Bringing Linux Appliances to Market

Early in January, Intel announced plans
for new Intel-branded Internet appliances that would run on Linux.
(The press release is
here.)
They also showed and demonstrated some of these at their booth at
CES--the Consumer Electronics Show--in Las Vegas. It was there that
I got to play around briefly with two devices: a computer-like thin
client, sitting in an ersatz kitchen, and a TV set-top box in an
ersatz living room. Both were beyond impressive. They were
scary.The web box had a display that seemed to have more in common
with an airport kiosk than a computer of any kind. Fundamentally,
it was a browser. A Mozilla browser, in fact, but without the usual
windowing features. It was simply a window on the Web, with a set
of other handy features: e-mail, sticky notes, calendar and so
forth. It was equally open and proprietary: on the one hand, it
used open-source software (Linux and Mozilla); on the other, it was
a closed and therefore proprietary box. It was, literally, an
appliance.The set-top box looked like, say, a DISH or DirectTV box, but
with one important difference: when you thought you were looking at
just another proprietary cable company display, you were looking at
a browser rendering HTML. Intel had webified The Tube by putting a
browser (again, Mozilla) interface on all the potential choices a
user might face. It had even moved some of the directional buttons
(e.g., forward and back) from the browser window to the remote
control. Again, it was that strange mix of open and closed.I wondered: what would we call these boxes? LinTel? MozTel?
MoLuxTel? Innux? Didn't matter: Obviously, "Intel" was the only
name that mattered. Linux and open source were nothing more than a
better building material and a better building method. In fact,
Linux and Mozilla disappeared into the plastics, the flash memory,
the deep background. This is what we mean by "embedded",
folks.Intel has already been aggressive about moving these things.
In the U.S., they have signed up US West and Lucent. Overseas, they
have signed up NEC's BiGlobe in Japan, France's LASER, which is
part of the Galeries Lafayette Group, and Nokia. Reported costs to
service providers range from about $300 to $700. But cost of the
devices to end users will depend on how service providers price and
promote the things. In some cases, the price will be zero.At CES, I had a long talk with Jon Bork, General Manager of
Intel's Broadband Services Division. Jon told me he led a team that
was instrumental in selecting Linux and driving its adoption within
the organization. Some of what he said was so interesting that I
had to sit down and talk with him again, this time with a tape
recorder running. Here is the conversation that followed.Doc Searls: Let's start with
why you chose Linux and what you're trying to do with your
appliance strategy.John Bork: The decision to
use Linux, in both the web appliance and the set top, was driven by
a multifaceted evaluation. We looked at business issues, technical
issues, and where Intel had the ability to innovate quickly, among
other things.Doc Searls: What other OSes
did you evaluate?John Bork: Windows, Windows
CE, X Works, and Linux, among others. But we chose Linux because it
offered the best balance across a number of factors. One was that
we thought it had the right footprint for the problem--a small one.
Another was cost. Certainly the price was right. We needed to be
able to make changes as the market changed along with us, and do it
quickly.Doc Searls: Did Linux come
up short in any way?John Bork: Yes. All of them
did. With Linux, it was in areas like USB support. With X Works,
there was a problem in getting the full family of browser plug-ins.
With Windows CE, we didn't see a fast enough rate of innovation.
Also, we need to get in and make bug fixes quickly, and we were
limited with CE. And one of the big issues with Windows is that
it's not an appliance-oriented OS. But at the end of the day, we
looked at all these factors and talked to our customers, and our
customers said Linux is the right tool for solving this problem.
