Robert Pogson

I was surfing for news about what’s happening in the world. I am a computer geek, but occasionally I like to broaden my horizons. At CNN.com, I came upon an interesting headline and clicked on the link.

“The web browser you are using to view this video is not supported. Please use one of the supported browsers:”

I am trying to wrap my head around this.

• The World Wide Web allows CNN and me to reach hundreds of millions of people.
• They chose this medium because of its low cost of entry and universality.
• They do not want to communicate with 20% of users of the web.

How bizarre. If I were running a business and wanted to reach 1000 million people at no more cost than reaching 800 million, what would I do? That’s a no-brainer. Use standards that everyone can use so that you reach them all. The issue was video. Everyone can use mpg and such. What is the problem???

Sigh. The BBC, CNN and others are shooting themselves in the foot if they want IE/M$-only access. By next year, 20% of clients on the web could be using something other than IE on M$. 20% are using FireFox as I am.

Oh well, dinosaurs have the right to be dinosaurs, but in this case they are choosing to be dinosaurs.

I was following links when I came across this article, “Dell and Desktop Linux: Can it Work?“, written before Dell came out with Ubuntu. It shows how wrong our conclusions can be based on fuzzy or incomplete information.

OK, where did the author go wrong?

• He did not see the rise of the tiny/low-end notebooks/desktops/thin-client-like/low-powered thingies.
• He was thinking of Dell’s old customers, not new ones who care little for maintenance contracts or getting the latest hair-drying hardware choked with RAM and big drives.
• He did not realize Vista would flop because it loaded even the latest machines with unnecessary tasks and so would not be adopted by business, compounding problems with the death/murder/suicide of XP.
• The sluggishness of US IT markets was not taken into consideration.

Moore’s Law has made a lot of the real-estate on a motherboard wasted space. Who uses 5 PCI slots? Who needs four slots for RAM and 12 drives? The power user or server. The ordinary Joe can run just fine all he needs to do in 512 MB, a flashdrive and a P3-ish CPU. When OEMs realized that the customer needed such products, they pulled out the stops and delivered:

• Intel and AMD and VIA made chips that run well fanless

motherboards with a minimum of real-estate had been out for a while but mostly for thin clients/mobile systems. The low-end works everywhere.

• ASUS wanted more share of notebooks which were hot in 2007 and made a bold move with the eee PC. Women, children, geeks, ultra-mobile folks loved them instantly. The low price of these things made the price of that other OS stick out.
• ASUS had to redouble production and stressed the supply chain. How long was that situation going to be a bottleneck?
• Millions of non-geeks have now seen GNU/Linux in action and like the performance vs price. It works
• Thin clients which work really well with GNU/Linux and use similar hardware continue to grow rapidly. The new low-end things can serve as portable thin clients.

There are over 6000 million people on the planet. TFA may have been right on for most of 1000 million. The others can now or will soon be able to afford to buy IT at these prices. Dell and the other big OEMs would have been foolish to assume the emerging markets wanted or could afford quad-core 2 gB systems. The author could be forgiven, though. Lots of people who are very vocal on the web live in the world of which he wrote. I, on the other hand, have been writing about shoe-string IT budgets and thin clients in schools for years. In my reality, that other OS has no place and Dell was not serving our needs very well. Last year, I built a system of 153 seats. Dell would have wanted me to order systems five at a time… using a credit card when it would have been much simpler to order what I needed all at once using a purchase order. Also, Dell has given lip-service to GNU/Linux by not advertising it, and hiding it on the website. Also, Dell seems afraid of the term “thin client”. Lo, many in the IT world put down thin clients when in the emerging markets they are nearly perfect tools for a low-maintenance, high-reliability, low-cost system.

Google, with “thin client” site:dell.com finds 16500 hits. Dell’s own search finds 936 including 113 “products” like thin and light notebooks running Vista… Dell’s own search finds only a few products actually called thin clients. A few others are “network computers”. None are below $300 and many bear Wyse name brand. In the real world, millions of thin clients in the sub-$200 range are being sold each year. No one in their right mind would think to run that other OS on them. The licence fee and performance would both be negative hits, just as they are for the new tiny machines.

It is a great time to be involved in IT. A lot of long-held beliefs are being shown to be FUD going down the drain. That old world of IT is growing at a few % per annum while the new world grows at 15-50% depending on the product and location. M$ can no longer sell as it did for a decade as a default hidden on retail shelves because it is just too expensive on the low-end stuff. People who use GNU/Linux a few years on the low-end stuff will know it works when they are ready to buy high-end stuff and the game will be over. Dell and the others cannot ignore that if any of them supplies the new markets because the old way of doing things will cost market share, huge market share. Competition, not the courts have finally fixed M$.

I have been accused of being a zealot for GNU/Linux, hater of M$, and ignorant of Vista. I will own up to the first two, on rational bases. My exposure to Vista has been brief and horrible. I can debate Vista. However, what do the statements by Intel that they will not deploy Vista say? Intel is one of the most tech-savvy firms on the planet. If after a year and a half, they agree with my observations that Vista is a dog and unfit to run on their systems, I can claim the justification that folks who know Vista much better than I come to the same conclusion.

More significantly, this is an assertion by one half of Wintel that things are broken at M$. Where will this lead? Will Intel cling to XP until M$ up-chucks something else? Signs are that it will be Vista II, containing the same useless features that are an advantage only to M$ no matter what the feature is called by the sales department. Will M$ finally get the message that they have to behave and to earn money the old-fashioned way, earning it? Will Intel go to GNU/Linux on the next round of upgrades? MacOS? Roll their own? I doubt they will stampede any particular direction but they will diversify, weakening the dependence on M$ which is a sinking ship. No large organization can risk being locked-in to a supplier which produces a horror like Vista and then pressures customers to migrate to that horror.

About the time of the next release of that other OS, we shall know the truth. Will the monopoly be truly gone or just weakened? I predict the monopoly will fail again to fix Vista because it is not fixable by design. That is the ultimate lock-in, M$ is locked-in too. They cannot free themselves without freeing their customers. If they free the customers, 25 to 50% will migrate to something else, perhaps GNU/Linux because of the proprietary hardware of Apple. If they try to release Vista II, Moore’s Law may get them out of trouble on performance but drives are still the bottleneck. If you need a ton of RAM just to hold files, you might as well use GNU/Linux on a terminal server for a lot less cash. If they try again to lock-in customers to Vista, a lot more will wake up. The low-end has crumbled. Expect the middle to crumble in a couple of years. The high-end may go its own way just because performance is big there.  M$ cannot  impose its machinations on the world and deliver performance.  XP and Vista have shown that. Vista II  will make even the sheeple aware.

see The Inquirer

A press release from IDC about Brazil states:

Ṣo Paulo, Brazil, June 13, 2008 РThe Brazilian IT market continues with strong expansion. IDC predicts that the year 2008 will close with total spending on hardware, software, and services in Brazil at US$23 billion, nearly equal to the US$24 billion expected in the Spanish market. The report, entitled Brazil IT Spending by State 2008, demonstrates that among the emerging BRIC markets, Brazil will only be behind China (US$64 billion) in terms of total IT spending this year.

see Investment in Technology in Brazil Equals That of Spain, According to New IDC Study

Some of that will be spent on GNU/Linux which is hot in Brazil… and China. At a time when the US economy is sluggish this means many global corporations from the US will find more of their business off-shore. If they give customers what they want, it may well be systems running GNU/Linux. Good news.