The Linux home desktop. This is the coveted property that untold numbers go home to play video and music on. Create home made birthday cards and print their digital photos from.
The work station. The interface that millions of employees and businesses look at daily and depend on to get critical tasks done. A bastion of practicality and sparseness.
It is the dream of untold OpenSource developers to have OpenSource and Linux dominate the home desktop market. To banish Microsoft Windows from the the 'adults' table over to the 'kids' table forever.
What is it that Linux and OpenSource need to offer to accomplish even a portion of that dream?
Usability. It's time to focus on the programs now. Home desktops users want appliances. click this icon to listen to music, click that icon to watch video. If it requires more than clicking on a couple of icons, it's too hard. No one believes that one should have to be a technician in order to make good use of a computer at home. Plug things in, they work. Done deal.
The home desktop needs to be an appliance, nothing more. The customers have spoken.
Linux as an Operating System is a fine and wonderful thing. Inherently more secure than some others and with some good habits learned, immeasurably so. Hardware drivers are becoming more common all the time and only a few holdouts remain who simply refuse to make their devices compatible with OpenSource systems.
But the programs, oh the programs. Where fore art though user desirable programs?
Where are the Create A Card desktop publishing programs, the "Learn To Speak Spanish" programs, the guitar lessons, the numerous PBS kids show based learning programs? The answer is ...Nowhere.
For all the bluff and bluster about wanting to take over the home desktop market, OpenSource programmers aren't creating the kinds of programs that home users want.
Now, truth be told, some of these types of apps are dependent on things like hardware drivers for the popular printers and digital cameras that are not easy to get the drivers for OpenSource to begin with. Also, seemingly silly things like fonts are tied up in patents and trademarks and unable to be used without paying hefty licensing costs.
Where are the OpenSource software marketing people? Why aren't they on the doorsteps to these companies holding out when it comes to drivers and fonts and all manner of things and selling these companies on the value of increasing their market visibility by releasing the software to be used in OpenSource projects?
I am willing to bet a bundle that if you could get some commercial, proprietary competitive OpenSource programs available for even a low price, enough to cover license costs, etc, users would buy them without an extra thought. Look at the $10 to $20 dollar shelves at Walmart and other stores, software is selling there like hotcakes. If those programs were available for Linux, people will pay.
What has any of this to do with work stations anyway? People who use computers at work will use what they are most comfortable and confident with. That would be the computers and software that they use all day at their workplace. Why use something you don't know anything about? If you use what you have at work, not only are you more comfortable using it at home, any work you might take home is going to be compatible with what is at work. Not a hard choice to make.
Work stations require less in the way of games and fancy graphics and multimedia than home desktops do. They need to be fast, flexible and productive. Linux would be well advised to get ingrained among users by becoming familiar to them by being used at more workplaces.
Onto the school desktop now. What has that to do with anything. The next generation of computer users is in school now. What they learn to use now in terms of software is very important to employers of them in the future. Not much needed in the way of training or re-training if they come out of schools already versed in how to use a common system.
If students are proficient and comfortable with Linux and OpenSource in schools, they will be major factors in companies purchasing decisions for systems in the future. Why pay for proprietary, high cost software when most of the new employees are well versed and productive on low cost and more efficient OpenSource software?
Did I say that OpenSource software is more efficient? Yes I did.
OpenSource software is designed to make the most use of hardware capabilities as part of it's natural development process. It's built in from the start, beginning with the Linux Kernel. Not only is it more efficient in its commonly shipped forms as distros, any one or any company can take that software and customize it even further to take advantage of the specific hardware in their servers and desktop computers. You don't get more practical or efficient than that.
So, start the schools using OpenSource software and Linux. The students will be trained and proficient on it. Workplaces will buy into it to accommodate to meet the capabilities and experience of the incoming generations of skilled new workers.
More workplaces are using OpenSource and Linux so people start buying more computers with it installed on new hardware, because they are comfortable and proficient with it from using it at work.
Programmers who start catering to the one click appliance home user program desires will be ready with desirable software for leisure and personal uses.
There you have it. Linux and OpenSource becomes the dominant scene.
Of course, by that time, there will be no more dominant, monopolizing companies and software becasue people are tired of paying exorbitant prices for software that and equipment that isn't worth half of what they paid for it.
In which case, the market will have thinned out a bit and maybe a few more players in the Operating System and software arena will be in the mix, forever eliminating the ability of just one group or company of holding all the cards again.
It could happen.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
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3 comments:
The customization/adaptability of Linux is as much a barrier to wide-spread adoption as it is a pathway. Windows (and MacOS, for that matter) are designed to present--as much as possible--an identical experience across countless different hardware platforms. There are simply too many distros, designed following too many different ideals, for the umbrella Linux experience to become a ubiquitous one.
That really is only true if you cannot discern that most of the so called "distros" really are not distros in their own right at all and are simply remasters for the most part of the "primary" distros.
Linux really is primarily represented by a handful of didstros such as Debian, Suse, RedHat, Arch, Gentoo, Mandriva, and Ubuntu, though Ubuntu is an offshhot of Debian.
If one starts with thes primaries then follows the 'tree of evolution' deriving of them, you find that these numerous choices only point to users own customizations to the primaries and one need not investigate the majority of them at all if they choose not to.
If you are confused by all the derivatives, then you really are not seeing the forest for the trees.
One of the things that made my switch to Linux earlier this year pretty easy is that I'm not in the habit of buying software for things when there are web applications that do the same thing. Why would I spend $20 on language learning software when my library subscribed to Mango Languages? Why would I pay for the guitar playing software when I can get lessons off YouTube? The Microsoft street-mapping software must have had its market share vastly reduced by MapQuest and Google Maps...
I think that is the trend we are moving towards right now. And I think it's that trend, rather than native Linux software development, that's going to make Linux a viable home desktop option.
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