The most interesting fact was that our customers were asking for
Linux, having studied the tradeoffs themselves.Doc Searls: Tell me more
about the products you are putting Linux in, and how you expect
them to evolve in the marketplace.John Bork: We're addressing
a couple of different market segments. We have what we call the Web
appliance internally. It's a single integrated appliance, meaning a
display, the communication piece and the processor are all in one
box. The Web appliance has integrated telephony, meaning either a
wireless or a wired handset. And the intent is to bring Internet
capabilities into parts of the home that you would traditionally
not see the Internet. And more than that, because of the telephony,
it's to integrate the telephony services in a way that makes the
telephony easier to use. For example, it's difficult to remember
what "#67" does if you don't use it all the time. But if you put it
on the screen so the guy just hits a button for Caller ID or Last
Caller Redial or whatever, now you have really made it easier for
those services to be used. And of course, to the people we're
selling to, such as the telcos, that's very attractive because
that's incremental business for them.Doc Searls: There's
directory integration.John Bork: That's another
one. If you think about all the opportunities of telephony and
Internet capabilities coming together, there are all kinds of
opportunities here.Doc Searls: In a way, it
turns your Net into your PBX. All displayed by HTML.John Bork: That's one way to
see it. I think the biggest opportunity the Internet brings is
crossing it with other technologies and market segments where it's
never been thought about before. We're doing that with telephony
and television--Doc Searls: --at the
client.John Bork: Yes. Other people
back in the infrastructure are doing things like integrating
satellite and the Internet.Doc Searls: A lot of people
are working on voice over IP.John Bork: Right. But just
think about your traditional telephone handset in the home, and all
the services hidden in that 12-button pad which you can't use
because it's too big a bother. Even there, we see a huge
opportunity. Look at things like Caller ID, which often requires an
outside box with a one-line display. That service improves
tremendously when it's integrated into a web appliance.Doc Searls: Suddenly, you
have a phone top.John Bork: Yeah.
Absolutely.Doc Searls: Are the products
you showed at CES just prototypes?John Bork: Well, we're going
beyond that. The intent in the web appliance space is to bring an
Intel-branded product to market, working with the telcos--both the
CLEC and ILEC type customers* --to
provide not just the hardware but the client software and the
server software, so it's a complete end-to-end solution.Doc Searls: So your customer
resells branded Intel boxes. Not just "Intel inside", but Intel
from the silicon to the plastic.John Bork: Absolutely. And
the intention is also that Intel's work would be apparent in the
software; so that the telcos, the ILECs and CLECs, would have their
primary brand at the portal.Doc Searls: How about
somebody like Panasonic, which is a big supplier of PBXes to the
SOHO (Small Office & Home Office) market (and one of whose
impossible-to-program PBXes we are talking over right now)? What
happens when you throw the Internet into that market? Would a
Panasonic want to private-label something like this?John Bork: Every discussion
is unique. I think if you step back from the Home Products Group
(HPG) and look at Intel's strategy, you see we intend to be the
building block supplier to the Internet economy. Insofar as
Panasonic sees a play using Intel building blocks, we would of
course be very interested in having that conversation.Doc Searls: Telephony is
one, and television is another. But do you guys see your stuff in
other existing appliances? At the Transmeta rollout, people were
talking about the browser on the door to the refrigerator--with a
bar code reader in the back, an inventory database and a keypad for
ordering more groceries or doing whatever else might make sense. Do
you see yourselves in that kind of market as well?John Bork: Not
exactly...Doc Searls: ...Okay, then
what happens when the browser is the interface for nearly
everything?John Bork: That's the
hundred-billion-dollar question. As everybody works through this
new appliance model, it will start to get clear. In the wireless
space, you see palms, pagers and cell phones all starting to
integrate. At Intel, we have a whole group just focused on
wireless. You see new peripherals to the PC, where the PC is the
processing hub and there are wireless connections to tablets and
appliances throughout the home: from hand pads to fridge pads. I
think the real business question is cost structure. The big cost
drivers are the batteries and the LCDs. That has nothing to do with
the microprocessor or the browser. How many different devices will
a customer buy with an expensive LCD and batteries that need
constantly to be replaced or recharged? The model for the Internet
is now to pay for services. What services will I pay for that
involve interacting with my refrigerator? And how much will I pay
for that in addition to what I pay for my telephone, PC, Web
appliance, palm appliance, cell phone? Two years ago, I heard that
if you added up all the services people would like you to consume,
the total would be more than two thousand dollars a month. And the
truth is that consumers are willing to spend about forty to sixty
dollars a month.Doc Searls: What other
market segments are you looking at?John Bork: There are two.
