[PLUG] SuitWatch - January 8 (fwd)

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Thu Jan 8 07:05:03 UTC 2004


  For your reading pleasure on this iced-in day.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
                             SuitWatch--January 8

  Views on Linux in Business

  --by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
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                                "Prophesies"

   Thursday, January 8, 2004--It's an ancient and not especially
   honorable journalistic New Year's tradition to offer retrospective
   summaries of the year just past and prospective predictions for the
   year just beginning. It's a bit of a gimmick, frankly, but a fun one.

   So, as an ancient and not especially honorable journalist with a
   penchant for gimmickry, I find myself surprised to recall never having
   produced either a year-in-review or a list of predictions for the year
   to come. Today I'll correct half of that.

   If I'm not mistaken, most of us were here for 2003 and remember what
   happened. So we'll skip that part and go straight to Pure Prophesy.
   And if the Alzheimers doesn't set in before 2005, we'll revisit the
   list and see how we scored.

   Okay, so here we go. Ten predictions for 2004.

   Prediction #1: Somebody buys Red Hat. My bet is Oracle.

   This is based on no inside skinny whatsoever. Just the observation
   that every company has two markets: one for its goods and services and
   one for itself. As the stock market cautiously improves, expect the
   active market for the sale of "Linux companies" to remain active.

   Connect the dots and it's not hard to see where this will go. Novell
   bought Ximian in August and SuSE in November. EMC just bought VMware
   in December. Red Hat just bought Sistina. Given the mojo behind Linux,
   which is growing steadily in just about every respect you can name
   (enterprises, governments, education, embedded, servers, clients thick
   and thin), additional acquisitions are a safe bet.

   Today, of all the high-profile "Linux Companies" that were around
   during the boom years of the late '90s, Red Hat is about the only one
   left that still has a profile. Though I'm no fan of rampant
   acquisition (a huge percentage of them fail), it's hard to ignore the
   trends here.

   Prediction #2: Quickbooks will come out for Linux. Other mainstream
   apps will follow.

   As Linux continues to establish itself in business, expect familiar
   accounting apps -- to name just one common category -- to start moving
   over. For example, as Linux continues to penetrate entertainment and
   publishing, expect Adobe to try gaining ground on Linux that it lost
   to Apple on the OS X platform.

   Microsoft? Not until they wake up and smell the demand. My guess is
   that it'll happen eventually. But not this year.

   Prediction #3: Outsourcing to low-cost Linux-based services will grow.

   Outsourcing is already huge. Folks providing it will naturally rely on
   the cheapest and most reliable platforms they can mount. This
   imperative applies whether the customer is a giant retailer like
   Target, which just signed a 10-year deal for on-demand computing from
   the Linux giant named IBM, or a small company like the one this reader
   works for:

     Actually I tried something new at this company. Since I end up
     doing all the support on the systems, we have outsourced everything
     except the desktops. And I mean everything. Currently our mail
     server, web server, and FTP server are being hosted by ipowerweb
     running Linux somewhere in California for $8/month. This gives us
     500MB of space and 50 email addresses.

     We have two networks for our people. One network is for development
     and hooked up to the robot. It is not connected to anything else
     (so far, never been hacked). The other network is for the office
     machines and each machine has a firewall and virus protection. No
     servers yet. Early this year I'm buying a RAID NAS Linux server
     appliance to hold the backups. I spend no more than 5 minutes a
     month on maintenance.

     From my perspective, the only way to go for small business is
     outsourced or in-house appliances managed by a web interface.

   That last item leads me to...

   Prediction #4: Phrase of the Year: "Mixed Environments."

   The all-Microsoft shop is following the all-IBM shop into the growing
   roster of Things In The Past. But that doesn't mean there will be many
   no-Microsoft shops. The mature state toward which we are heading is
   one in which the best tools and materials get used for whatever the
   job happens to be. Given current cost- and support-savings imperatives
   alone, this bodes well for Linux.

   Prediction #5: New Net-ready embedded consumer electronics devices
   will get hot.

