enough," as CIO.co.uk editor Martin Veitch notes.

It won't help that Google doesn't look or behave in the way enterprises demand, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan writes.

In sum, Google has a lot to prove, and doesn't have a track record of churning out hits. It has one significant moneymaker, whereas Microsoft has two, one of which Google is now targeting with Chrome OS. It's going to get ugly, but I suspect Google may be the company that ends up with the black eye. As an open-source advocate, I'd like it to be otherwise, but I just can't see enough differentiation in Google's approach to suggest it will be more successful than others before it.

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It was just a matter of time before Google stopped pretending it doesn't compete with Microsoft and introduce its own operating system to go head-to-head against Microsoft. As reported by CNET, Google has now lifted the covers on its Google Chrome OS, "an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

That's funny. We already have several of those, each of them running the same code powering Chrome OS, as Glyn Moody reminds us. They're called Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Moblin, and...you get the point.

More specifically, while Google claims Chrome OS looks to the future of a Web-friendly OS, this is precisely the future that Canonical's Ubuntu has been envisioning and actively courting. It's therefore not surprising that Ubuntu enthusiasts like Renai LeMay ask why Google apparently elected to "splinter the Linux community" rather than "leverage the stellar work already carried out by [Ubuntu]."

Why indeed?

Well, because Google clearly wants to pull a Microsoft. Yes, Google has stated that "[a]ll web-based applications will automatically work," and not just on Chrome OS, as doing otherwise would be suicide, but you can bet that Google will fine-tune its own applications to privilege their performance on its OS...just as Microsoft has. At least Microsoft doesn't ask the open-source community to help it in such work.

Google may well be focused on simply creating a "delivery mechanism for a web browser," but as Gunnar Hellekson opines, there are far more efficient ways to do so. Hellekson goes on:

Google keeps dropping these code bombs on the [open-source] community -- that's a really expensive way to produce something nobody wants to help with.

In short, don't expect the open-source community to do Google's work for it, work that Google may not be particularly well-suited to do.

All that said, I'm glad to see more competition in operating systems, and think Google will do a lot to help push the state of the art, just as it has in browsers. But let's be clear: Google's announcement is neither cause for widespread elation (open-source world) or fear (Redmond). As ZDNet's Dennis Howlett explains:

Where's the secret sauce here other than the Google halo effect painted over with the browser and duly hyped by the SV Google lovers?...[T]he reality is no one outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble gives a damn what operating system and browser they use. Many are still mandated to use IE6 as a colleague reminded me the other day. Simply having Google wave its hand is not going to sway hard nosed enterprise buyers - even if it is free. Which neatly brings me to another point.

Google has said it wants to get help from the open source community. I'll bet they do. All those drivers that [TechCrunch editor Michael] Arrington dismisses with a wave of the hand WILL need to be served. If he thinks I'm wrong then a quick call to any of the major banks' CTO offices should put him straight on that one....Even...when ChromeOS does emerge it will be a v1.0. No enterprise buyer I know will go within a country mile of committing its users' kit to something at that level of maturity.

In other words, Chrome OS has a long way to go before we see it hit significant volume of adoption, no matter how good it ends up being, and particularly enterprise adoption.

As for how good it will be, Robin Yellow, a friend who works in IT for a Fortune 100 company, notes that "Google are a bunch of young people in California who ride Segways and wear their pajamas to work," which may not be the ideal bunch to create software that enterprises of the world want and will trust. That's a concern shared by Red Hat's director of product management, Rich Sharples, who worries: "What Linux needs is a true consumer-grade desktop - the Google experience still seems to be aimed at the tech savvy."

Google opted to "build" its own Linux distribution, rather than use a wildly popular, Web-focused OS like Ubuntu. It is doing so with a team that lacks Microsoft or Apple's flair for enterprise and consumer, respectively, and has asked for the open-source community to make up the difference.

Good luck with that. Open source does many things exceptionally well. End-user design doesn't tend to be one of them.

I respect Google's technological savvy. I respect even more the development chops of the open-source community. Unfortunately, I don't think either is a near-term, credible developer of a consumer-friendly OS that will motivate people to want to move from their Macs or Windows machines to adopt Google Chrome OS.

That's why I think CNET's Ina Fried should change her headline from "To challenge Google, Microsoft might want to think Apple," to "To challenge Microsoft, Google might want to think Apple." Google is the challenger, and the reality is that exceptional design, not merely technology advances, is what will drive consumer change.

