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Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

For the longest time, the only two entities that made money from a mobile phone were the carrier and the handset manufacturer. Open and shut [1].

No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is

- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer

- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity

- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]

- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]

- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store

- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store

Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.

 

Open or closed?

The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up”  the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.

“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.

 

[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone. 

[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.

[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.

[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market). 

Is [old giant] losing out to [hot upstart] over [new trend]?

Did Microsoft miss out on the big search opportunity that Google pounced on? Is Google losing the real-time communication game to Twitter?

Microsoft’s original mission was “a computer on every desk and in every home” [1]. Even with their almost total dominance of the PC industry, that mission remains far from accomplished.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s a mouthful. But it’s also nowhere near completion.

Both companies – one over 3 decades old, the other over a decade old – have still only plucked the low-hanging fruit. Urban homes and corporations have computers, but there are still billions of potential Microsoft consumers – who might be well served with a mobile “computer”, for instance. For Google, even with its mind-boggling data center infrastructure and web-crawling, the task is just begun. Books. Space. History. Energy and resource consumption. And more. And that’s just the “organize” bit. Converting all that data to information so that it is “accessible and useful” is another thing altogether.

Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling. That’s why it’s unfortunate when such an organization changes its very mission to something that can mean absolutely anything (and therefore also nothing): Microsoft’s mission is now “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential” [2].

Google isn’t about to kill Microsoft. Not if Microsoft directs all its resources towards what it set out to do. Likewise for Google; Twitter isn’t out to organize everything known to man. So ignore those predictions of doom.

 

 

[1] According to Wikipedia the exact words were “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home”

[2] Although I didn’t find any evidence to suggest Microsoft changed its mission in response to any other company or threat

GigaOM announces the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.

So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about  “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.

It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.

Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.

Microsoft will lay off 5000 staff over the next 18 months. This is partly due to an 8% decline in client revenue attributed to “continued shift to lower priced netbooks”. Netbook sales have been robust. Buyers prefer Windows XP over Vista on netbooks because of performance issues, but Microsoft makes lower margins on XP. This is essentially the problem. Industry analysts are awaiting Windows 7, its Windows release.

But it won’t help.

Microsoft says Windows 7 is netbook-friendly (and it might well be), but that’s irrelevant. The issue is higher margins. If Microsoft prices Windows 7 like Vista, it’s going to raise the total price of netbooks. That is unacceptable. After all, the USP of the netbook is Cheap.

Now, I think the company’s realized the underlying problem: Mobile and Desktop are moving towards each other.

The company is more likely to make higher margins on its Mobile Operating System than on its Desktop Operating System. High-priced smartphones are becoming increasingly popular and also more sophisticated. On the other hand, PCs are getting smaller and lighter – and cheaper.

Most commentators have already identified Mobile and the Cloud as the defining markets for the immediate future and they’re probably right. Microsoft has plays (albeit relatively weak ones) in both these in the form of Windows Mobile and Windows Live.

I think we’re going to see a shift in investment toward these two markets, and away from the PC market. At the minimum, expect a quick rollout of Office Live soon (either free or monetized) and Windows Mobile 6.5.

Much has been said about Google’s open-source browser strategy after the Chrome release. The consensus seems to be that Google doesn’t want to win any direct “browser wars” (at least, not in the Netscape v/s IE sense), but to raise the standards for *all* browsers to run ever more sophisticated web-based applications. In other words, create a new “Internet platform“. Helps everyone, including Microsoft.

Noble enough, canny enough, bold enough. Except that no one’s talked about the gamble that’s implicit in the move.

Let me explain.

Suppose Google enhances its web applications using Chrome’s new capabilities – which it will. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader – now run almost as well as desktop applications. But only on Chrome. Now, these applications are more dependent than ever on the browser. In other words, Google is encouraging users to install a thin layer (of Chrome) on top of Windows to run their web apps. Perhaps Firefox will follow Chrome’s lead. That means 20% of the user base will be able to run the next generation of Google web applications.

But there is the remaining 80%. For that 80% of users, Internet Explorer is the receptacle through which they interact with the web. If Microsoft chooses to not play nice, Gmail, Google Docs, Reader will “break” on IE – that is, not render/function properly.

The average Joe’s reaction is to blame the “website”, not the browser. Example: The other day, the Yahoo! India mail website “broke” on Internet Explorer. My sister’s reaction was “Well, looks like Yahoo! mail’s not working properly, let me try Gmail”. Not “let me see if it works on Firefox”. Or my personal experience in cyber cafes in India: If the site doesn’t render correctly, “We’ll try after some time”. Not “Hey cybercafeowner, do you have Firefox on this box?”

In other words, if IE decides not to implement Chrome’s under-the-hood architectural innovations, it will end up discrediting Google’s own web applications, not IE or Microsoft. The average user is happy with his/her webmail (or other such apps). He/she won’t shift to a new browser, he’ll demand that the “email” work “as before”, or he’ll/she’ll switch to a new “email”.

No prizes for guessing that MS is hoping the new “email” is going to be Windows Live Mail.

At the outset, I’d like to clarify I’m no iPhone or Apple zealot. My interest in mobile touchscreen interfaces has been piqued by my recent purchase of an iPod Touch.

I was playing around with a colleague’s HTC Touch Cruise the other day. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and, in summary, is a full-featured smartphone with decent multimedia capabilities. That’s not what this post about though.

It’s about two clear observations I made – that we’re stuck in the late 90s when it comes to mobile touch-based input devices, and that UI designers still use the desktop paradigm when designing for mobile touch screens. While Windows Mobile is what triggered this post, with PalmOS, and UIQ too.

Poke, poke

Turns out that it’s a huge pain navigating the WinMobile interface on the 2.8″ touchscreen with your fingers. The buttons are tiny, the menu options are awkward, and it’s next to impossible to grab and drag a scrollbar. I gave up.  It’s clear – the best way to navigate a Windows Mobile is using the accompanying stylus. 

But a stylus is a hopelessly outdated tool. Along with the physical QWERTY keyboard for desktops/laptops, the stylus is a tool for mobiles that stubbornly refuses to die. Perhaps it’s easier – and commercially attractive – for touchscreen phone manufacturers to add applications and features than to rework a familiar, though suboptimal interface.

iPhone/iPod Touch have changed that. iPhone may not pack the sheer number of applications the HTC Touch Cruise does, but its interface is revolutionary. It lost the stylus. In fact, with multitouch – flicking, pinching, dragging with multiple fingertips – your hand is more effective than a stylus. You may not agree with iPhone the device (I don’t) – but you have to admit iPhone’s set the benchmark for all touchscreen interfaces.

