Imagine if I offered you a free car. Not only that, but I told you that this automobile had one of the best engines in its class, better fuel efficiency than its competitors and you could choose from a list of optional extras that I'd throw in for free. No strings attached. I'll even deliver it to your house for you. Interested?
Populate a product line with too many options and you'll chase customers away. And Linux did.
Simon Dingle, contributor, ITWeb
It seems like an unbeatable proposition. But the software equivalent of the above offer has been available for a long time and most people turn it down. Desktop Linux is a great product. The operating system kernel is one of the best you'll find - some would say the very best - and it's free. If you can't download it, companies like Canonical will even send disks to your house, free of charge.
And yet Linux is still nowhere as a desktop operating system.
According to Net Application's Net Marketshare statistics, Microsoft Windows controls 93% of the global market for desktop operating systems, Mac is on 6% and Linux has but 1%. The others - like SunOS - pop up as tiny fractions. And that's it.
Around 2003, I had high hopes for desktop Linux. I was, at the time, actively involved in the open source community and administrator of a large Linux user board that was growing by thousands of users every month.
We would often discuss the plight of Linux on the desktop and our consensus, at the time, was that while it was certainly growing, it was not ready for the prime time yet. Linux still required too much work from users at that stage. It was confusing to choose a distribution and install it.
Another, bigger challenge was an ironic one. Because of the open nature of Linux and its software ecosystem, choice is a big part of using it. You have to choose a distribution - and there were hundreds at the time. Multiple applications existed in each category from entire office suites to e-mail clients and even window managers for the desktop environment.
For the technically-oriented this choice was heaven. We could tinker and mess around to our heart's content. I took great pride in configuring and compiling my own kernel every time a new revision was released. I loved that I could make my desktop environment look however I wanted it to, or could SSH into my machine from anywhere in the world and launch powerful applications from the command line.
But to the average computer user it was a nightmare. All they wanted to do was get on with their work and the endless choices led to analysis paralysis.
But then came Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth and his team at Canonical understood the challenges that exist for desktop Linux. They knew that too much choice was great for enthusiasts, but a disaster for consumers. They realised the world needed a friendly distribution of Linux if there was any hope of wide-scale adoption. In fact, the tagline for Ubuntu Linux was “Linux for human beings”.
And Ubuntu has been successful. It has changed many minds about Linux and I have met many consumers who find it easy enough to install and use. The latest version of the software - 11.04 - is a masterpiece. It easily rivals Mac OS X in most departments and completely blows away Windows 7 for intuitive ease of use. And prettiness. And, OK, just about everything else too.
But Linux still has some major challenges. For one, there is still no conclusive open source answer to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org, which is arguably the best alternative to Microsoft Office, is ugly and unintuitive. Document compatibility is still a disaster thanks to Microsoft's control of de facto standards, and while I am a big fan of everything the community surrounding that project is doing, it just doesn't cut the cheese, if we're honest.
But the bigger problem is that you can't get Linux preinstalled on a computer. Walk into Incredible Connection and you have two choices: Windows or Mac. Most people can't be bothered with installing Linux, especially when they've already paid for Windows. And the bigger question is: why should they? Especially if they don't share the ethical persuasions of open source enthusiasts.
And that is the gist of the matter, right now. Microsoft realised early on, and astutely, that winning over vendors would be key to its success. Bill Gates began tying them down with DOS. And this has kept Microsoft ahead of the game.
Imagine if a company like Lenovo adopted Linux and spent as much time on its development as it currently does on integrating Windows? Then we might see some traction.
But these companies don't. And the reason they don't is because of a Catch-22 involving ecosystems and demand. Customers don't really know what they want. Vendors need to tell them. And at the moment the message is clear: you need Windows. You might want a Mac, and that's fine, but make sure you pick up a copy of Office to use it with.
Things are getting interesting with mobile, however. And here Linux is already king. According to Gartner's estimates of the second quarter of 2011, Android - originally based on version 2.6 of the Linux kernel - controls around 46% of the worldwide market for smartphones. Symbian is next with 22% and Apple has 18%. Microsoft has 2%.
Mobile has flipped things on its head. Mobile vendors are shipping devices that run Linux out of the box. Sure, it isn't called Linux and no, it isn't quite as open as purists will tell you Linux is. But Amazon still managed to fork it and create its own distribution, so it's open enough for me.
And this leads us into an interesting discussion of where things are going, and how something like Ubuntu might fit into that future. But alas, we're out of space.
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