If Google needs a reminder of this, it need look no farther than Android, its open-source alternative to Apple's iPhone OS, which is long on technology and short on success, precisely because it fails to understand and allure the consumer.

If Google really wants to leverage the power of open source and outdo Microsoft and Apple in ease of use, perhaps it should find a way to broaden the base of the open-source development community to include average users so that your mom, my brother, etc. can provide feedback on how to improve ease-of-use of Chrome OS. Now that would be innovative.

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There are companies like Intel, Canonical, Novell, etc., that are desperately trying to make Linux-based personal computers easier to use. Unfortunately, as Ubuntu fan Steven Rosenberg points out, there are often far too many decisions a lay user must make to make Linux just work for the average user.

Rosenberg was struggling to play music on his Ubuntu machine (you know, one of those obscure activities that only the geek elite do ;-), and struggled because of Canonical's efforts to balance ease of use with free-software purists' desire to have no proprietary codecs. The result is a mess:

But for a project/distro/movement that wants to preach not to the choir but instead to the unwashed, Windows-using masses, either let 'em play MP3s out of the box, make it easy to add that functionality (i.e. don't make 'em Google it, for heaven's sake) while at the same time educate them as to why MP3s, MOVs, Flash and all that other royalty-carrying, proprietary crap is bad, or just say right out front: "If you're geeky enough to figure out how to play multimedia, go ahead. But otherwise, re-install Windows and everything will be fine."

Amen. Using one's computer shouldn't be a religious experience. A computer is a tool, and it should just work. Mixing ideology with a utilitarian tool like the personal computer is an exercise in futility...for the developer and for the average end user.

This isn't to suggest that the Linux "desktop" can't work. It can, as the Linux Foundation's Moblin distribution proves: it's the most Mac-like Linux experience yet. It doesn't require me to resort to a command line to make Linux work for me. It recognizes that I have better things to do.

So, the Linux "desktop" can work. But to do so, I think we need companies involved, companies that are trying to scratch a very different itch than the one developers may be inclined to scratch themselves. That itch is usability for average end users. It's an experience that is high on ease of use and trades away choice. This is not a bad thing.

Indeed, it's the start of giving Linux a fighting chance against Windows and Mac OS X on the "desktop."

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In open source or in product development generally, one of the biggest mistakes is to take on a deeply entrenched incumbent on its own turf. Almost inevitably, if you play someone else's game, even if you're a little cheaper/faster/better, you're going to lose. Inertia favors the incumbent, and there's a whole lot of inertia involved in switching vendors.

For this reason, I agree wholeheartedly with Bill Weinberg's suggestion that Linux's opportunity in Netbooks is to focus on the mobile side of the market, rather than bringing a traditional, personal computer bent to the market.

Weinberg writes:

...(O)ne strategic error made by purveyors of Linux Netbooks was to covet the volumes of the global mobile telephony market while following the business models and channels of the legacy notebook marketplace. Linux fans--.orgs, Linux ISVs, and device OEMS--unfortunately approached the Netbook opportunity as a downward extension of the desktop and portable PC business, with volumes of 297M units in 2008 (IDC).

Instead, the Linux ecosystem needs to envision Netbooks (and MIDs and tablets) as building on the worldwide mobile handset business, with its 1.28B annual unit shipments (Gartner) the most lucrative slice of which, smartphones, constitutes 14 percent (ABI) with 20 percent annual growth rates.

Microsoft owns the traditional personal computer market, and probably will forever. But don't lose hope: the best strategies going forward are disruptive, in the Clayton Christensen sense. Microsoft is weak in mobile. This is where Linux proponents should focus their "desktop" strategies.

Apple is gaining on Microsoft in personal computers as much because of its iPhone revolution as its beautiful laptops. If Linux wants to win in Netbooks, and it can, it must do so by undermining Microsoft, not by confronting its desktop dominance directly. Netbooks must be more "Net" than "book," just as mobile phones are more about "mobile" than "phone."

If this is true, Google's Android, which is targeting smartphones first and Netbooks second, may have the upper hand on Intel's Moblin, which aims at Netbooks first, and is largely designed as a Windows replacement.

Malcolm Gladwell recently reminded the world that David beats Goliath with a sling, not a sword. Linux-based Netbooks, playing David to Microsoft's Goliath, should approach the market with a mobile bias, rather than with a personal computer bias.

