It has been a long time if ever that Linux has been described as a desirable OS but it is happening now. A survey of smartphone-lovers finds that more intend to buy Android/Linux next rather than iOS or worst, Phoney 7. Underneath it is the same stuff that consumers have not been choosing for a decade but the change is understandable. While the forces of evil denigrated GNU/Linux as “communism” and “cancer” and their multitudes of “partners” repeated the chants until the media believed them and common wisdom in the retail trade was than no one would buy GNU/Linux, the makers of smart phones have been uncontaminated. You can see ads on television for smart phones with Android/Linux from the manufacturers, ISPs, banks, etc. and many millions of people are showing them to their friends. The “partners” have been bypassed. The monopoly is now irrelevant.

Interestingly, while low cost has been touted as one of the major advantages of GNU/Linux, the smart phones with Android/Linux are often sold at a premium over the high-prices products from Apple. There is a long tail of lower-priced models but it is often the purchase of a smart phone from an ISP at a rate subsidized by the ISP and paid along with monthly usage that makes the Android/Linux smart phone reasonably priced. The openness of the system also permits many manufacturers, not just the biggies, to dive in and compete on price/performance. The result is Apple is being swarmed and cannot match the presence/hype/mind-share of Android/Linux. The same thing will happen in tablets and eventually in all forms of personal computers.

For share numbers see “Android Outranks Apple in Desirability–and That’s Huge”

The numbers are interesting. Android/Linux has passed iOS in desirability and Phoney 7 and iOS have both declined in desirability. FLOSS is knocking off two monopolists with one stone. By the time M$/Nokia get their act together, Android/Linux will be a winner, a new kind of monopoly of the multitude. Fragmentation? Software-patents? Ha! These are not an issue. Price/performance and competition beat constipation any day. This will spread to all PCs sooner or later. The world just does not need monopolists in Silicon Valley or Redmond. The world can create its own IT.

Want to give FLOSS a spin on your PC? Try Debian GNU/Linux. Want a smart thingie running some form of Linux? Go to any retail outlet for smart phones. Just stay away from Apple amd M$. You can run, examine, modify and distribute the software with few restrictions and lots of enablement.

Here are some sellers of smart phones:

• a telco
• an ISP
• a bank
• a big-box retailer

Hmmm. That last one is interesting. Aren’t they the ones that decided GNU/Linux was not going to sell on netbooks after M$’s salesmen paid them a visit?

In a bizarre ruling, SCOTUS has ruled that if a contract includes compulsory arbitration, class-action lawsuits by consumers are not allowed. A case in California had found courts considered the provision unconscionable. Among other things, the business could appoint an arbiter and 96% of the time, the arbiter found in favour of the business…

This is a blow to consumers in USA and a black mark on the justices of SCOTUS who see their pet philosophy of life overruling constitutional law. I wonder if such a court will ever kick out software patents which are also anti-competitive and a burden to consumers.

see The Register – US Supremes deal death blow to class action lawsuits

According to Canalys which counts tablets, 88 million PCs shipped in 1Q 2011. About 5 million of those were tablets. That leaves very little growth for PCs on which that other OS ships, perhaps 1-2% Y/Y. I wonder if a year or more of such lackluster growth will cause the ouster of Steve B.

Combining the effect of Barnes and Noble’s defiance of M$’s NDA-encrusted licensing offer for their Nook e-book readers, which suggests M$ will not be able to discourage the world from slurping up tablet PCs with Android. and 2011 is looking like a grim year for M$.

The monopoly is on sick-leave.

see Digitimes – Worldwide PC market up 7% as pads fuel growth, says Canalys

UPDATE M$’s report is in. Revenue for that other OS on PCs is down 4%. Worse, for M$, operating income is down 10%. Wow! That is more than the dip in PC units shipped in spite of what they write:
“Windows 7 remains the fastest selling operating system in history with 350 million licenses sold. Revenue for the segment was down 4% in the third quarter, in line with the PC trends, excluding prior year launch impact.”