One is building a cable modem-attached set-top box. The concept
here is bringing the Internet to the television set. In some areas
of the world, the cable-attached approach of bringing Internet
service in over high-speed hybrid fiber coax (HFC) is the right
solution. That's where you run the neighborhood in fiber and then
copper coax into the home. In many parts of the world, because they
started later than in the U.S., they are farther along in their
fiber deployment. Then the third market involves a partnership with
Nokia, focusing on satellite boxes. That's Internet delivered by
satellite, with a POTS (plain old telephone service) back channel.
We think there is a tremendous opportunity for the direct-to-home
market.Doc Searls: So who are your
customers, so far?John Bork: On the web
appliance side, we have a couple. One is LASER, which is Lafayette
Services, in France. They're part of Galerie Lafayette, one of the
biggest retailers in Europe. If you do a lot of business as a
customer with Galerie Lafayette, eLaser may
give you this appliance if you spend more than
a certain amount of money. That's one model. Another is what we
have with BiGlobe in Japan, a subsidiary of NEC. They private-label
the appliance and bundle services. On the set-top side, we have an
agreement with Hughes Network Systems to provide support for AOL/TV
or DirecTV. Then we have an agreement with Nokia for a set-top
platform based on Linux. We haven't announced a service provider
for that one yet. Finally, in China, we have a deal with Pacific
Century Cyberworks, PCC, to bring the Internet to people over there
over a modem-attached set-top box. And we are working on other
things that are yet to be announced in other parts of the
world.Doc Searls: With that
Galerie Lafayette deal, it seems to me what you've got here is the
Minitel replacement, at least for France. People outside France
might not be familiar with the Minitel, but it's a terminal
attached to the telephone system, and it was very successful for a
very long time. So I imagine that this appliance would be easy for
French people to adopt as a concept.John Bork: That's true. When
we were searching for analogies, the first thing out of many
people's mouths was, "It's a Minitel." We said yes, exactly, that's
a perfect model for what we're trying to do here. But this
appliance is based on open standards and open source, rather than
proprietary in the way the original Minitel was.Doc Searls: So you've got
home appliances, set-top boxes and satellite boxes.John Bork: Think of them as
very similar product concepts with very different communication
paradigms.Doc Searls: At the software
level, you've gone with two open-source solutions: Linux for the OS
and Mozilla for the browser. And you like them, because they are
handy and compact building materials that you can apply any way you
like.John Bork: Right. We're also
very active with the Mozilla development team, because one of the
things we found as we got engaged was that we needed to go fast,
and we could get that way by becoming part of the Mozilla
development team.Doc Searls: What have you
contributed there?John Bork: Stuff like
foreign language support. We needed Chinese, for example.
Internationalization is customarily dealt with later in the
development cycle, after you get the core product out. We needed it
earlier.Doc Searls: How about items
like USB support? I notice USB interfaces on the appliances you had
on display at CES. USB and Infrared.John Bork: Yes. We have been
very active in USB driver support. If you look at where Intel wants
to take the PC, you'll see we're moving toward legacy-free goods.
