[PLUG] SuitWatch - June 27 (fwd)

[Rich Shepard]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
                                   SuitWatch

  Views on Linux in Business

  --by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
     _________________________________________________________________

                            "Karmic Adjustments"

   Thursday, June 27--Here at Linux Journal we often half-joke about the
   years remaining before we finish working off our "Microsoft-bashing
   karma". (Bashing Microsoft is so last millennium, y'know?) That means
   the trick is to talk about Our Friends from Redmond in an objective
   way, which is easier these days because Microsoft looms progressively
   smaller as a dominant force. (See, I didn't bash. We're talking facts
   here.)

   For perspective, let's remember what life with IBM was like when that
   company's influence was at high ebb--a period that lasted through most
   of computing's history. Those of us old enough to remember can recall
   referring to Big Blue simply as "the environment". In those days you
   either lived as fleas in the fur of the great blue beast or you were,
   so to speak, out in the cold.

   What's interesting from today's perspective is not that IBM
   "controlled" so much of the industry or that Microsoft later did the
   same. What's interesting is that both dominated through a long period
   when it was possible for one company to define the whole world for
   everybody else. For a century or more AT&T did the same in telephone
   communications. IBM and AT&T provided base infrastructure for
   everybody else in their industries. Even if they didn't own the iron
   or the wires, they owned and controlled countless protocols, standards
   and foundational products. Gradually that kind of hegemony wore away.
   Few of us remember when Racal-Vadic came out with the first non-"Bell"
   full duplex 1200bps modem. It may seem like a small thing today, but
   at the time it looked like a crack across a vast ice shelf. There were
   a lot of those cracks, mostly forgotten today.

   The ice age is over. What dominates now is the Internet, with an
   infrastructure that consists mostly of protocols: TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP,
   SMTP, IMAP, LDAP, FTP, Telnet, POP3 and so on. "The history of the Net
   is the history of its protocols", Vint Cerf says. These are the things
   that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve, although
   once a protocol is established, improvement tends to come in the form
   of additional protocols supporting additional services. These
   protocols are established often by quiet adoption by many companies,
   rather than by loud promotion by one company.

   In the last few days I've heard casual mention that two widely
   different companies were using the Jabber protocol for routing XML
   streams between here and there. One is Apple, which apparently will
   use the Jabber protocol (not the server, just the protocol) in its new
   iChat system. The other is Fidelia:
   http://www.fidelia.com, which does performance management for Linux
   and Solaris systems in enterprises. Neither company mentions this fact
   anywhere in its public documents (not that I can find, anyway). If
   this constitutes a trend (and I suspect it does), AOL's and
   Microsoft's instant messaging (IM) systems will inevitably find
   themselves adapting to a world where the prevailing IM protocol is one
   they don't own.

   There is no reason either company shouldn't be able to continue
   dominating the IM service business, whatever that business becomes.
   They just won't control IM infrastructure, because Jabber (or one of
   its descendents) will become the Net's primary protocol for instant
   messaging and presence detection (the protocol's other main virtue).

   As the Net grows in the number and variety of services supported by
   its basic protocols (say, wireless networking, thanks to 802.11b, and
   zero configuration networking (zeroconf):
   http://www.zeroconf.org, which will make its first major appearance in
   Apple's forthcoming Rendezvous:
   http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/), countless new businesses and
   market categories will be made possible. This is a good thing, even
   for dominant companies like AOL and Microsoft. The trick for these
   incumbent dominators is to play a supportive game, not a lock-in
   game--to obey the imperative best expressed by John F. Kennedy: "With
   great power comes great responsibility."

   In apparent compliance with that imperative, Microsoft has been
   expressing a need to take responsibility for security. Not long ago
   Bill Gates declared that "trustworthy computing" was Job One. This
   week that commitment bore fruit in the form of "Palladium", a "vision"
   that would, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "Make online
   security and the protection of some Internet content a built-in
   feature of personal computers."

   The rollout was carefully orchestrated. In Newsweek and MSNBC:
   http://www.msnbc.com/news/770511.asp, Steven Levy called Palladium
   "one of the riskiest ventures the company has ever attempted. Though
   Microsoft does not claim a panacea, the system is designed to
   dramatically improve our ability to control and protect personal and
   corporate information. Even more important, Palladium is intended to
   become a new platform for a host of yet-unimagined services to enable
   privacy, commerce and entertainment in the coming decades." He adds,
   "Because its ultimate success depends on ubiquity, Palladium is either
   going to be a home run or a mortifying whiff."

