The Open Road

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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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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In a recent CNET interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Ballmer calls out two "primary forces" for Microsoft in the enterprise: Oracle and Linux. These are the things that keep Microsoft's Ballmer up at night.

It's odd, then, that neither Red Hat nor Novell seem to be doing much to take Microsoft on directly, except in the Unix-to-Linux competition with Windows that either Red Hat or Microsoft is winning, depending on whom you ask.

Novell depends too heavily on Microsoft's Suse Linux coupon program to aggressively stomp on the hand that is feeding it (and it's feeding Novell quite well), but what is Red Hat's excuse?

Historically, Red Hat has simply lacked the resources to go after Microsoft. Red Hat has always run a very lean operation, a necessity now but especially back when its subscription model hadn't yet started to deliver recognizable revenue that it could actually spend. Those days are over, and Red Hat now throws off a lot of profit.

Yet Red Hat still seems content to tangle with Microsoft at the field level with a "Linux is better than Windows if you're leaving Unix," while in the CNET interview Ballmer outlines a much more robust competitive strategy against Linux:

(Our EMC) partnership makes us stronger versus our Linux-based alternatives on the desktop. Part of the way we compete with open source desktop stuff is by having stronger total value-add.

We can't beat Linux on initial price. So, the notion of being able to go and say, here's a solution that you can really use to do fantastic security, fantastic data loss prevention from the client through the back-end, that's a powerful part of our proposition.

This refers to desktop Linux, but Microsoft's strategy everywhere against Linux is the same: a broad, value-adding ecosystem enabling Microsoft to offer holistic solutions. Red Hat largely continues to deliver point solutions ("Need an application server? We've got the best one. Need an operating system? Ours is best"), missing the market for overarching solutions, a market that Microsoft has mastered.

Going forward, I believe that Red Hat must expand its solution offerings if it wants to take market share from Microsoft. The Unix-to-Linux "low hanging fruit" won't last forever. When it's gone, the biggest barrier to Red Hat's continued growth will be Microsoft. Unless Red Hat starts acting now to build up a holistic response to Microsoft's value proposition, including the desktop, Red Hat will eventually struggle to grow.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

It's one thing to talk about open-source software like Linux becoming easy to use and a joy to look at, but it's quite another to actually fund the development of such improvements. Mark Shuttleworth has talked a lot recently about desktop Linux becoming as easy and beautiful as Mac OS X. Now he's ready to fund the talk.

In his introduction to the next Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope, Shuttleworth hints at a vision of Ubuntu's "once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine," and he says, "we want to make sure that the very best thinking across the whole open-source ecosystem is reflected in Ubuntu." Jono Bacon, community manager for Ubuntu, puts a little substance behind Shuttleworth's suggestion, outlining how Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will help guide sponsorship dollars to developers that want to improve Ubuntu.

But it is in this blog entry by Shuttleworth that Canonical's ambition takes its fullest shape:

...Canonical is [increasingly] in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can't imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bzr branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world, others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries.

And so it begins. To date, Novell has been the primary "upstream" contributor to the Linux desktop, though Red Hat and others have also been involved. Unfortunately, these participants have primarily been concerned with the enterprise Linux desktop, which is more utilitarian in its ambition than what I suspect Shuttleworth has in mind.

The Mac has carved its way into the enterprise because it has created devout consumer evangelists who insist upon bringing its aesthetics and utility into the enterprise. For desktop Linux to succeed, it must become much more enjoyable to use. People must want to use it.

Shuttleworth understands this. This is the right step for Canonical. Some open-source developers see aesthetic beauty as a nice complement to the Linux desktop. It's not. It is core, at least if the Linux desktop is to have a prayer of going mainstream.

Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real expertise in defining that. And that, as a distribution, our primary job is to be a very efficient conductor of their good work into the hands of users....

Because we've increasingly been engaged in the definition of the desktop experience for some of these consumer electronics products, however, we're now in a position to actually start engaging with those upstreams and investing in that desktop experience....

And so we started to build out a team that will focus on the specific user experiences..., and our goal, very simply, is to make sure the Free software ecosystem can deliver a Mac OS-like experience, or an experience that will compete with the Mac OS. We see Apple as the gold standard of the user experience. We believe that, while it can be a challenge, the innovation inherent in the Free software process can deliver an experience that is comparable and in many ways superior.

Mark is a wonderful diplomat, but I'm glad to see that he also recognizes the deficiencies of his upstream communities, even if he would never articulate it like that. Put baldly: The upstream developer communities that he references are developer communities, often without the expertise or interest in developing an average user-focused experience.

To beat the Mac for usability, the emphasis can't be on developers. It has to be on users. Too often open-source developers forget the user. I'm glad that Mark has not.

Novell's Brainshare is in full swing, and the company announced two significant deals. The first is that Hewlett-Packard will be preloading Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop on select laptops and desktops. It's a big coup for Novell after Ubuntu scored with Dell. It's also a big coup for customers who won't have to go through the bother of maintaining Linux on incompatible hardware, as I recently did with Ubuntu on Lenovo's X61 laptop.

Novell also scored with Sesame Street Workshop. This isn't a huge revenue generator but it's a fun deal. Sesame Street Workshop is a big believer in open source and has been deploying it a range of different contexts. Good to see them selecting Novell's Suse Linux...for the right reasons.

I see articles like this one--explaining the migration of one's mom, grandma, etc. to Linux--and I can't help but believe it's proof positive that the migration in question never should have happened. If it requires an article explaining the success (or failure) of the migration, it's too difficult to bother doing.

At least this author was honest:

So, is Ubuntu Linux ready for this type of installation? Yes, provided they have someone with some Linux expertise at hand to help them.

I'm an open-source believer, but that belief does not mean that I believe open source should be used where it is a less viable solution. At some point the desktop Linux crowd is going to realize that its goals (control, primarily) don't necessarily mesh well with those of the average user (usability, primarily). This is fine. It's not cause for alarm.