Honey, I shrunk the desktop

Windows Mobile 6.1 has a task bar, a system tray, a Start button and a drop-down Start Menu. With nested menus. On that tiny 240×320 pixel screen.  

After spending a while with the device, I realized that Windows Mobile is essentially a shrunk-down version of the desktop Windows interface. The widgets are smaller, but the paradigm is the same. The result is a cluttered interface and a frustrating navigation experience.

Someone’s psyched the WinMobile team into believing that their biggest strength is that their mobile interface looks just like their desktop interface. That may have been true when mobile applications were very simple, but it doesn’t hold true any longer. It’s hurting usability and innovation.

There have been several calls for this, and I’m going to say it here again – the WinMobile team will do themselves and their legions of developers and enterprise customers a world of good if they rethink their interface. 
 

Note: I think Samsung and LG also have very good touchscreen interfaces. But this is merely an observation from Google Image Search results. Haven’t tried them out first-hand, so no comparisons.

Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.

Xobni is an Outlook plugin that has proven remarkably useful in managing managing bloated inboxes. It’s generated its fair share of buzz lately, and most users seem to love it. Apart from a clutch of very well-implemented features, what it is about Xobni that make it such a inherently popular tool?

Visibility: Xobni is a sidebar for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. With tens of millions of people using Outlook at work and, indeed, spending all day in it, Xobni is constantly in its users’ view. Contrast that with applications like Facebook, which live in a tab in your browser and will be out of view most of the time. (Serendipitiously, widescreen monitors are more popular than ever before, so a sidebar works well).

Ready-to-go: Unlike Facebook, xobni doesn’t need a first-time user to enter profile information, build a network over time by inviting friends, or accumulating wall posts or scraps. Xobni uses as fodder the tons and tons of information that’s already accumulated over the years in your inbox. That means once it’s done indexing, Xobni gets you up and running right away – discovering your network instead of you building it.

Intent-based: Xobni understands how you ‘do’ email. Users don’t view email as a chronological list of tasks at all – they either want to look at email as boxes of tasks (or projects or events), or as a collection of people whom they talk with. Xobni does the latter, and very well. So it’s a cinch looking up attachments from a contact, or the time of day you typically communicate with someone, or schedule time with someone.

Cool: Xobni’s done a terrific job of being viewed as something cool to transform drab old Outlook into. That’s why so many early adopters have turned passionate evangelists.

Do you use Outlook at work? Have you given Xobni a spin? What else (apart from specific features) do you think makes Xobni popular?

I was reading a Fortune Magazine article on how Ray Ozzie is the vanguard of Microsoft’s new Internet Services strategy. It struck me that Microsoft realizes that we’re moving away from the desktop to the “webtop” paradigm, where your data resides in the “cloud” of the Internet, and that we’re moving towards fundamentally new services that leverage the power of the Web. In other words, MS seems to “get” the Internet of the future.

In fact, one of the tenets of the “new Web”, or Web 2.0, as it’s more popularly known, is that value is moving up the software stack, and that applications are now commodities; the real value lies in services that are offered via those applications. For instance, I’m writing this document on Writely, a sort of Wordpad-for-the-Web. Mind you, it isn’t an application in the traditional sense of the term, as much as it’s a service. In any case, the important thing here is that it doesn’t matter what browser application I’m using to access this document on Writely. I’m using Firefox, but I might as well have been using Internet Explorer. Or Opera. Or Safari. Or… well, you get the idea. The browser does not matter any more. It is a commodity. A lot of application “services” today run on the same principle. All of Google’s offerings: Search. Local. Maps. Gmail. Orkut. Blogger. Writely itself. Take a look at the hottest tech startups today. Flickr. del.icio.us. 37signals. YouTube. Digg. Bloglines. Spot the pattern? How you access the application services does not matter.

The browser is just the way we access the Internet today. What will matter is how we will access the Internet tomorrow. I’ve said this in the past, and I’ll say it again here. Google Desktop (GD) is the application to watch out for. The future will belong to what are known as Internet-connected widgets, or as MS calls them, Internet-connected components (ICC) . These will be used on desktops, mobile devices, and any other appliances that will be connected to the Web in the future. And GD is one application that uses these ICCs already. Almost every single plugin connects to the Internet to gather the data it needs. Or take a look at Konfabulator, deemed valuable enough to be bought by Yahoo!. These widgets are the future of how information and content on the Internet is going to be created and accessed. Taking it to the next level, imagine these widgets on your smartphone. Or in your TV/TiVo. Or in your car. That is the opportunity for ICCs.

So does MS need Internet Explorer?
The area we’ve talked about above is where MS’s future opportunities are. Ray Ozzie and his team have to find a business model to monetize this opportunity. That’ll require his deep technical insight. It’ll also require immense technical talent from within MS to build a programming model around the new Web. And here’s where I’m going to step in and make this assertion.

Microsoft should stop developing Internet Explorer.

Instead, it ought to concentrate on building the Internet into the very heart of the next Windows, whether it’s the successor to Windows Vista (for the desktop), or Windows Mobile (for mobile devices). Firefox is doing a better job than IE in every respect. It’s the better browser by far. Only Opera can come close to being as good. IE isn’t MS’s competitive advantage in the least, in many respects, it’s a liability. A wise move would be to cease development on the browser – any development on IE would be simply playing catch-up to Firefox and Opera. It makes no sense to compete in such a market when you’re better off building up tomorrow’s market. Microsoft needs to jump to (in the words of Guy Kawasaki) “the next curve”. Or in the words of John Sculley, “change the rules of the game”, as he did at the helm of Pepsi.

I sense that Windows Live is another mistake that the company’s making. Not the idea of web-enabled services – that’s fine by me. But the fact that Windows Live works best on IE and has problems with Firefox, Opera, Safari means that we’re going down the same path again – trying to “lock-in” users to their browser, when it doesn’t make sense – does the value lie in Windows Live application services, or does it lie in Internet Explorer? There’s no rationale in their policy right now, and it looks as if it’s degenerating into an ego issue – stop the spread of Firefox at any cost. If Ray Ozzie is to be believed through his “The Internet Services disruption ” memo, MS is now a services company, only with multiple product offerings. (As an aside, this model is precisely what Gates had alluded to in his book “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” more than half a decade ago. Talk about visionary!) So why is it competing in a senseless, hopelessly commoditized market which isn’t even a revenue source, where all it gets is bad publicity, and where its product offering is way behind competitors from a feature and ease-of-use point of view?

If Microsoft has the courage to back up its vision with action, it ought to include a copy of Firefox with Windows Vista, as the default browser. But the home page ought to be Windows Live. Hmm – now that’s a move that makes sense!

