What will the innovators at M$ think of next? Having trouble convincing people to try Skype? No problem! Just install it at 3am while they sleep…
“Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) last night deployed a Skype update to Windows clients that had never had the telephony and messaging software installed. This resulted in Skype being installed on these computers.”
I have used WSUS. It helps keep a bunch of PCs updated. I never could get it to work perfectly and now it’s acting like a trojan, bypassing IT policies to avoid time/bandwdith-wasters. How many $millions will be wasted removing the junk from PCs in schools and offices and homes?
I have long seen retail shelf-space as the last frontier for GNU/Linux desktop OS. There have been a few flurries but now Google and others are seriously promoting */Linux on the desktop/notebook/whatever. Google is producing tablets with its brand by the millions. It’s OEM partners are doing even more. Now the latest version of the Chromebook will have retail shelf-space at Best Buy (US) and Dixons (UK). It can work off-line folks, making it a general-purpose PC, almost.
“Chrome OS, and Chromebooks, are transforming from Linux-based, thin-client systems to full competitors with Windows systems. Would that be enough to get people to switch if their main choice was their pick of Windows 7 PCs? Probably not. But, when your choice will be Windows 8 systems, well, like Vista before it showed, customers may prove to not be that loyal to Microsoft after all.”
The Competition Bureau is supposed to defend the Canadian economy from anti-competitive acts like exclusive dealing, bundling, price-fixing and the like. Despite some good work, the departing chief did nothing about M$ and its “partners” excluding GNU/Linux from retail shelves all across Canada. She did nothing about bundling that other OS with nearly every PC sold in Canada for decades. Clearly that prevents competition for operating systems and prevents competition on price/performance. Shame…
Gartner is taking credit for advising M$ to shift away from that other OS, NT version, to the new stuff in order to stay relevant. Gartner estimates in ten years almost no one will be running Lose 32 applications. Instead it will all be about Lose RT…
I think Gartner is right about that other OS sinking into oblivion in a decade but I don’t see M$ being able to dictate the shape of IT beyond the horizon. People are tired of Wintel and M$ whether on x86/amd64 or ARM. No one is in love with M$ sufficiently to follow wherever M$ leads. If the apps go, so will the sheeple. If people have to make an effort to migrate to RT, they might as well migrate to GNU/Linux, developers, IT people, users, everyone. The new applications will be on the web or LAN anyway so there’s no need for particular clients from M$ or anyone else. People will choose the cheapest clients that work and those are */Linux for the time being. If M$ becomes irrelevant, why send them money?
Pronouncements about future growth of Ubuntu GNU/Linux are not based on wishful thinking or tea leaves. Jane Silber has feedback from downloads, updates and OEM shipments to back up huge growth in India as well as China.
“We have chosen India for our biggest retail expansion after China because we see tremendous opportunity and growth in this country. India is one of the countries where Ubuntu is most successful and well received. We see significant growth in Ubuntu adoption in India. Over the last year we saw 160 per cent growth. So, we believe that there is real potential and demand here. I would like to make special mention of our partners because this is done with them. So we can go to the market through our OEMs. Canonical is not building computers and Canonical does not have stores. Our OEM partners know very well and have much more data than we do about the many machines that ship in India with Ubuntu pre-installed. Our OEM partners believe that we can grow with proper marketing and education.”
GNU/Linux does very well in a competitive environment. Ordinary people are getting to know about GNU/Linux at school, from associates and OEMs and retailers. They are not locked into Wintel and affordable IT using GNU/Linux makes sense to everyone. In these circumstances it is reasonable to believe this growth will continue until GNU/Linux has huge share of installed OS in India. With India’s huge population and rapid growth, the sky is the limit.
Tragedy struck a mall at Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada on the weekend. Part of the roof which was also used to park cars crashed down through two stories into the food court on the main floor. It took days to retrieve two victims because the concrete slabs hung up on a stair-well and the victims could not be retrieved without disassembling that structure with a long-reach articulated excavator. The delay to bring in such equipment from hundreds of miles away was terrible as it was thought one may have survived.
The miracle? One could hold that nothing good happened because buildings just should not collapse, but poor design and maintenance was another story. The miracle is that the food court was one of the busiest places in the mall and just minutes before the collapse there were dozens in the path of the concrete. The miracle is that only two died. Sometimes, at the worst of times, good things happen.
