Hi (apologise in advance for poor E
nglish, It's not my native language). This is my first blog
and I would like to discuss here about Linux desktop. I am not a regular blogger but I thought that almost everybody is blogging theses day and a blog with my own observations might be fun to write.
A lot has been written about Linux desktop. I think anyone who want to see Linux as a desktop operating system will need to look at the competition very closely. There are two major competitors- Windows and Mac. First let's look at the Microsoft's Windows. As everybody knows that Windows is the most commonly used desktop operating system. The question arise is that why Windows is the most commonly used desktop operating system? To answer the question I would like to ask you another question, Why Google is the most used search engine? The first thing that comes to mind when talking about Google and Microsoft is their brands. There is Gmail, Blogger, YouTube but when you think about Google the first thing that comes to mind is search. Similarly when you think about Microsoft the first thing that comes to mind is Windows which is preliminary a desktop operating system.
Now think about Linux and the first thing that comes to mind is ........ Well nothing. May be operating system comes to your mind, but think about it for a minute. It is not clearly defined what is Linux. Actually Linux is just a kernel, The complete operating system is GNU/Linux. OpenOffice and Gnome are not Linux. Linux is very different from other operating systems. It is the only operating system which is not a complete operating system. Complete operating systems are RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu etc. These operating systems are Linux based operating systems because they use Linux as their kernel.
It is very clear that most successful companies & communities such as Apache and Mozilla have at least one successful product (HttpServer and Firefox respectively) which creates their brands. They may have multiple products but most consumers know them due to their most successful product which create their brand awareness. Brand awareness according to me is the most important thing for any company or community. Every successful company or community build their brand from their most successful product(s). For example Windows is the most successful product of Microsoft which help them to create their brand awareness.
The good thing is that there is lot of scope for competition in the market of desktop operating systems and bad thing is that Windows has over 90% market share. Gaining some market share for any other desktop operating system is difficult due to ubiquity and familiarity of Windows. An important question arise is that how can any desktop operating system (Linux, BSD or Solaris Based) can gain some market share. As I said before that brand awareness is very important but it is not everything. We need to understand the process of creating Windows operating system. There is almost endless functionality that can be made available inside a operating system and of course it is not possible. The first thing that any company need to do is to specify the functionality of its next generation operating system. Whenever Microsoft start creating its next generation operating system it looks at the areas that can be improved. First Microsoft look at the competition and makes a list of functionality which is not yet available in Windows but available in competing operating systems. There are several commercial and non-commercial software packages available for Windows that provide different functionality such as Media Centre, Speech Recognition etc. After looking at competing operating systems and different software packages Microsoft creates a specification of its next generation operating system. After creating the specification Microsoft implement those specification. Implementing specification can take anywhere between 3-5 years depending on the features.
If you look closely you will come to know that most of the major operating system release of Microsoft such as Windows 2000 and Windows Vista were actually not very popular in desktop operating system market. This is fact that both Windows 2000 and Vista were major release and provide many new functionality when compared to previous generation of Windows. Now compare these two operating system (functionality wise) with their successor and you will come to know that there is not much difference between them. Very few new functionality (such as themes etc) were added to successful operating systems (Windows XP & 7).This gives us some hint that how Microsoft create a successful product. First it creates a new product with new features that might be bloated and slow. Because product (operating system in this case) is bloated and slow, It is criticized. To fix the product Microsoft do some optimization and wait for hardware to improve. Once product is optimized and hardware is capable of handling the product (due to moore's law), Microsoft release "new" operating system which becomes successful.
Lots of applications are only Windows specific which is bad for healthy competition because it makes switching to any other operating system very difficult. I think that there is a need to push application vendors to create cross platform applications. Creating cross platform application might be difficult but it is not impossible because there are technologies available such as Java for achieving this goal. In fact it is already happing because of Network computing (cloud). Most people these days are using a lot of online applications which is good because cloud computing is platform neutral and allows a person to access his/her applications and data anytime anywhere.
Now let's look at Mac OS X. Though Mac is not as popular as Windows, Its market share is second only to Windows. Macs are easy to use but are niche product. Apple products are mostly popular in US and Europe, And especially in high end segment. It is usually believed that if a single IT company produce both hardware and software then it can provide much better user experience and it seems to be especially true when we look at the Apple products. A better example would be the iPhone which revolutionized the mobile phone segment. Due to iPhone consumer especially in the high end segment now demand a pc like experience from their mobile phones. Despite all the success most of the Apple products are still for a niche segment and are not present in the small to mid-size segment especially in price sensitive developing markets.
Every community operates differently and there can be multiple opinions about how an open source community should work. Personally I didn't like the operational style of Linux community. I do agree that fast evolution is necessary in technology world but If a community continues to add features and patches without well thought out specification then the product becomes bloated, huge and inefficient. Linus Torvalds himself said about it.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14782/linux_creator_linux_is_bloated_huge_and_scary
A question arise in our mind is that how can a community or company can compete against Microsoft or Apple. As I said before there is a need to push application vendors to create cross platform or platform neutral applications. A company or community can also try to emulate Microsoft or Apple process of creating their operating system(s). Open source organisations such as Linux Foundation can play a key role by bringing together different communities and define standard specifications for Linux. Open source foundations such as Eclipse, Mozilla, Apache have defined how an Open source community driven project should work. Partnership with different hardware vendors should be such that consumers should be able to select their operating system at the time of purchase. High quality and easy to use well polished operating system(s) should be able to gain some market share with the help of some marketing muscle.