Here’s a report on CNN Money, on the way Bill Gates deals with information. The article does provide a rare glimpse into Gates’ office, but you come away with the feeling that this kind of article ought to have appeared on a technology website, like ZDNet, maybe – and ought to have been more in-depth. Can someone out there do an interview with Gates on this specific topic – Personal Information Management?

There are multiple issues about today’s increasingly high-tech workstyle that come forth in this piece by Gates. I’m going to go through a few of them here:

Desktop v/s Laptop v/s Mobile:
Gates works on a desktop PC, using a massive display spread across 3 21″ LCD monitors. What struck me was not the awesome display (I have experienced the joy of working with a 21″ LCD display before I switched to a ThinkPad), but the fact that for a person who travels a lot, and works from multiple locations, he uses a PC! I’d think his chief workstation would be a laptop. I couldn’t imagine life without a laptop now – I am so used to being able to access my documents whether I’m at work, home, at a conference, or at a speaking engagement. Gates says that “when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It’s fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.” Well, I want to know more about this synchronization solution he’s using. I’d find it pretty difficult to sync all of my stuff on my Thinkpad to a PC, or the other way round – there’s just too many different types of things.

What’s interesting is that there’s nothing in there about mobile tools. Does Gates not use any? After all, the mobile world is now high on MS’ agenda. I would think that a touch-screen mobile device would be ideal for his meetings. I was speaking to a CEO of a technology company a few months ago, and he described how people used to walk into meetings these days without a laptop, TabletPC, or even a notebook. Then they’d whip out their Nokia smartphone and a foldable Bluetooth keyboard from their pocket, and type away!

I would think that Gates, who’s always championed the idea of “eating your own dog food” (witness how they migrated to Windows Server 2003 across MS internally even before the actual product launch), would use one of those Palm Treos that now run Windows Mobile 5.0:

Desktop Search:
“Another digital tool that has had a big effect on my productivity is desktop search”. Windows Desktop Search is probably (I hope!) what he uses, and although I don’t find it as snappy as Google Desktop Search, I can imagine what a huge productivity enhancer it can be for Gates. No filing, no browsing. As I had said previously, I do not use the Windows Start Menu anymore. I simply type the name of the application I want to in the Google Desktop search window, and click on it from the results list. Way faster.

The challenge for Gates is now to make Search the new paradigm for managing personal and public document repositories.

The Paperless Office:
The paperless office is now pretty much a reality with most tech companies now – we at IBM have digitzed almost all of our internal processes. There are a few instances where transactions are performed online but need to be printed out for approval – those are being addressed as you read this post. But the overall statement is true – it’s been a long time since the average technologist used a paper and a pen.

In his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Gates has covered the Paperless Office over an entire chapter. He points out that the only paper forms that remain at MS are the ones that deal with the Government. I’m certain that the situation is more acute here in India, where there’s no sustained, pan-department, nation-wide drive to cut down on paper. (Recall the ubiquitious sarkaari “file”!) That is where the most innovative minds must focus.

Sharepoint and Wikis:
Gates talks about collaboration using Sharepoint: “…SharePoint, a tool that creates websites for collaboration on specific projects. These sites contain plans, schedules, discussion boards, and other information, and they can be created by just about anyone in the company with a couple of clicks.” We at IBM use Wikis extensively. I haven’t had a chance to look at and evaluate Sharepoint, but Wikis do the same job with aplomb. Wikis are very scalable – two people working on an idea can use a wiki just as well as a multi-site, enterprise-level software development team with a staff of over a hundred – and very usable – no knowledge of HTML needed.

So we’re finally moving away from moulding our collaboration practices to fit in with existing tools, to building tools that are more suitable for efficient collaboration. For years, teams used email as a form of communication between teams, cc’ing everyone on the team to make sure everyone had the entire context. This is hugely inefficient! Think of the immense duplication of information – text, context, attachments. And speaking of context, it’s extrememly difficult to follow the flow of information by looking at multiple emails bottom-up. Wikis solve these problems with one stroke. The only shortcoming of a Wiki today is that representing tabular data is a bit of a pain.

Finally…
Finally, Gates talks about the “digital whiteboard” in a few MS offices, which takes a snapshot of the board and all its contents as an image. Hmm. We at IBM simply whip out our mobile cameras and take a photograph of the whiteboard! This remninds me of the story of NASA spending a lot of money on developing a pen that would work in Zero-gravity conditions, only to find that the Russians were doing fine with a pencil

Just came across Basab Pradhan’s Blog via Sambhar Mafia. So he’s one of the rarer breed on the blogosphere today – the Indian CEO Blogger. Apart from Rajesh Jain, there are almost no Indian CEOs blogging. First, Basab’s got a few good articles straightaway – one that wonders why Navi Mumbai’s rise has to be the result of Mumbai’s meltdown, or an intersting one about why passengers hurry to disembark from a plane at Bangalore airport, but not at Delhi airpor t!

Back to the question I raised – why we don’t have Indian CEOs blogging – and don’t even get started on “American CEOs don’t blog either” – there’s nothing that says our CEOs ought not to blog if their American counterparts don’t. But why would Management blog? An CEO – that is, top management – blogging, can be a very effective form of market differentiation. Apart from conveying to everyone where the company’s headed and why, a CEO blogging gives the impression of a very open organization – and that can be a very powerful tactic. Indians perceive India Inc. with awe, but also with a certain degree of detachment, almost like a form of “us and them”. Who wouldn’t want to know the real Naresh Goyal, the real Sunil Mittal, what Nandan Nilekani’s thinking these days? Jerry Rao of mPhasis writes fairly regularly in the Indian Express – rarely about the IT industry, mainly on policy matters and reform. That, in my opinion, gives both Jerry and mPhasis a human face. If Jerry were to start blogging about matters in his industry as well, it would work tremendously in his, his company’s and his customers’ favour. Imagine Naresh Goyal writing about global aviation, business trends and his vision for India’s future, and Vijay Mallya on the Indian alcohol/airline market, Government policies, how the industry is subverting the Government’s ban on alcohol on TV via smart advertising, about serial entrepreneurship…

There’s a huge audience for these blogs, certainly. There are far more Indian bloggers than I ever could have imagined – the Indian blogosphere is a healthy and vibrant community. Most of them have good content too, so they’re definitely right-thinking, rational people. Besides, businesses of most companies today aren’t limited to India. If a company’s products and services have a global market, it follows that readership for Mr. CEO’s blog will be global too.