They are also stuck at 350million… Isn’t that old news? Further, ARM processors are shipping in the billions. What OS is on them? I guess the dinosaur has not felt the tar on its toes yet. The fact is that personal computing is on fire, not declining. M$ is losing its grip on personal computing. Most reports that I have read state that the decline in M$’s PCs is far offset by the explosion of ARMed devices, both smartphones and tablets. People just don’t need that other OS any longer. I expect another year of declines for M$ until they can ship something on tablets that gives something competitive to Android/Linux or GNU/Linux. Consumers are not going to be put back in the bottle. They love the tiny gadgets too much.

Checking with IDC’s 1Q2011 summary of PC shipments, they report only Lenovo had good growth. They ship a lot into China but they also had good growth in the rest of the world. They do ship GNU/Linux if you insist.

Some bosses just don’t know their limits and like to micro-manage and intrude at every level. Sometimes it works but often the boss stumbles in, breaks something, and resumes his busy day leaving employees to pick up the pieces.

I have had some incidents. One day a boss came in to tweak something on a cyclotron and jammed a highly radioactive target. I had to go in an manually free some Zn⁶⁵ that was fresh from the machine. Another time I had a boss who would come in and demand a report, some statistics, about how the programme was going. He would invent a different reward programme for students every other week with new criteria. As this was not pre-planned, our paperwork was not yielding the information promptly so I finally automated. Whatever he demanded, I could work out an SQL query to dash out an answer within a few minutes. I was pretty sure that boss broke things as a form of harassment.

Well, Apple has such a boss. He is suing folks for using “app store” in terms of Android but the argument has been raised that Jobs himself has used the term “app store” generically… There goes the case, trademark and all.

see “Steve Jobs’ Android jabs may cost him App Store trademark”

There is news that the CoreFlood botnet has been dealt a blow by governments taking over the servers that are the command and control system. The horror comes from the analysis of this botnet. Over six years it has amassed gigabytes of account authentication information and has spread by taking over the system administrator accounts for whole “domains” of that other OS. Continue Reading

I have done this maths before: “7″ is not shipping on a large number of PCs these days. This is a dramatic change over the last ten years. Normally the current release from M$ gets a free ride.

I am not alone in this observation:

see Microsoft’s own numbers suggest declining Windows market share

This is a good thing for IT. That other OS should not be the default for any computer.

Repeatedly we are told that using M$’s stuff creates jobs world-wide. It is not so. It is out-sourcing to M$. Take Nokia for example. They are chopping 4000 jobs with many of them in R&D, the lifeblood of tech. Replacing their own OS with M$’s does not make a lot of sense because M$’s share of phones is tiny. Putting it on Nokia’s stuff is bound to encourage customers to shop elsewhere, say, Android.

On the consumer side of things, M$ likes to take $50 or more from each PC sold. That’s larger than the margin on lots of hardware and represents lost profits that could be invested in R&D locally, around the globe. Businesses locked into M$ will sink or swim with M$ and you can bet that when the ship goes down, M$ will be sure to take the last lifeboat.

A number of manufacturers and OEMs have scaled back their estimates of notebook production in 2011. This is not about shrinkage by a few companies. It is an industry-wide phenomenon where tablets are taking a bite out of the market. Tomorrow, M$ will reveal its situation. If the manufacturers feel the pain we should see that pain reflected in a kink in the growth of M$’s revenues.

• Compal dropped estimates for 2011 12% with quarterly revenue down 48% from a year ago…
• Samsung was the only one to achieve a paltry 1% growth in notebooks for the quarter

Since notebooks are the largest share of the IT landscape and desktops are only showing life in the corporate sector, M$ should have a change from the usual news. We shall see. They do have some presence in tablets but little on ARM and nothing on Apple’s stuff. I don’t expect their situation to change for the better until their product is released on ARM sometime late in 2012. I expect it will be a disaster like Vista judging by defections and low morale leaking into the news.

Worse than defections from within, customers are also defecting. Even the share of PCs installed with that other OS continue to decline.

Barnes and Noble has filed counterclaims against M$ asserting that M$ “is misusing these patents as part of a scheme to try to eliminate or marginalize the competition to its own Windows Phone 7 mobile device operating system posed by the open source AndroidTM operating system and other open source operating systems. Microsoft’s conduct directly harms both competition for and consumers of eReaders, smartphones, tablet computers and other mobile electronic devices, and renders Microsoft’s patents unenforceable.” Continue Reading