"Hit 'em where they ain't," said Willie Keeler, which is as true in hitting baseballs as it is in competing with Microsoft.

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Revolutions don't always roil and boil toward a noisy, violent fracas. Sometimes they don't even ripple the surface.

Such is the Ubuntu Netbook revolution, which makes waves in the Linux community--and really nowhere else. Not publicly, at least.

I was fortunate to spend two hours on Tuesday night with Chris Kenyon, head of Canonical's Ubuntu business for original-equipment manufacturing, or OEM. Kenyon, in addition to being a fellow Arsenal fanatic, is also Ubuntu's point man for its quiet, but nonetheless dramatic, Netbook revolution.

Kenyon, who appeared a placid, affable chap when we first met outside Arsenal stadium to witness a shattering of Hull City's FA Cup hopes, eventually let his competitive side out during the match, cheering the team and jeering the referee. Brilliant. It was then that I got a taste for what Canonical's competitors, and particularly Microsoft, might be in for when competing with Ubuntu.

In the Netbook market, Ubuntu is the clear winner, with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and the other major hardware OEMs shipping Ubuntu-based Netbooks. But it's not yet clear what "winner" means. Microsoft, after all, still apparently claims 90 percent of all Netbooks shipped with Windows.

Therein, however, lies the seed of Ubuntu's revolution. Ten percent market share for Linux is pretty incredible. We rightly cheer Apple for its steady onslaught of Microsoft in the personal-computing market, and that's as Apple struggles toward 10 percent market share. Linux is already there in Netbooks, and Ubuntu claims the bulk of those installations.

There are indications that this could accelerate. I won't comment on the royalties Canonical currently earns on its Netbooks, except to suggest that its competitive price point must be extraordinarily expensive...to Microsoft. Manufacturers continue to ship Windows XP and pay Microsoft virtually nothing for the privilege due to discounts, rebates, and other incentives. With Ubuntu exerting downward pricing pressure, Microsoft doesn't stand to gain much in the growing Netbook market.

Let's say Microsoft earns $8 per copy of Windows XP shipped, which might actually be high, at least with the larger OEMs. At that point, the price differential between shipping Ubuntu or Windows XP is slim. But once Microsoft eventually turns off the XP spigot and requires OEMs to ship Windows 7, will Microsoft be able to command a hefty premium on its brand alone?

I doubt it. Canonical has permanently reset the Netbook operating system price point in its favor, at a level where it can compete vigorously while Microsoft must compete reluctantly. Microsoft, in short, is now playing by Ubuntu's terms.

Now let's compound the problem for Microsoft. Taiwanese original-design manufacturers are actively deploying Ubuntu for their OEMs (HP, etc.). They are now gaining experience and expertise in testing and quality assurance for Ubuntu. The mechanics of shipping Linux, in other words, are beginning to be well-understood. This, coupled with consumers' growing comfort with Linux in the Netbook form factor, make it hard to justify the inertia of staying with Microsoft just because it's Microsoft.

Netbooks are disruptive, in part, because they define productivity in terms of the Web, not Microsoft Office. The more users want to spend time in a browser, or instant messaging, or e-mail, the less Microsoft Windows is required. The less Windows is a requirement, the less that OEMs are going to be willing to pay for Windows licenses. Microsoft suffers (indeed, it may already be suffering), OEMs gain (because they earn better margins on their Netbooks), and customers gain (all the functionality they need at an attractive price).

And, of course, Canonical gains. There's a revolution going on. It's quiet, but it's happening.

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Who is Microsoft's biggest competitor? Some say "itself," and with good reason, as Computerworld points out. Microsoft's biggest Windows competitor is pirated Windows.

But there's another company that is increasingly setting its sights on Microsoft, and it's doing so largely unnoticed. The company is networking giant Cisco, which through a mix of open-source software and collaboration technology is launching a credible campaign to deep-six Microsoft's desktop dominance.

In the past year Cisco has acquired PostPath, which enables it to move Exchange users to its Linux-based, drop-in Exchange clone (PDF), and Jabber, which adds presence and instant messaging. It already had WebEx and more, giving Cisco a well-rounded collaboration story that mimics Microsoft in key places, like Exchange/e-mail, but surpasses it in others.

We typically pit Red Hat or IBM against Microsoft, but is Cisco Microsoft's most determined competitor?