By the way, a few American tech company do have a blogging “face”. For instance, Microsoft has (like him or hate him) Robert Scoble, Yahoo has Jeremy Zawodny and Russell Beattie, IBM has Ed Brill for its Lotus product line, Novell has Nat Friedman , Miguel de Icaza, Sun has Jonathan Schwartz – that’s helped each of these organizations build up a community following. But here’s the opportunity for us to race ahead and build a vibrant online thought community with perspectives from our corporate leaders!

If anyone needed a reminder that blogs have caught on only recently, take a look at this:

Two days ago, I’d wondered about Novell’s Internal Linux Move, on the sidelines of an article about such an announcement by IBM. In an interview with ZDNet UK, Novell’s MD in the UK told readers to watch out for announcements on that front at Novell’s Brainshare 2004 Convention in March last year.

Today, I hit pay dirt. Here’s an April 2004 interview with Novell’s CIO, Debra Anderson, (interestingly enough, also by ZDNet UK), which focusses almost entirely on this internal migration. Debra admits that a significant motivation for the migration was perception – Novell wanted to be seen as “eating its own dog food” – something that Microsoft is very proud of. Also, the migration strategy seemed to be to first use OpenOffice across the organisation – on Windows – and only later migrate fully to Linux. Novell also won’t be upgrading any Windows desktops they already have:

How is it working out winding up the Microsoft licences you do have – are they making that an easy thing for you to do?

It’s interesting you ask that — we just concluded our licences in March. That was our annual contract with Microsoft and we terminated the Microsoft OS and Office enterprise licence.

That was across the entire organisation?

What that means is that for all the OSes I have, I do not have upgrade rights. Now I still have perpetual use for the set number of Microsoft Office clients I purchased

I also stumbled upon a couple of March 2004 articles from Brainshare 2004 on – where else – ZDNet UK! Here’s an interview with Jack Messman himself ( Novell’s chief executive and chairman, for those not in the know). Jack also was in a particularly bombastic mood, declaring “We don’t need no stinkin’ Windows“! Remember, all of this was at Brainshare 2004, held at Salt Lake City between March 21-25 2004. It’s been over three quarters of a year since then. If Novell had indeed made significant progress on their promises, we’d be hearing from them a lot more than the stony silence we’re getting on this issue.

If IBM and Novell, the current flagbearers for Linux in the Enterprise, have both faltered on their own Linux migrations, they’re going to find it very hard to convince customers to do the same, either on the desktop or in the datacentre. There had better be some soundbites at Brainshare 2005 – March 20-25 2005.

Microsoft makes a big show of inviting customers to their Redmond campus to show off their internal usage of the latest in their product line. Gates devoted a large chunk of an entire chapter in his landmark “Business @ The Speed Of Thought” to this claim. Paul Thurrot, professional apologist for Microsoft, often touches upon this in his reports on his website. (Hey, to be fair, I admire his zealousness, and I recommend his website to all Windows enthusiasts!) It’s time IBM and Novell woke up to the need to not only do the Right Thing, but also to be seen doing so.

In the last quarter of 2002, LG Electronics and a few other computer makers introduced a line of PCs into the Indian computer market. Nothing new – except that these PCs came pre-installed with Linux. My initial reaction was one of delight and euphoria! Perhaps 2003 would indeed be the Year of the Linux Desktop – and that India was where the seed of that revolution was being sown!

But sadly, these PCs have failed miserably, in every possible aspect, to make any sort of impact on the massive Indian PC market. They came and went without so much as a whisper. Why? In this essay, I react to this market failure. Using a couple of reports that appeared in some Indian online tech magazines, I discover a few shocking facts about Indian PC manufacturers’ attitude towards Linux.

It isn’t very surprising that LG’s MyPC failed to make any significant inroads into the Indian market. It’s not just cost alone which is going to make users shift from Windows.

LG has been bundling Red Hat 7.3 along with it. A default install of RHL 7.3 would make any linux newbie cringe. It isn’t even as good as Windows 98 as far as looks and ease of use is concerned. (Not that I’m blaming RH for the whole thing.) They ought to have tried Mandrake 9.0, ELX Linux, SuSE 8.whatever, Xandros, even RHL 8.0 (but Bluecurve’s got too corporate a look for the home desktop user). But RHL7.3?!

It just seems to me that this entire exercise of Linux-based PCs was a failure because of complete and total lack of planning. Short sighted opportunism on the part of LG and Champion Computers led them to introduce such PCs into the market. No one is going to shift to Linux just because it’s cheap – least of all the individual home desktop user. He’s got to have compelling reasons to do so.

More than anything else, I find the reactions of the managers of these firms particularly disgusting :

Manikandan, deputy general manager, LG Electronics India said,

According to Kapil Wadhwa, who is the director of Champion Computers,

True, but weren’t efforts lacking on your part? You need to bundle a better OS than RHL 7.3 (at least, a better-looking OS ) if you want to realistically compete with the pirated Win2K -WinXP market. 99% of your target market uses their machines essentially as a games and entertainment machine. Ever thought of the fact that users wouldn’t be able to run these games? Ever thought of bundling Transgaming or some other such software along with it and using this fact as a marketing ploy?

Wadhwa said that it is only after educational institutes begin teaching Linux, that users will begin feeling comfortable with it.

To say that people will start using Linux only if educational institutes start teaching it is ludicrous! Surely people don’t use Windows just because it’s been taught in school?! Did people start to use Windows simply because institutes started teaching Windows, or was it the other way round? MS has spent billions of dollars into user-interface research just so that any ordinary person can use their systems. What about the 40yrs+ generation? They use computers at home and at work without them being taught any of this in school. Computers are easy enough to use without them being taught. Don’t blame the consumer for your faults. You will alienate your market faster than you can say “GNU!”.

What about the visibility factor? This is what Kapil Wadhwa of Champion had to say:

And who, dear sir, is going to create this visibility, if not you? If you want your PCs to sell, and if you know that Linux’s visibility is low, is it not up to you to create it? I would never have known about this LG MyPC thing if I had not been flipping through an obscure channel by the name of TMG Enter where this was a 1-minute report.

Basically, this comment sums it up for me:

said Manoj Kumar of Champion Computers.

These are people who care nothing at all about the real advantages of Linux. They neither know, nor do they care, about GNU, the Free Software and Open Source movements. For them, Linux is nothing other than a cash-saver. Free as in speech, control over software, means nothing to them. That is why they will eventually fail. If they use their marketing skills and money power to highlight the correct aspects of Linux, then they will be able to convert even those who have been using pirated Windows for years.

What about support? How about manuals, guides, included simplified documentation, always-available helplines? What about marketing? Linux-based PCs came and went, leaving quite a bitter taste in the mouth as regards India Inc.’s views on Linux’s advantages.