On the PC, that means USB, 1394 (FireWire) and PCI-type connections
into the box, to remove some of the ISA, serial and parallel port
kinds of stuff, which was where a lot of the reliability issues
showed up. On the appliance, we think USB is one of the most
powerful attach mechanisms for cameras, printers, microphones,
scanners and other devices you might want to have around, say, a
set-top box, to enable an Internet experience. So we have been very
active in USB driver development in the Mozilla movement. We're
actually among the people reviewing the changes coming in to the
driver, and helping to drive those changes. This is also
complementary to what we're already doing on many other OS
platforms.Doc Searls: You invented
USB.John Bork: Yeah.Doc Searls: What I like
about what I'm seeing with USB is that it describes the size and
shape of the TinkerToy holes you can use to build all kinds of neat
stuff.John Bork: It's a very
powerful way to bring peripherals into an overall
configuration.Doc Searls: How about
FireWire?John Bork: It's one of those
technologies where we're waiting to see what the market does. As
you know, Intel is already working on USB2, which is a higher-speed
USB connection. But the customers have the final say here. Early
prototypes had 1394 and customers said "We don't need it. Take the
cost out."Doc Searls: I was impressed
with the set-top box implementation of Mozilla. What the viewer saw
looked like any selection screen with DISH or DirecTV, where you
are looking at a variety of program and other choices in a table or
some other visual format. But what you are looking at is HTML. What
you've done is moved a lot of the desktop browser interface onto
the remote control. Forward, back, stop.John Bork: If you think of
TV as just another browser window, you're exactly on the
concept.Doc Searls: Except that a TV
isn't a computer, nor is a set-top box. What did you do,
technically, to implement this in an appropriate way?John Bork: We had some very
interesting challenges in bringing out a set-top box that really is
able to access the Internet. Three in particular. The first was
ATVTF, a standard for bringing the TV into the browser, and also
for enhancing the TV image with other pieces, such as hot spots or
live-click technologies, where basically TV and the Web become a
seamless experience. The second was enhancing the set-top box for
TV. So we spent a lot of time working on TV quality out. How do we
produce a product that really makes the Net look best on the TV
set? Traditionally, PC architectures have not been optimized for
that design goal. They have been optimized around a progressive
scan monitor on your desk. The third piece was designing a GUI and
an interface that looks good in a living room environment: a
10-foot rather than a 2-foot experience.Doc Searls: It seems to me
that the two experiences are coming together. I was impressed at
CES by how much the display technologies seem to be merging. You
certainly see that already when you slap a DVD into your laptop and
watch a movie.John Bork: There is a
technology rathole here--Doc Searls: --We like those.
We're a technical publication.John Bork: Good. It's
interesting. Traditionally, Intel loves high MIPS-consuming
applications. So things like DVD movies, we love that stuff. The
interesting part is that the computer is better able to mimic the
TV than the TV is able to mimic the computer. Because with a
computer, you've got the processing power and a progressive-scan
high-quality display. The biggest challenge is bringing TV up to
the display resolution and processing power that the computer has
today. So when you look at some of those huge plasma TV screens we
saw at CES, and go "Wow!" when they show a DVD, we forget we're
still dealing with less resolution than you get on a computer.
Another issue: web content with a white background looks pretty
crummy on a TV. A computer display has no problem displaying pure
white. But if you talk to a TV tube manufacturer, they tell you
they optimize for a gray balance in a picture tube. A solid white
background would burn out the tube. There are also some interesting
technical issues regarding our current NTSC-interlaced scan
television sets that are exciting to me. You're going to start
seeing progressive-scan TVs, high-resolution TVs and other
technologies that the TV manufacturers will bring out. Waiting for
those is actually the biggest barrier to making the computer and
the TV an equivalent experience in equivalent usage
paradigms.Doc Searls: What we saw with
WebTV was making a bird look like a dinosaur. They did some neat
type and layout tricks, but ironically, the system choked at places
like Microsoft's own home page, which has acres of detail with lots
of tiny type.John Bork: The type is an
issue. We think WebTV has struggled with conveying a full Internet
experience. You need the ability to have all the relevant plug-ins
there, so that when the user goes to a web page, they don't get "Go
to your PC to see what this really looks like."Doc Searls: It was also
interesting to me that with your implementation of Mozilla, some of
the browser buttons were now at the physical layer: on the remote
