Linux in the Mainstream?

Recently, Linux has been showing up regularly in the mainstream news. For example, there is an article titled “The Greatest OS That (N)ever Was” in the August issue of Wired which is both technically and historically accurate. This article will certainly help increase the visibility of Linux.

Even as Linux's popularity and visibility increase, Windows NT is becoming the server of choice for corporate America. Perhaps choice is not the right word, but NT is fast becoming the automatic answer for companies that don't want to rock the boat.

It wasn't that many years ago that everyone was saying “You can't go wrong buying IBM.” At that time IBM was the 360 mainframe and its offspring. It was hard to imagine that any other company or operating system could take the place of this big iron. Unisys, CDC and others had pieces of the total mainframe market, but IBM seemed to be unstoppable. In fact, people commonly said “IBM machine” when refering to a computer.

There is a lot to learn from this experience. Was it good marketing on the part of IBM that made them the standard? Initially, I expect it was. After all, marketing consists of doing research, finding a need, matching your product or service to that need and advertising the benefits of your solution.

Once other companies started to offer solutions that were as good or better, IBM took advantage of its huge market share to impose itself on the consumer and squelch the competition. For example, even though a standard character set, ASCII, existed, IBM used EBCDIC, their own character set. To enter the market the competition was forced to be compatible with IBM and thus had to use EBCDIC.

As machines became more and more powerful, minis and then micros began to take over the office. At this point the game changed. The new IBM was not a hardware/software giant like IBM but the software-only company, Microsoft. Microsoft offered a better solution which, at the time, meant a more cost-effective solution. As a result, they got the market share and that is where we are today.

Microsoft has clearly overpowered their competition in the IBM tradition and has vendors such as Intel going along for the ride. The standard is to be Microsoft compatible; Plug-n-Play means working with Microsoft operating systems. Virtually all PC hardware vendors bundle a Microsoft operating system with the hardware.

The Linux community is playing catch-up, developing software like SAMBA so that Linux will interact with Microsoft systems, dealing with Plug-n-Play hardware that only works with Microsoft operating systems and so forth. So, we have software that addresses compatability issues. Now, we need the hook—the thing that will make Linux a better solution. That hook isn't going to come from out-spending Microsoft, it has to come from innovation.

I am more of an observer than an expert, but I do have some suggestions. Some of these ideas come from a Seattle-based Linux mailing list, the GLUE list (check out http://www.ssc.com/glue/) and from talking to people about what they want.

All of these solutions need a truly easy install. By this I mean a bootable CD which installs and asks for the information it needs. While it might be difficult to make a universal Linux system this easy, for a specific market, it should be easy.

Remember, we don't have the money to be bigger than Microsoft. We need to go after markets that better fit our size. If we solve the problems of a few of the smaller markets, people will start coming to us for a solution.