The SQL Slammer Worm hit businesses the world over in Jan 2003, causing, yet again, losses of millions of dollars. But this worm was just one member of a steady stream of viruses and worms to attack the Internet in the last few years. This brings us to the larger issue of the sheer vulnerability of current software, particularly Microsoft’s, to such attacks.

In this letter to the Editor of the Indian Express I highlight this problem and debate how much Microsoft is to blame for this threat.

Your editorial “When the worm turns”, on 28th January, brings to the fore a worrying aspect of computing that seems to have escaped the notice of most of us.

The SQL slammer worm, as you mentioned, exploited a gaping vulnerability in the Microsoft database program SQL Server, used by many many businesses around the world on their mission-critical systems. You have described the enormous damage it caused around the world, particularly in “wired” countries.

Now, at the end of your editorial you have written “Now, if only Microsoft would hurry up and plug that glitch in their software.” This is a crucial point to make and is the crux of my whole argument – should the world rely on just one company to keep its systems, worth billions and billions of dollars, up and running? By this I do not mean that Microsoft is to blame per se. It is perfectly right on its part to provide software that businesses need. The fatal mistake that businesses are making is, going in for software that is closed source, like all of Microsoft’s.

Closed source software is the kind that does not allow the end user to see or modify the source code (the files written in various programming languages that make up the end product). This means that Microsoft and Microsoft only can control SQL Server (and indeed all its other products). Any vulnerability in the program can be fixed through patches issued only by Microsoft, which may choose when to do so and whom to distribute these patches to. True, major Anti-Virus companies have issued fixes to guard against this worm and others, but as usual this is a reaction, these are steps taken only after the damage has occurred. The question we need to ask ourselves is “Why should there have been such a vulnerability in the first place?” This vulnerability remained because no one was able to review SQL Server’s source code in order to notice the problem. If the source code had been released to the public along with the product (or even as the product was being developed), many of the known and (God forbid!) as yet unknown bugs might have been revealed long back.

There is a software movement called Open Source Software. This movement believes in free access to the source code of products, and cooperative development of software. Through this model of software development, excellent products have emerged, such as the Linux operating system, and the Apache Web Server (a web server is the software that drives a website). Open Source Software gives complete control of the software to the end user, with the freedom to use, modify and redistribute the software as he wishes (with some restrictions to maintain the free nature of software). This software is the kind that we ought to be using, simply because of the control that it grants us. No longer does an organisation have to depend upon a handful of companies to maintain its software, and thus, its data.

This last point is important. Most commercial software, especially database products, store the customers’ data in their own format, which is readable only by that company’s software. The details of the format will never be made public. This renders the company totally dependent on the software vendor to guarantee access to the data. As we all know, data is the cornerstone of any organisation. Should businesses, whether small or collosal, leave control of their data in the hands of a single company?

As far as the question of security goes, Open Source Software undergoes intense testing and review by developers around the world. Most bugs in the software are reported immediately, and fixes are released in a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks, as with commercial software.

Will the businesses which lost money due to this worm , or the countless users who were unable to access their email, hold Microsoft accountable for this devastation that this worm has caused? No. It will be the insurance companies who will have to dole out any compensation. Time and money lost is lost forever. And after all this, we have no guarantee (and it is unreasonable to expect one) from Microsoft that its products will no longer contain such vulnerabilities.

Microsoft will continue making buggy products, which will continue to be a bigger menace to the world business, as computing technology makes further inroads into our lives. It is up to us to decide whether to risk our fortunes upon a single, unamenable entity, or upon Open Source products, which are freely modifiable, and thus more secure.

Mr. Sanjiv Mathur, Head of Marketing, Microsoft India, had his viewpoint on Open Source Software in Governments published in the November 27 issue of the Economic Times. Here is a point-by-point rebuttal of his claims made in the article.

And you can do a *lot* more with free software than you can with commercial software.

Oh, really? Does the Samba team charge for the excellent software they provide that involves reverse-engineering Microsoft’s networking standards and providing interaction between UNIX and Microsoft-based products? Does the OpenOffice.org team charge for its revolutionary office suite, which according to a poll on linux.com satisfies the needs of nearly all MS-Office users? Do the KDE and GNOME teams charge for the superb desktop environments they’ve built? On a larger scale, in case he’s referring to distributors, does RedHat charge for the entire 3 CDs worth of RedHat 8.0 that they’ve put on their ftp site for download? Do any of the other distributors? Wrong, sir, wrong. Most companies that develop applications on Open Source platforms do NOT charge.

And by the way, where you draw the line between “basic software” and the “applications developed on it”? Because Linux is essentially a huge set of applications ranging right from the kernel to the desktop environments, working together to produce an OS. There is no “basic software” anywhere in the UNIX world. All are applications. Mr. Mathur is still stuck in the Windows world where you have a “basic” Windows product and then have to buy additional applications that run on it.

To suggest outright that the pricing structure of Open Source Software is similar to commercial software is flawed. Unless a company specifically approaches a Free/Open Source Software vendor for support as regards initial installation, further support and training, there is no obligation upon that company to pay the vendor. Such charges as mentioned by him are not mandatory, and indeed, several companies moving to Free/Open Source Software do not opt for support from the vendor.

Prove it. This doesn’t make sense. As mentioned by R. Gopalakrishnan, secretary to the chief minister of MP, the TCO of Free/Open Source Software is anywhere between one-half to one-tenth of the equivalent commercial solution, even when accounting for your “hidden costs”.

Reducing choice?! The fact that the Open Source community has over 3 high -quality equivalents for every major commercial offering, speaks volumes for the proliferation of choice in the Open Source market. Instead the very nature of GPL is what encourages and fosters Open Source products of high quality – because everyone gets to make use of the best code contributed by the most talented developers.

But price is what Microsoft is harping about; the Open Source community has always stressed upon the “free as in speech” advantage that Free/Open Source Software offers. And while Microsoft brands the Open source philosophy as “communist” and “anti-American”, listen to their Head of Marketing speak – “supported by a strong regime for intellectual property protection”. This kind of “regime” is exactly what fosters monopolies. If Microsoft is really interested in advancing technology, then the best way to do so is to make public your best technologies, so that others can extend them. The best implementation shall win. Those that don’t make the grade will lose due to lack of market acceptance.

Same flaw – Same argument. See above.

He mentions integration costs between various components. The best part is that a lot of the integration is done by the distributors themselves. Then again, the integration part isn’t as hard as Microsoft makes it out to be – excellent sites like Linuxfromscratch.org describe how to get a complete Linux system, using nothing but the source codes of various software. Imagine doing that with Windows 2000 components!