control. They actually seem to belong there.John Bork: We went through a
big exercise in '99 where we went out to consumer electronics
stores, counted buttons on remotes, compared usage models, and
asked, "What are people really going to use?" You never want to
present a user interface through a 100-button remote. The reality
is that people don't use them. So the challenge is to provide a web
experience through a remote with 30 buttons or less. We gave
ourselves a 'button budget' and were very stingy about using more
of them. The question constantly was, "How do you get all the
functionality out of a very simple and easy-to-use remote?" If you
have complex, hidden or hard-to-use functions, don't put them on
the remote. Allow the user to pick them off the screen.Doc Searls: Let's go deeper
into the technology: how you hacked on Linux and Mozilla, and how
you ignored legacy, as you put it, to develop these new
products.John Bork: We started with
the Celeron processor, basically because of the cost points we
wanted to hit in the appliance market segment. Outside of that, we
wanted to optimize for delivering a sealed box with a low-rise form
factor. That meant using a PCI bus, because the communications
piece is still somewhat of a moving target. We told ourselves we'd
love to jump to DSL, but the market isn't there yet. So we're
working with both POTS and DSL on the web appliance. On the set-top
box, we needed to design for both POTS and satellite, alongside
cable modem technology, all in the same box, so we don't have to
build the whole thing from scratch each time. TV tuner technology
is right there on the board, leaving legacy I/O out and putting USB
in. So what you start with is a PC and end up with a device that
harnesses PC power, but optimized to solve different problems. This
meant peeling away irrelevant pieces of the PC architecture, and
then adding other pieces, like TV tuning and telephony, that are
core to the product concept.Doc Searls: From a Linux
perspective, you peel away the legacy operating system and
substitute one that is much smaller and more adaptable.John Bork: Yes. Windows CE
is an environment where Microsoft says, "this is what the reference
design looks like, and as long as you build this, Windows CE will
work on it." Linux, on the other hand, is an erector set, where we
design the reference hardware to meet the problem we're trying to
solve and then go to Linux for the piece parts from the bin to
build exactly what works.Doc Searls: And there are
fewer licensing issues.John Bork: There are three
things involved here. First, can you get the license? That's not
our biggest concern. Second, can you innovate fast enough to get
the right product out of it? And third, given that we're all new
here, and the successful formula is anybody's guess, can we change
and fix things at an accellerating pace? We chose Linux based on
the ability to innovate and fix things quickly, more than "Can we
go negotiate a license?" Intel's position is OS-agnostic, really.
Different problems require different OS solutions. There isn't one
OS for every problem. But in this case, our analysis said that
Linux is the right OS to solve this set of problems.Doc Searls: And I imagine
there are more and more people inside Intel who know how to build
solutions with Linux.John Bork: Yep. Absolutely.
We not only have Windows experience, but also a long history of
UNIX experience. So when we went to work on Linux, there were lots
of guys who said, "Hey, I've been working on similar problem sets
for a very long time. We can help." That makes hiring both inside
and outside of Intel a very easy job.Doc Searls: How do you cope
with open-source development inside a company like Intel, which,
like most companies, has an employment agreement that says
"everything I do when I work at the company belongs to the
company"?John Bork: We set out to
solve three problems here. Number one was, for the things we
identify as our intellectual property, how do we make sure they
don't seep out? Second, for the things covered under an open-source
license, like a GPL, how do we make sure they
do seep out? There, we need to make sure they
seep out in a way that works with the spirit and the letter of the
license. Third, how do we enable Intel employees in their own time
to work on open-source projects? In the past, we've always dealt
with operating systems that were owned by somebody. Now we're in
this new territory. We're in the Linux community, and we need to do
the right thing both for ourselves and for that community. So we've
taken a couple of steps. First, HPG (the Home Products Group) has
an open-source manager whose full-time job is to design, drive,
audit and manage these processes.Doc Searls: Is this
spreading around the company, or is it confined to the HPG?John Bork: Right now, the
open-source manager works for the Home Products Group, but what's
interesting is, as he has gone out and trained other parts of Intel
on open-source processes and on our policies and procedures, other
groups are now starting to hire his equivalents. I would say we
started it, but it's spreading pretty rapidly as Linux begins to
solve other problems.Doc Searls: Where is the
HPG?John Bork: At three sites.