A video documenting a simple problem has gone viral on Youtube. One step from a subway station is a tiny bit higher than others and people following the rhythm of the stairway often trip on it. Bad things Happen.
Good things happen, too, when ordinary folks, users, tell service providers what they think of the service. Sometimes one picture is worth a thousand words. Other times thousands of responses get the attention of people in a position to make the world a better place.
In software, the same principle applies. The people who make software are not perfect. They make mistakes. They misunderstand things. They get priorities wrong sometimes. They don’t know every situation in which software will be used.
In FLOSS there are often well-defined means of giving developers feedback. Sometimes e-mail works. Other times a bug-tracking system works. FLOSS also has a backup system for when feedback fails to get a better result, the fork. Since the code is open for examination and modification, it is feasible for a user or group of users to fix the problem or to improve the software. It is even possible to make informed decisions about starting from scratch to replace software. Choice is good.
FLOSS beats closed source software in many ways thanks to the openness of the source-code. Often there is no way to ensure feedback gets to the people in charge with non-free software. There are just too many layers involved. I remember the time I was working in a school and several times reported on paper a problem with the configuration for printing. My students, using GNU/Linux could print but no one else in the building who was a student could print. At first, I was told I used the wrong form. On the right form, nothing happened. Finally, I physically assaulted an IT person and demanded to know why the problem had not been fixed. “What problem?” was the reply. It turned out that my boss had rewritten my report. The secretary in the IT department also rewrote it. By the time the IT guys got it, the report was watered down to “Hello, World!” or something so generic no action need be taken. It took the IT guy seconds to allow students to print…
So, if you want your feedback to count, if you want to use software that increasingly works for you and not someone else, use FLOSS, the right way to do IT. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux because it works for you. Debian has a very effective bug-tracking system. Of course, there is a package for that and you can add it to any computer running Debian GNU/Linux. How’s that for openness? You are not restricted to using that package for reporting software bug either. You could use it to report on stairs, building maintenance, gardening chores, “Honey, Do” lists and so on.
“in a typical enterprise environment, the 80/20 rule applies when you look at application use and processing power. 80% of the people are using only 20% of the computing power in their machines. If you have any experience in large enterprises you are snorting because it is unlikely they are even using 20%, but let’s use this for illustration. The majority of worker bees are doing simple tasks. They are writing documents, whether in a word processor or in email, they are preparing or delivering presentations, which really is only specialized word processing. They are surfing the web, administering systems, working or submitting tickets, or reading. None of these tasks is particularly computationally taxing.”
Thus, the thinner clients have come of age. Thanks to Moore’s Law, they are now small enough to fit in the pocket and cheap enough to be owned in multiples and to be everywhere.
Just as important as price and availability, the small cheap computers of today are amazing performers considering much of the work is being done on powerful servers and clusters of servers. No desktop or notebook has the local database and search power to tell you where the nearest Chinese restaurant is but your smartphone which you may have bought for $0 down can. The price/performance of small cheap computers appropriately networked is just too good to ignore any longer.
Besides ARM making such small cheap computers possible is */Linux which costs $0 “per seat” the best incremental cost in IT. The result is that instead of spending $thousands per PC per roll-out every 3 years, the world is moving on to ad hoc computing models that don’t assume Wintel at every node. Only a few need anything like the model of ten years ago, a PC on every desk and a licence from M$ on every hard drive. The world of IT is too large to take dictation from Redmond, Washington, USA.
“Everything used to be desktops, now 60 per cent of PCs sold are laptops. Next year, tablets will outsell desktops," forecast Microsoft’s Antoine Leblond, head of its web services operation.”
Of course, they see “8″ running those tablets, but that is wishful thinking. The ideas that PCs last only a few years, that PCs slow down with use and that every PC must have a licence from M$ are extinct species of thought in IT. Today, people want small cheap computers and Wintel cannot give them that. Wintel is all about charging excessively for technology which they got away with when they were a monopoly but that is ending. M$ can no longer dictate the paths of IT. There are many valid choices that people have been exercising in increasing millions over the last few years. People love Android/Linux, GNU/Linux, tablets, smart phones and thinclients and above all, ARM. In 2013, the important difference will not be “8″ on ARM but */Linux on x86/amd64. The reality will be that the technology that people love on tablets will begin to replace the technology they hate on desktops and notebooks.
My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.
My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.
I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.
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