From a larger perspective, the UNIX philosophy isn’t even about the kind of integration that Microsoft (and the Windows world) are used to. UNIX is all about tools, tools which each achieve one fixed function, and then to combine these tools in almost infinite ways in order to achieve your end. This is what gives UNIX its fabled flexibility and transparency.

As far as integration between components goes, if each one of those components follows clear, open, simple standards of communication (as opposed to cryptic, closed, binary-based standards) , there shouldn’t be any problem.

This argument is now beginning to bore me – Open Source software being more vulnerable to security just because its source code is available. How does Microsoft explain the fact that in spite Windows NT/IIS Web servers making up a small fraction of web servers on the Internet, as opposed to UNIX/Apache-based ones, the former are the ones which are most frequently hacked? Indeed, UNIX wouldn’t be such a hit on mission-critical servers (such as web servers) if it were so vulnerable just because its source was available. Go check out NetCraft.com for a rating of the longest-running web servers; all of the top ten run BSD, a free variant of UNIX. I quote “Applied Cryptography”, Bruce Schneider, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, page 3, speaking about the public key-private key encryption algorithm:

“All of the security in these algorithms is based on the key (or keys); none is based in the details of the algorithm. This means that the algorithm can be published and analyzed. Products using the algorithm can be mass-produced. It doesn’t matter if an eavesdropper knows your algorithm; if she doesn’t know your particular key, she can’t read your messages.”

Or, even more relevant, to “Practical UNIX and Internet Security”, Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford, O’Reilly and Associates, pages 40-45:

“… This is especially true if you should find yourself basing your security on the fact that something technical is unknown to your attackers. This concept can even hurt your security.”

Scary, isn’t it?

Good attitude. But having said that, don’t use your financial and political clout to undermine other offerings, whether closed-source or Free/Open Source. History is rife with examples of how Microsoft has used non-technical means to further its interests.

The form of R&D that the Open Source community puts in, is far more than any commercial offering, both in terms of quantity and quality, since those who develop Open Source Software are committed to the code they produce, the fact that they are at all coding the software bears ample testimony to the fact that they put in an amazing amount of time and research into their product. The beauty of the whole ecosystem is that developers do not *expect* to be compensated for the work they put in. Compensation is the fact that they gain a higher standing among their peers. To a true developer, this is the highest form of reward.

Well, then by all means do so. It will be immensely beneficial for all, not least you.

He misses the other side of the coin – If anyone can copy your software and market it as their own, remember that they have to make it available under the exact same licencing terms that it was available to them. Thus if they can make unlimited copies of your software, so can you, of their product. Whatever modifications the “third party” makes to your software to make it better, you can view those same modifications and use it in the next version of your software.

Thus in a process that builds upon itself, the software in question keeps getting better and better. The vendor who in the end markets his product better, will win. But customers always have the option to switch to the other alternative(s) available. In the end, the customer benefits. Those are the new rules of the game. No one has, or can, decree that vendors have to keep making vast profits the way they have always been doing. If, in the interest of producing radically better technology, vendors find that they cannot do businesss the way they have traditionally been doing, then that’s too bad. New business models will evolve to fit the new trend in technology. All Microsoft is doing is stifling this evolution towards better software by branding it as “onerous”.

And finally a contradiction. When he started this article he said that in the end, Open Source software in the marketplace is not much different from any commercial offering. So how will attempts to render software free “ultimately undermine the software industry”? The software industry as we know it today will undergo a sea change in the future. Software today is looked at as a product, rather than a service. That will eventually change.

Clearly Microsoft has a fundamentally different viewpoint on software than the Free Software/Open Source Software community. They shall go their way and we ours. May the best man win!

On the LIG and other lists there have been discussions over the past few days, about the ramifications of Mr. Bill Gates’ visit to India and the donations that he made simultaneously to fight AIDS in India ( as Chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and to Microsoft India (as Chairman of Microsoft).

What i found particularly disturbing is the way that our chief ministers were falling over themselves in order to get further investment from Microsoft into their states. This is not because our CMs are tech-savvy (although this is what Vilasrao Deshmukh, S.M.Krishna and Chandrababu Naidu would like us to believe), it is solely because to them, Microsoft is

1. a cash cow, a source of huge funds, and
2. a high profile (U.S.) company, with whom, if associated, they would be able to enhance the image of their respective states.

These states are also beginning, or have begun in some small way, an e-governance drive. In this light, Mr. Gates, the businessman that he is, probably sees an opportunity to make further inroads into the Indian market.

The BusinessWorld cover story says,

If Microsoft can target the Government, it could make a lot more money, considering India is slated to be among the largest software markets within the next 5 years. It is already on its way to doing so. Mr. Gates always lends a sympathetic ear whenever any CM meets him. And then after his visit, Microsoft India is always quick to follow up on any new initiatives that he might have brought up. So our technologically advanced states already have a Microsoft bias, in both governance and education.

In this light, it’s very important that we have a credible and unified approach ready to convince our state governments that they ought to use Open Source/Free software in their e-governance drives. The benefits of doing so have been oft-repeated on this list, so i’d better not go thru them again. This needs to be done because for all the task forces that our government(s) might set up, and all the vocal support they may give to Open Source/Free software, this seems to vanish into thin air whenever someone like Bill Gates lands up here. Then all the begging-bowls come out again, mainly for the reasons mentioned above. (Yes, i am worried and insecure, NOT because of Microsoft, but because our Governments (at the centre and states, regardless of party) have a long history of making awful policy decisions, and letting the most stupid issues cloud their judgement).

I suppose the reluctance at the top to go ahead with adopting Open Source/Free software in governments is the same FUD that used to dominate the corporate world in the mid-to-late nineties – user-unfriendliness, lack of applications or support, and, (i think, most important) the fact that with Open Source/Free software, the Government doesn’t have one company of even a fraction of the stature of Microsoft while dealing. Given how conservative our government (and bureaucracy) is, this is the one factor that prevents it from having faith in Open Source/Free software, no matter how much its benefits are drilled into them. The government thinks it needs ONE company to deal with, not a community “out there”.

So either we need to find some way of making it believe that the community “out there” does provide better software, or find some Open Source/Free software company that acts as the facilitator (and hence the link bet. the community and the government). Maybe Linux distributors with an Indian prescence – Red Hat comes to mind first – could fit the bill.

A reporter from I.T Nation Business Review sent me a questionnaire regarding their cover story for next month’s issue, “The popularity of Linux in India”. I’ve reproduced my answers to their questionnaire here:

Well, I have seen RedHat Linux installed on nearly all Linux PC s that I’ve seen. Mandrake Linux seems to be the only other distribution that has any sizable user base. There is a disturbing perception here that “RedHat” means “Linux” and “Linux” means “RedHat” . Whenever users refer to the version of Linux they’re using, it’s always something like “He’s using 7.3 still, even though 8.0 is out”, referring to RedHat Linux 7.3 and 8.0 . I even saw a poster of a training institute that said that they offered courses on “…Windows 2000, Linux 7.2, Solaris…”. What Linux 7.2?!