We have a division in Oregon. Our general manager and VP/general
manager work in Santa Clara, where we have a small group. Then the
remaining half or two-thirds are in Chandler, Arizona.Doc Searls: Okay, let's get
back to how open source is working at Intel.John Bork: Yes. So, out of
this process has come new corporate policy that allows people to
actively participate in the Open Source community. That's the first
thing. Second, we've put policies and procedures in place that
govern the way we write and tag the software, and build the
software, identifying what's ours and what's the community's. In
the latter category, there is lots of software that we want to make
sure gets back into the community. So we've put training in place,
where all of our engineers learn the differences and how to work
with those differences. There are different models involved. With
Mozilla, for example, our work is immediately going back into that
Open Source community. In other places, we are innovating mostly
internally, and the time to bring the work out into the community
is when we ship product. There, we will have validated, tested, and
found it's ready to be submitted. But it's been a big challenge,
because this is a new paradigm for a large corporation like ours.
Open source is a new phenomenon for us.Doc Searls: In many ways,
however, open source is really the natural way things work. In
building construction, for example, if somebody thinks of a better
way to raise a roof or a floor, they're going to share that with
the next crew they work with. So word spreads. The knowledge of how
to build something tends to be shared. And it's in the interest of
everybody that knowledge sharing takes place. But it's new to the
software business, where pre-fab construction out of large pieces
in which the designs belong to one big company has been the norm
for a long time. But in the Open Source world, anybody can innovate
and share it with everybody. This is good, but it can also be scary
for a company that doesn't want the design changed out from under
them on a big project.John Bork: The constant
challenge for big companies is in creating and adopting innovations
as fast as possible. This has never been easy, but I do believe
innovation is the answer. While big-company lawyers may try to slow
that down a little bit, the working purpose today is to go as fast
as you can. The PC Internet economy has shown us conclusively that
the guy who wins isn't the guy who holds up the train. It's the guy
who makes it go faster than anybody else.Doc Searls: That's hard for
a big company.John Bork: As a big company,
your first instinct is to name three guys, segregate them into a
corner, firewall them in and tell them to work on a solution. It
took us a few minutes of staring at this problem before we realized
that was not the way to go here.Doc Searls: That says good
things about your culture. There are still lots of companies that
would act on that first instinct. They would isolate a team around
a problem, rather than recognize that the team needs to be part of
a larger community of shared interests, and that sharing will help
solve the problem faster. In fact, at the Transmeta announcement, I
was the one who asked the obvious question: "Why the secrecy?" They
may have achieved a publicity goal, but at what cost? How could it
have helped to deny their engineers the opportunity to converse
outside the company about the innovations they were working on,
especially if it invited design-ins with long development
cycles?John Bork: Intel's got a
neat culture that's really confrontive. We had to sit down and say,
"How were we going to make this doggone thing work?" and, "What are
we going to have to do differently?" The cool thing was our culture
is flexible enough that when we have to change, we do. The
opportunities are what matter most. With guys like Andy Grove and
Craig Barrett driving, we change pretty fast.Doc Searls: How much of the
kernel are you using?John Bork: We just take the
source off the Net, pull out the stuff we don't need, seeing what
libraries are used and not used, and constraining ourselves from
there. See, the biggest challenge we face is getting the OS, the
browser, the plug-ins and a few applets into eight megabytes of
Flash. So a lot of our work has gone into analysing what pieces we
need, and how we skinny this thing down.Doc Searls: What about
streaming plug-ins?John Bork: We are in the
process of negotiating with the major streaming plug-in
manufacturers. Again, depending on the marketing segment, there are
clearly different needs for streaming media. In the set-top box
segment, of course, streaming content is the holy grail. It turns
out that in a Flash-based box, you can get most of what you want
with a browser and plug-ins. You're not going to be able to store
that content. You'll show it and move on.Doc Searls: How do you deal
with plug-ins that change over time?John Bork: One of the things
we focused on is that the box needs to be software-downloadable,
down the wire from the service provider, and manageable from the
service provider. And that's critical because the Internet will
continue to evolve at lightning speed. And it is absolutely
essential that as new plug-ins come along, we can download them in
the field without rolling a truck, which is the traditional way in
which service providers have handled upgrades. The proposition is
to keep up with the Internet's own rate of innovation.* CLEC = Competitive Local Exchange
Carrier; ILEC = Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier

email: ljeditors@ssc.com