[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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