The government, tragically, seems to be taking a very narrow view of Linux and free software in general. It considers only the “free as in cost” aspect of free software, saying that India is a poor country and thus Linux has a very strong case in India…

But free software is much more than that. Indeed, the “free as in freedom from licencing issues”, and access to source code, is a much more important aspect of free software. The Government needs to understand that by adopting free software, it is achieving control over its software and data, that its software systems are owned by itself and not by some third company.

The Government still needs to do a LOT more as regards its “new initiatives” with Linux and free software. To cite a crucial example, in our school computer syllabus, students are taught that “A computer consists of 2 parts, hardware and software. Hardware means either a Intel 486, or the newer Intel Pentium processors, and software means MS-DOS or Windows.” Further, the syllabus goes on to teach them MS-Word. Thus we have a generation of students, who have been insightful enough to opt for computer subjects in their schools, but who end up learning just about Microsoft products. These students wrongly believe that Windows is the only OS that a computer can have installed, and that only Intel makes processors. They do not teach word processing, but rather MS-Word. This is a shocking scenario and needs to be rectified very soon. Imagine the chaos when the industry moves to Linux and Linux-based products, and our students are still learning this stuff!

Further, the Government has to stop falling at Bill Gates’ feet every time he visits India, and not treat him like a head of state. For more of my views on this please refer to an article I wrote to the Linux India Mailing List, which can be found on my website at http://www.geocities.com/tuxonline/writings/ossingovt.txt (Update – this link is outdated – Rahul)

Still , these initiatives taken are a positive step, better than none at all. Let us hope that Linux companies can take advantage of these initiatives, particularly in Government computerisation.

In India, as well as worldwide, prices of computer hardware are falling rapidly and regularly. In contrast prices of Microsoft products are rising, examples being MS-Office and Windows XP. Thus, the price of software is increasing in terms of percentage of total computer costs. There will come a time when this percentage will just be too high to be acceptable to users.

We are also seeing OEMs in India offering PCs preinstalled with Linux. For instance, LG is offering its MyPC with RedHat Linux 7.3 preinstalled, Compaq is also introducing a similar package. However, these same vendors, in their advertisements regarding their other models, they put up a sign that says “Compaq/IBM/LG recommends Microsoft Windows XP” . This confuses prospective buyers (one of them was my aunt, so I know!), who are attracted by the costs of this Linux PC (almost Rs. 7000 less), and on the other hand they see this sign about XP. These vendors should define very clearly the intended audience for the Linux PC s and the XP ones.

Further, what about the after-sales services? Are there technicians who have enough knowledge about Linux that they can tackle most problems? There still exists this huge fear complex in the minds of most small-time computer vendors about Linux. About a year ago, My speakers developed some problems. When I contacted my vendor about it (he’s a medium-sized assembler) he promtly sent over a technician to investigate. The moment he found that I run Linux, he not only refused to help me, he even terminated my warranty, saying that I had violated his terms, that they did not support Linux, and, to top it all, that Linux had caused the problems with my PC!

The version of Red Hat Linux that LG is supplying with the MyPC is pretty old now, and can hardly be considered for desktop use as a replacement for even Windows 98. So it is hard to imagine any organisation that would switch to the MyPC. Software also needs to be provided along with these machines. For instance, Linux does not have the number of games available for Windows, but one can run most Windows games on Linux using special software. This software needs to be bundled with the PC.

There are excellent desktop Linux versions available today. The first one that comes to mind is Xandros 1.0 (http://www.xandros.com) . This version of Linux, which unfortunately sells for as much as $99, is a very very advanced Linux distribution which can safely be declared a competitor to Microsoft Windows XP.

Another distribution is Lindows (http://www.lindows.com), which a lot of stores in America (Walmart, for one) are already offering as preinstalled. Among the traditional ones are Mandrake 9.0 (http://www.linux-mandrake.com) which has for long been consistently providing high quality desktop software. Sun Microsystems and RedHat are working separately on a distribution of Linux specifically aimed for the corporate workspace. These distributions are being watched closely, as both Sun and RedHat are touting it as the “next-generation” Linux.

Finally, India has its very own desktop Linux distribution, ELX Linux (http://www.elxlinux.com)! This distro has received rave reviews from various sections of the computing industry, and is on par with Xandros and Lindows.

There are some very obvious steps that all of us Linux advocates should take. The first one is to maintain relationships with various OEMs and resellers, to encourage them to start providing good desktop versions of Linux preinstalled on their PC s. This will immediately cause mass awareness about Linux. Next is to work collectively to remove all the FUD (Fear, uncertainty, doubt) that ordinary users still have as regards Linux. I was invited in October to deliver a seminar on this very topic: Linux on the desktop. Right after this, I was flooded with calls on how to obtain Linux, how to install it, and so on. So, given enough correct information, people are certainly willing to switch to Linux.

We also need to drop the mindset of “Linux is cheaper than Windows”, because as more and more is expected from Linux and free software, developers and software vendors will have to put in more resources. This will cause the price of most free software products to rise. So we must be prepared to pay.

The biggest advantage that Linux and free software enjoys over commercial software, is the control that it grants to the end user over the software. Issues such as access to the source code, freedom to modify and redistribute it, and other such principles are crucial in the long run. No software vendor will be allowed to dictate terms to the user. These freedoms also encourage multiple software developers for the same product, leading to the proliferation of choice for the end user. These are the issues we need to be talking about to people. This is the argument that’s going to make them shift to Linux.

Free software is released under a number of licences, chief among them being the GPL, the BSD Licence, and the Netscape/Mozilla Public Licence (MPL). The Linux kernel itself is under the GPL. The major features of each licence are :

• GPL: the GPL does not allow you to make your modifications private. If you modify a GPL-ed product and redistribute it, you must do so only under the GPL.
• BSD: the BSD licence allows you to make your modifications private.
• MPL: This licence has special provisions for the developer. It allows Netscape, for example, to re-licence the modifications the you’ve made to its software.

The tricky nature of most of these licences is meant to preserve the free nature of the software. However, traditional software companies who are used to working with commercial software, find these impossible to work with. The solution to this is to rethink your entire software philosophy. Refer to Eric S. Raymond’s seminal work on this subject , The Magic Cauldron, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html

Most of the “major IT companies” in India are solutions providers, and are willing to use Linux only if the client requests it. I spoke to a marketing executive from Wipro in July last year, and asked him this very question. He replied that Linux is gaining acceptance as an alternative to traditional UNIX servers, but clients still find it too risky to try Linux on their workstations. When asked why, he said that they thought Linux was still not ready for desktop use, and that there weren’t enough applications to run on that platform. He did, however, concede that their own developers found Linux an excellent development platform.