It's not just in applications that Cisco increasingly competes with Microsoft. Cisco has been overtly targeting Microsoft with Linux, and has become a top contributor to the Linux kernel. The only thing it lacks is a desktop operating system, but in the cloud-based future that may well be a strength, not a weakness.

I'm not sure how Cisco has managed to fly under the radar for so long, but I imagine Microsoft is keeping a close eye on Cisco. Unlike Intel and others that would like to shed their dependence on Microsoft, Cisco has little need to placate Microsoft, because the bulk of its revenue doesn't depend on Windows. That's a frightening proposition for Microsoft, and one worth watching.

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While evangelists of Linux distributions built for personal computers (i.e., "Linux desktops") point to Netbooks as an indication of renewed life in their chances to compete for consumers, new data suggests that this may be a fool's hope.

Instead, such advocates would do well to follow the leads of Canonical and Red Hat, as they respectively extend the desktop with cloud services and deliver desktop functionality from the cloud.

Although it's true that roughly 30 percent of Dell Inspiron 9s Netbooks run Ubuntu Linux, it's equally true that about 90 percent of Netbooks run Windows, as Computerworld recently pointed out, while Linux had started with 30 percent of the Netbook market.

And while Dell is now saying that the return rate on Linux Netbooks is no longer four times that of Windows, as it was reported in October 2008, it's unclear how or why Linux will be able to take a greater share of the Netbook market, given that Microsoft has reduced its pricing to compete with Linux.

Sure, this means lower profit margins for Microsoft, but that's a hollow victory for Linux, isn't it?

Linux has a much better chance of succeeding on personal computers, if it starts from a position of strength, not weakness. Two areas of strength for Linux are mobile and servers. The mobile Linux market, however, remains somewhat fragmented, making it difficult to mount a near-term desktop challenge.

The Linux server, however, is ripe to creep down into the desktop, and that's precisely what Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat are doing.

The two companies are going in opposite directions, but they end in similar positions. For Canonical, which, with Ubuntu, arguably has the strongest claim to innovation and leadership on "the Linux desktop," the trick is to move more personal-computing services into the cloud.

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth told me last year that his Ubuntu desktop strategy would increasingly include cloud services. Recently, Canonical started to deliver on this vision by Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) hooks to its server edition, which has the added bonus of giving Canonical a compelling revenue model.

Red Hat, for its part, is starting with the server, where it's the undisputed market share and value leader. Recently, Red Hat told Computerworld that it plans to grow its so-called desktop footprint with a "desktop" that isn't: it's a virtual machine running remotely on a server and sitting side by side with Windows.

There may be flaws in this strategy, as some have pointed out, but as Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens told me on Wednesday, Red Hat's approach makes a lot of sense for CIOs who want to increase manageability of desktops while simultaneously reducing costs:

The target we are designing for is not the legacy model of thick Windows clients or terminal services. Open source is about driving innovation and new paradigms of use, not just to make a cheaper alternative to proprietary (software).

So the desktop target model we are designing for has several elements:

• Enable open-source solutions to help lower the OpEx costs of Windows environments by allowing Windows desktops to be virtualized within the data center;
• Open up the interoperability and technical advancement of the desktop remote-protocol space by open sourcing the Spice protocol for building VDI infrastructure on. This will have impact not just on virtual desktops, but also remote display of physical desktops;
• Through our ovirt.org effort, build an open-source implementation and reference architecture for building clouds, on which servers and desktops can be instantiated on demand;
• Bring virtualization to the client through our KVM technology, putting a hypervisor directly on the desktop. Enable the client to not just plug into VDI environments, but to be able to run desktops within the cloud or locally, seamlessly, and with full mobility;
• Through this new model, which enables multitenancy of desktop environments, enable a virtualization-optimized Red Hat Enterprise Desktop to be run from the same pane of glass as Windows.

In sum, Red Hat is not merely looking to join the Linux game for personal computers; it's also seeking to completely change the desktop market--Linux, Windows, or otherwise. This is an ambitious goal--one that Red Hat's Linux server strength puts it in a good position to deliver.

Linux desktop advocates should take a cue from two leading Linux companies, Red Hat and Canonical. The point isn't to replicate the Windows desktop. The point is to completely change the way desktops are delivered and their services consumed. Anyone still worried about Linux on Netbooks is fighting the wrong battle.

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