Robert Pogson

There are a lot of reasons why GNU/Linux makes sense in IT today whether on the server or the desktop/notebook:

1. It’s great software developed by millions of developers around the world and distributed widely on the web with a Free Software licence that allows you to run, examine, modify and distribute the software.
2. It’s fast and efficient because the priority is speed and efficiency, not marketing.
3. It’s easy. Even my young grand daughter has no problem running it. Students, teachers, bankers, clerks, managers, writers, artists, photographers, videographers, etc. use it with no problems at all.
4. It’s infinitely customizable if that’s what you want. Never again do you have to accept a single concept of an OS. GNU/Linux can be anything you want simply by removing one package and installing another. If you can’t find the package you like, you can write your own or hire a programmer. That’s unlikely to be necessary because there are hundreds of distributors and each distribution is customizable.
5. There is a huge set of applications for GNU/Linux. In the past year a couple of gaps have been filled: gaming and video editting. If you want just a few applications or if you want hundreds, it’s easy to create the system you need.
6. Package management means it’s simple to install/remove applications or to update your entire system with just a few clicks.
7. You can manage 1000 PCs/servers as easily as one making GNU/Linux suitable for individuals or large organizations. It’s a true networked OS which allows secure management of all machines from any machine using openSSH and the package manager.
8. Worried about malware? Malware is almost unheard of in GNU/Linux. I have been using GNU/Linux for more than a decade and never seen any. The bad guys make malware for that other OS because it’s such a fat soft target.
9. It costs almost nothing to use, because it’s free for OEMs to install, or costs $0 for a download.
10. You can buy it retail/pre-installed. You just have to look. Where I live that’s mostly on the web but it is available everywhere. If you’re lucky enough to live in Brazil, Russia, India, China and Malaysia etc. you can find it on retail shelves.

“Most of the reasons why people think they can not use Free and Open Source Software, and particularly GNU/Linux, is that they are thinking about the GNU/Linux of fifteen years ago, and not the GNU/Linux of today.”
see Ten Reasons Why You Can't Use GNU/Linux

“The funding law signed this week by President Barack Obama is part of growing US paranoia over Chinese cyber attacks.
It stops NASA, and the Justice and Commerce Departments from buying information technology systems unless the FBI give the thumbs up. Currently FBI policy is that if the gear comes from a Chinese company there must be something wrong with it.”
see US Congress bans buying Chinese IT

Chuckle. We are entering a new Dark Age for IT in USA. While USA squats in the dirt contemplating its navel, the world moves on with more and better IT in a competitive market where price/performance matters. Remember previous incarnations: GPS crippling, prohibition on exporting encryption, etc.? Those all damaged the USA’s competitiveness while the world got on with creating new markets in spite of the USA. At the same time USA lost huge numbers of jobs in manufacturing and lost pre-eminence in one field after another and ran up huge debts.

Expect more of the same. While the government of the USA (all branches) take themselves seriously while chasing their tails, the world is taking the shortest path to a bright future free from monopoly in IT and everything else. No doubt there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as USA subsides but it seems to be the way of all things that the legacy of the forefathers gets squandered by the kids.

"Early adopters tend to leave the home laptop in the bag and are abandoning the home office in favor of the lounge room couch or bedroom to do online activities in a more comfortable environment using a tablet or smartphone. This early adopter trend is becoming mainstream consumer behavior. Consequently, technology and service providers are faced with no alternative but to innovate for mobility. If they do nothing, they face a potential train wreck as consumers abandon gadgets, services and applications that do not fully support changing mobile lifestyles."
see Gartner Says Mobility Is Reshaping Consumer Gadget Spending and Behavior

Along with this shift is a total stall in adoption of Wintel. Households with a desktop PC are stuck at 60% as the old machines cling to life but are not replaced. Meanwhile the mobile gadgets have a huge share of households. There is some life in notebooks but they grew just 37% while tablets grew 500%. This year, the contest will be over. Between the tablets and the smartphones, few will have a need for a Wintel PC. ASP has come down 12% for desktops and notebooks in one year. There’s not much room to decline further without M$ taking a big hit. Obviously the high-priced Ultrabooks are not making a dent.