   Why should your digital camera only dump pictures onto your desktop or
   laptop machine? Why shouldn't it connect by Wi-Fi or Ethernet directly
   to a ready server on the Net? For that matter, why should any device
   that needs to move data not be ready to interact in open and
   productive ways over the Net with remote storage and all kinds of
   ready services on the back end? I'm not sure how this one will play
   out -- whether the trend will be driven by the Sonys and Apples of the
   world (which will want to restrict you as much as possible to their
   gear, services and partners), by the ISPs and hosting services looking
   for value-adds to sell or what. But I'm sure Linux will make
   implementation quick and easy in both the embedded device and service
   providing roles.

   By the way, I'll be at CES this weekend, and I'll let you know what I
   find out there.

   Prediction #6: The ROW boat pulls in front, with government help.

   In big-picture market data parlance, ROW stands for "Rest Of World."
   Here in the US we tend to look at everything outside our own borders
   as ROW. From inside the business sphere, we tend to look at government
   the same way. Well, right now it looks like those are the two
   categories that will contribute the most to Linux Leadership this
   year. One case in both points is a story reported yesterday by the
   Israeli National News:
   http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=55243: "Finance
   Ministry Weaning Israel Off of Microsoft".

   Don't be surprised to see Project Leopard:
   http://leopard.sourceforge.net/ helping that development along.

   Prediction #7: Syndication and notification will go mainstream and
   change everything.

   Syndication and notification are hot. The leading (or the most
   branded) metadata format for syndication and notification is RSS,
   which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS
   quickly is becoming an infrastructural value-add for the Internet.
   Thanks to RSS (and its equivalents) when you publish on the Net, a
   notification goes out to the world, and your content is in a position
   to be syndicated to everybody who pays attention to the notification,
   usually through news aggregators. When they write about what you
   write, services like Technorati:
   http://technorati.com (which runs on Linux) let you know what they've
   said too. More linkage happens, Google takes notice and juice flows.

   RSS is the standard with the highest profile, thanks in large measure
   to its advocacy by Dave Winer, prime mover behind RSS 2.0:
   http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss. It's the first in a series of
   established and emerging metadata standards, which extend the reach of
   the category far beyond the on-line publishing world. All kinds of
   things can be syndicated, including updates to product and parts
   catalogs, weather information, traffic notifications--you name it.

   As always, anything that expands the Net as an infrastructure platform
   inevitably involves plenty of Linux as well.

   If you're new to RSS, Amphetadesk:
   http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ is probably the leading news
   aggregation for Linux. Hebig.org:
   http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php has a huge
   directory of other RSS news readers and aggregators as well.

   Prediction #8: Web services will finally get huge.

   Loosely Coupled:
   http://looselycoupled.com/glossary/web%20services defines Web services
   as "Automated resources accessed via the Internet. Web services are
   software-powered resources or functional components whose capabilities
   can be accessed at an Internet URI. Standards-based Web services use
   XML to interact with each other, which allows them to link up on
   demand using loose coupling."

   Most of Loosely Coupled's sources are from 2002. That was the big year
   for talk about Web services. The following year was a big one for
   implementation, including all that stuff I just said about RSS, which
   fits the definition. Now we're reading business magazine cover stories
   about Amazon's expanding business in Web services. Thanks to Web
   services, Amazon becomes an e-commerce platform for countless
   businesses other than its own $4 billion/year retail operation.

   And Amazon, of course, runs everything it can on Linux.

   Prediction #9: The mundane reigns.

   The most widely deployed Linux implementations are the least visible.
   Also, perhaps, the fastest growing. One example is Samba, which looks
   to most enterprises like a Windows file and print server. There are
   countless millions of Samba servers in the world. Another is wireless
   access points. When I did my study of Wi-Fi in New York last year, the
   largest percentage of WAPs I found had a default linksys SSID.
   Linksys, now owned by Cisco, easily has the largest WAP market share.
   Lots of Linksys WAPs run Linux--maybe most or all of them, I'm not
   sure. In any case, it's an easy supposition to make.

   Prediction #10: SCO will lose.

   Far too much hot air and ink already has been wasted on this subject.
   Lawyers withstanding, it will end. Count on it.

   Of course, I'd welcome hearing your ideas too. A second guess at this
   kind of stuff can't be worse than the first one.

   --
   Doc Searls:
   mailto:doc at ssc.com is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. His monthly
   column in the magazine is Linux for Suits, and his biweekly newsletter
   is SuitWatch.
     _________________________________________________________________

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