   Some of the best thinking about Palladium has been coming from Eric
   Norlin at DigitalID World. In "The 282 Billion Dollar Riddle":
   http://www.digitalidworld.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=ar
   ticle&sid=72, Norlin says Microsoft's grand strategy mooshes Palladium
   together with the .NET development framework and "Trustbridge", a new
   "federated identity system for the enterprise". He says:

     As Palladium, TrustBridge and .NET come to fruition Microsoft will
     once again find themselves the OS company with an OS that isn't a
     commodity. The reason for this is an identity-based core, but -- in
     what I'm willing to proclaim a masterstroke -- Microsoft has chosen
     not to try to make *that* part of it proprietary. In other words,
     Microsoft will push hard for federated, interoperable identity.
     They will do so, while keeping some parts of Palladium, TrustBridge
     and .NET proprietary -- that is their hook. They will let identity
     be open, interoperable and flexible, and in return they will make
     sure that their OS is proprietary. It's in their best interest to
     do so from a legal and business perspective, and they know it.

   Among other places, here's where Norlin goes: "Microsoft's involvement
   with the WS-I (web services) standards group--specifically their cozy
   involvement with IBM--now makes perfect sense. IBM turns Linux into a
   pure enterprise play; Microsoft takes the "consumer" market."

   Then he makes one more point worth passing along: "Microsoft does not
   consider Liberty, Sun or anyone in identity to be competition. They
   want to intemperate with all of them."

   In fact, selective interoperability appears to be a key strategy. How?
   Well, get this: Microsoft is going to publish the Palladium source
   code. "We want to be transparent in all this", Jim Allchin says. For
   more of the rest of the story, Extreme Tech has a rather deep
   analysis.:
   http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,274309,00.asp

   Meanwhile, right next to the Palladium story in Monday's Wall Street
   Journal was a larger, above-the-fold item that was anything but good
   news: "New Microsoft Pricing Looms". The subhead said much more: "Some
   Customers Consider Switching to Rivals' Software". The larger story is
   about Microsoft's new software pricing policy, which takes effect at
   the end of July and has been anything but a PR success. Says the
   Journal:

     Because of expected price increases, some longtime customers are
     considering competing products such as the Linux operating system
     and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice, which competes with
     Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite of programs. The chief
     information officer of one large European financial concern who
     declined to be named for fear of raising Microsoft's ire said he
     was "70% sure" his firm would start moving its more than 30,000
     computer desktops to Linux-based software made by a company called
     Ximian Inc. instead of re-signing with Microsoft.

   Meanwhile Ximian is calling Microsoft's July 31 deadline "Y2Pay" and
   is offering customers a special deal:

     If yours is like many companies, you're facing an ominous deadline
     on July 31st. You'll have to decide whether to commit now for
     future Microsoft software upgrades you may not need or want, or
     face the prospect of higher costs for new licenses later. The
     countdown to Y2Pay is coming. What will your company do?

     You do have a choice--begin moving users to lower-cost Linux
     desktops using software and solutions from Ximian. From now through
     August 15th, you can purchase Ximian Desktop Professional Edition
     for Linux, a complete desktop environment and suite of productivity
     applications that includes Sun StarOffice 6.0 and Ximian Evolution,
     at a savings of up to 25% over the usual price.

   Any business Ximian gets out of this will be a huge boon, even if most
   Microsoft customers go ahead and sign new contracts (which is the
   default assumption). Operating systems continue to commodify at a
   rapid pace. Linux is simply taking the lead in that much broader
   movement. The new commodity operating system isn't Linux but whatever
   UNIX you feel like using, Linux included. If you're working under the
   hood in command-line mode, the differences between Linux, BSD, Solaris
   and OS X matter less than the fact that deep down they're all breeds
   of an OS that's purely infrastructural.

   I suspect that Palladium isn't as infrastructural as Microsoft would
   like it to look. But it still involves a number of concessions that
   make clear that the company is simply a significant inhabitant of a
   larger ecosystem, rather than the whole environment.

   Doc Searls:
   mailto:doc at ssc.com is senior editor of Linux Journal. His monthly
   column is Linux for Suits. He is also a coauthor of The Cluetrain
   Manifesto.