Last evening I tried to do a lot with a smartphone. I had difficulty working a web-application to insert data or to query a database but viewing the data was not a problem even on a tiny screen. I scrolled. I zoomed. … while I sat in a stuffed chair in front of the TV. That took care of that. I can’t read a screen anyway. I needed particular numbers and paragraphs of text. A smartphone works. A tablet works better. A tablet with a keyboard works better than a desktop/notebook PC idling.

This shift is not a blip or something temporary. It is here to stay and it means */Linux finally is taking huge share of client PCs of all kinds. No one can say that FLOSS is not mainstream because there already hundreds of millions of units in place and growing rapidly.

As if the slump in PC unit sales and the tepid response of markets to “8″ weren’t enough, M$ is nailing its coffin shut from the inside by raising prices…

“As previously announced, all of the above prices end on January 31. Starting in February, all editions of Windows 8 will sell for their full list prices, which means the cheapest Windows 8 upgrade will go for $119.99.

Note, however, that unlike the discounted upgrades offered previously, that price just gets you Windows 8, not Windows 8 Pro. If you want the additional Pro features – including BitLocker encryption, domain connectivity, and Hyper-V virtualization, among others – you’ll need to shell out a little more for the Pro upgrade edition, priced at $199.99.

see Microsoft to end Windows 8 discounts on January 31 • The Register.

For decades, M$ has agonized over finding prices that the market would bear. Now they are trying to compensate for reduced volumes by increasing prices. The death-spiral has commenced. Expect to see major agony in Redmond in 2013. Raising prices on a sluggish product will obviously kill uptake. The rate of decline of the empire will soon increase dramatically. I look forward to next week’s quarterly report. It should be the last one they can suggest business as usual.

Rumours are now confirmed. Intel plans to enter the hardware market in a big way and also to exclude others…

“so the PC ends with a whimper, not a bang. Broadwell will be available in a ‘desktop’ variant as well as a laptop version, but neither will be socketed. There are a lot of good technical reasons to release it only as an embedded and mobile CPU, but not for anyone other than Intel. They want more of the PC ecosystem, and are taking it. Enthusiasts have been written off, and the rest of the ecosystem is being preemptively kneecapped in case they try to step out of line. The desktop is dead, and with it, PCs become irrelevant, mobile or not.”

Intel kills off the desktop, PCs go with it | SemiAccurate.

By not producing CPUs with sockets, Intel will cut out all kinds of small players, and gain more power over the motherboard makers, even to the point of preventing motherboard makers from competing with Intel.

The other half of this imminent collapse is M$’s entry into hardware with “8″ and “Secure Boot”. the folly of allowing Wintel to rule IT is coming home to roost. The only way out for OEMs and motherboard makers is to switch to ARM or AMD. AMD could surely use the business but could not fill the vacuum of Intel. ARM could. We live in interesting times.

For mere users of IT, this is disastrous. Whatever freedom of choice people had with x86 is gone. No one will be able to upgrade an x86 PC by swapping CPUs, or even replacing a CPU that got fried.

It is the end-times for Wintel. The survivors are grimly killing every competitor in hopes of surviving a bit longer. M$ is on the edge of a cliff. Intel seems intent on defining its own Apple-like hardware domain, increasing share of x86 space by restricting options. Firmly locked into Wintel with no alternative suppliers? Expect to pay more for the privilege of being a slave.

There are few advantages for most of us. A socketless motherboard might be a few $ cheaper and an iota more reliable but Intel will pocket that most likely as anyone who wants an x86 motherboard will be forced to buy from Intel.

Looking back over decades we now see this disaster was foretold in the first agreements between IBM and M$ and Intel. Not requiring M$ to second-source was stupid. Requiring Intel to second-source (Motorola, Signetics, Cyrix,… remember them?) was a bit better but Intel still managed to throttle their competitors in CPUs through instruction-set patents and payoffs. Now Intel is about to leverage it’s monopoly in x86 CPUs into something every bit as ugly as what M$ did.

Despite the obvious fact that GNU/Linux, Android/Linux and ARM are not quite ready to fill the Wintel space (volume, not quality), there is a silver lining. All up and down the food-chain of IT people will be actively seeking choices in hardware and software. When the dust settles, M$ and Intel will still thrive in some cracks but the world will be free to make choices at last. The more M$ and Intel cannibalize their “partners” the more opportunities for */Linux on ARM and, eventually, new CPUs from China.