As far as support from hardware companies is concerned, yes, there are a few hardware vendors who have Linux drivers for their products ready for download on their web sites. But these are few and far between. Another area of concern in the free software community, is that these drivers themselves are closed-source, and proprietary. The community complains that this is against the spirit of free software, and I would tend to agree with them.

Microsoft muscle power is certainly a big obstacle in the adoption of Linux in the Indian industry, and so is the high piracy level in India. That is why I said earlier that it is not the “free as in cost” aspect of Linux and free software that we should be harping upon; rather, it is the “free as in speech” part. Do users want control over their systems or are they willing to give these freedoms to some company? As Benjamin Franklin put it so beautifully, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Microsoft’s chief income comes from large organisations who deploy Windows-based systems. These are the entities that Microsoft is targeting in its anti-piracy drive. It knows that individual home users in India cannot afford to buy genuine copies of Microsoft products, and on top of that, upgrade them whenever it comes out with newer versions. It is probably in Microsoft’s interests, to not target the individual market, to let them continue to use pirated copies. Why? To achieve what is called product “lock-in”. If, right from the onset, if the only thing that users use are Microsoft products, naturally, they will be most comfortable with these poducts in their workplace, leading to adoption of Microsoft products in the workplace too. They probably realise that this rampant use of pirated software is actually creating a “Microsoft Generation”.

Linux companies will probably target the menace of Windows in a very simple manner : to produce software that it technically superior to Microsoft’s products. But what they really need is a fantastic marketing organisation, to convince users, both individual and corporate, that their products are indeed better. Microsoft’s forte has never been developing the best products, but to make users think that these are the best.

I don’t think that this is an individual issue to be addressed. Once the user base for Linux achieves a certain critical mass, hardware vendors will be under tremendous pressure to make sure that their products are Linux comaptible : take the recent announcement from chip-maker AMD that it will make sure that its chips are well-supported by Linux. Software support for Linux will drive the hardware support. This is already happening. To give you a really significant example, two years ago, a number of groups, including the NSA (National Security Administration), HP, Immunix, approached Linux Torvalds, The creator of the Linux kernel and now the lead maintainer of the Linux kernel development team. Each wanted its solution to be the approved security mechanism for Linux.

I feel that once resellers are convinced about the advantages of Linux, lack of training will be no problem, as they will start spending as much on gaining Linux expertise as they do today on gaining Windows expertise. More and more training institutes are offering courses based o Linux, primarily system administration and network adminsitration courses. This is a good think, bacause sysadmins and n/wadmins get to know a lot about the inner working of the OS. Once enough people get trained at these institutes, such complaints will disappear.

Basically it is important to remember that the world has been using Microsoft technologies for the last 20 years at least. It will obviously take time for a new technology , however good, to gain general market acceptance. It is compounded by the fact that computers today play a critical role in all walks of life. For many people, moving to a new technology presents a certain risk which they may not wish to take suddenly. For Linux, it is sure to be an evolution rather than a revolution.

But that’s where you’re wrong! There are more people willing to try out Linux as an alternative to Windows than ever before! You see, Linux has been garnering a lot more press attention than at any given time in the past, and nearly all of it has been positive. So when the average user reads about so many companies adopting Linux, and reads about the CEO/CTO of that company extolling the benefits that his company has gained from Linux, he thinks, “If these guys find Linux so cool, why not get it on my computer?” Because users are fed up with the unreliability of Windows (especially Windows 98, which most use), but they continue to use it because of lack of any other alternative. It’s like “passive acceptance” of whatever faults Windows has. Now they have an alternative.

Pros:
Most free software products tend to be very flexible, and that’s true in the Linux world too. The desktop environments for Linux are much much more customisable than Windows. An average desktop user used to the Windows GUI will be absolutely delighted at the amount of customisation that is possible. Then there is the advantage of choice. For every software that Windows can offer, Linux has 3 or more high-quality alternatives. More of my views on this at http://www.geocities.com/tuxonline/writings/whylinux.txt (Update – this link is outdated – Rahul)

For developers, Linux is a programmer’s paradise. Most programming language compilers and interpreters are installed along with a typical Linux installation. The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is one of the most sophisticated compiler suites in the world. There are fantastic text editors such as Vi and Emacs that make code writing easier. IDEs such as Kdevelop, Kylix, Anjuta are also available.

The one disadvantage that I can think of is the lack of games for Linux. It’s like major games developers are just ignoring Linux while developing games. The market for games is enormous, and whichever platform runs the most games, will have a great advantage in the individual desktop home user segment.

Areas which used to be major problems, but are now as good as gone, are difficult installation procedure, poor hardware support, lack of applications, lack of finish in the graphical desktop environments available, etc. These are no longer practical issues.

These questions ought to be answered by the commercial vendors themselves. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question. After sales services will improve only when there is a large enough user base, but such a user base will develop only when assured of good after-sales services.

Channels will find their margins reduced substantially. (as if they weren’t low enough already!). But they’ll have to adapt or die. As more and more people start to move to free software, control will pass from vendor to consumer. Consumers will dictate terms in the new market. Channels will make profits, no doubt, but they’ll be razor-thin, as they adjust to the new market.

Linux has had to battle the huge market share of Microsoft in the Operating Systems and platforms space, so Linux companies are starting out with huge odds against them. Then, just as corporate interest in Linux was beginning to grow, the dot-com bubble hit, and so did the global recession. So it hasn’t been the best of times for the market in general, and certainly not for any industry that’s just finding its feet in the market. So take it as a positive sign that in the face of such huge disadvantages, Linux has taken such giant strides.

I don’t think it’s advisable for Linux to become standardised in the first place. The beauty of Linux is that there is so much choice, so much variety available. Current users of Linux would hate to see that choice disappear. It’s enough if all vendors of Linux agreed upon common minimum guidelines to follow, so that Linux doesn’t end up going the UNIX way, i.e, into fragmented, incompatible versions. I don’t think that this will ever happen, largely because of the free nature of software. And such standards are coming up : we’ve had the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for years now. SuSE, SCO, Connectiva and TurboLinux have formed between them a consortium called United Linux, for cooperation in development, and to ensure that packages made for one distribution are guaranteed to work on the others.

I’d say that Linux development needs to follow a middle path – not become too standardised like Microsoft Windows, and on the other hand, not fragment like UNIX.

Oh, Yes!