Tale of Two Stories

Google
has achieved maximum Linux irony by becoming the only commercial
enterprise to leverage enormous quantities of free software
(10,000+ Linux servers at last count) into de
facto web infrastructure: private enterprise as public
utility.Irony or not, Google is a major Linux success story. Even if
it doesn't win every search popularity contest (last year,
Jupiter
MediaMetrix said MSN and Yahoo's search engines still had
more "audience reach", although Google led by most other measures),
its influence will only grow as the company earns more
acclaim
and
success.So what's wrong with Google? The press will be glad to tell
you. Take two current examples:"Google
vs. Evil: The world's biggest, best-loved search engine
owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be
evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just
the cost of doing big business", by Josh McHugh, in the January
issue of Wired."A
Nation of Voyeurs: How the Internet search engine Google is
changing what we can find out about one another - and raising
questions about whether we should", by Neil Swidey, in the February
2 edition of the Boston Globe.One story is about purity, the other about privacy.Both ask tough questions.McHugh: "The company's growth spurt has spawned a host of
daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer.
Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse
to link users to "hate" sites? Punish marketers who artificially
inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology's attempts
to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google's
archive of previously indexed pages?"Swidey: "Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our
expectations about what we can know about one another. But this
search engine that fields 150 million queries a day is of no use in
helping us determine how much information we deserve to know about
one another, or how we should proceed once we know it. Should we
confront friends, dates, or coworkers with the damning details we
unearthed while cyber-snooping? Or should we say nothing?"Both come to agreeable answers:McHugh: "It's inevitable that a company of Google's size and
influence will have to compromise on purity. There's a chance that,
in five years, Google will end up looking like a slightly cleaner
version of what Yahoo! has become. There's also a chance that the
site will be able to make a convincing case to investors that
long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The
leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin's to lose. For now, at
least, in Google we trust."Swidey: "As a nation, we need to put measures in place,
before it's too late, that provide some basic protection of vital
personal information, like bank account numbers and Social Security
numbers and, most important, details that have personal safety
implications, such as the addresses of victims. But, in the end,
given how much of life is lived online nowadays, the greater good
is served by making most information accessible and
permanent."Both tell their stories well, but in the end, when all is
said and done, well, a lot more is said than done. Such is the
nature of covering an unrelenting success story. You still have to
tell a story.Listen to the managing editors, the assignment editors, the
editors-in-chief at every publication covering news, and you'll
hear one question repeated like a mantra: "What's the
story?"Swap "problem" for "story" and you get my point. Stories are
about problems. Happily Ever After comes after a story is over, if
it ever comes at all. Problems are what keep you turning pages.
Problems are what make you tune in the latest report from the News
Desk, Weather Central, Metro Traffic or the ball game.Sports, in fact, exists entirely to satisfy the human need
for stories. If there's no struggle--if teams and players don't
give each other problems--it's not interesting. There's no story.
If you're at a game and the home team is up by 30 points with a
minute to go, your problem is getting out of the parking
lot.Back in the late 1970s I worked for a parapsychology research
organization loosely attached to Duke University. One of my
colleagues there was
Jerry
Solfvin, a deep guy given to asking profound questions. One
day, while we were busy sawing through ceiling sheet-rock at the
house we shared, Jerry paused to ask, "What is the fundamental unit
of consciousness?"Without even thinking, I replied, "It's the story."At the time I was reading
Writing
to Sell, by Scott Meredith, the legendary
literary agent. Meredith said every story has a
"plot
skeleton" with exactly three bones: a
character with a
problem, moving toward a
resolution. What matters most,
Meredith said, is keeping the character interesting and the problem
complicated. The job of the resolution is to give sufficient cause
for hope--and nothing more until it's time to end the book.I was convinced at the time (and still am) that Meredith's
plot skeleton also describes human interests in general. We are
naturally interested in problems and complications. We work toward
resolutions, sure; but as Steve Jobs famously said, the journey is
the reward. Nothing's more dull than a problem-free life of
infinite privilege.Character, problems, complications. That's what keeps us
interested in Google--even when the problems aren't that big and
the issues aren't that complicated.Now: What about Linux?That's what I'm here to talk about.See, Linux' stories are changing fast. The old
World
Domination meme is losing its irony. Think for a moment
about the
oft-quoted
Ghandi line, printed onto countless geek t-shirts:
First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they
fight you. Then you win.Linux is winning. Even Microsoft is now treating Linux'
success as a fait accompli. Linux' open-source
development methods are cited in Microsoft's latest quarterly SEC
filing as a "significant challenge to the company's business
model". Microsoft also is being forced by governments around the
world to open its source code to inspection, a sign that many
highly placed hearts and minds have been swayed by arguments in
favor of open source.This doesn't mean Microsoft is defeated. It does mean,
however, that it's not the enemy it was. The stories have changed;
the problems are different now--so are the players. Red Hat and
SuSE are still around, sure, but now the leading "Linux company" is
IBM.But what does "leading Linux company" mean when the real
leaders aren't the usual suspects at all? They're the worker bees
at companies of all sizes that are shifting IT dependencies from
other operating systems and development methods to Linux and open
source. They're IT departments embracing
a de facto standard. And more, much
more.Yesterday I had a long talk on the phone with Avery Lyford of
Linuxcare, which makes
its living in the growing
server
consolidation business. He said the challenge for Linux
right now is to cope with its own appeal, which fans out all over
the place. Server consolidation uses virtualization to respond to
the problem of server proliferation. "Now you've dissociated the
unit of work from the box." There's the issue of "business
criticality" and problem-areas such as "failure impact and disaster
recovery", where Linux is proving quite helpful. There's procedural
stuff like "development staging." On that last issue Avery said,
"Every application goes through development, test, staging, and
rollout. Linux, for the first time, allows you to switch
architectures during that process. So you can develop for Linux on
Intel, test on something else and deploy on a third physical
architecture. Think about it. For the first time that's
true."And yet the change seems more mundane than profound. It's
"best practices" stuff. Whatever business cliché you use,
the effect is the same. Linux seems to be a vast magnet, quietly
re-aligning ferrous atoms inside IT departments that continue to
look the same.Two years ago it was a big deal that
Burlington
Coat Factory had massively adopted Linux as its main
platform. Now it's common to hear Linux mentioned in the same
breath as
GE,
Goldman-Sachs,
Home
Depot,
Boeing,
LSI
Logic,
FedEx
and Reynolds & Reynolds.
It's not hard to imagine Linux becoming common IT infrastructure
inside every large company whose name isn't Microsoft. And who's to
say it won't happen there too?All the companies listed in the last paragraph have different
stories. What they have in common is an adoption pattern in which
relatively little money moves to a "Linux vendor". For example, the
flow of money to Oracle may stay constant, while the OS platform
moves from HP-UX to Linux, while the hardware changes or stays the
same. Internal applications that have nothing to do with any brand
name in hardware or software also may move from some other OS to
Linux without making any noise outside the company--or even
inside."Use value" (as opposed to "sale value") applications are
dark matter to everybody outside the teams doing the work. Changes
in those applications don't call for press releases, no matter how
profound they may be. Still, the adoption of Linux and open-source
development tools and methods causes radical changes in IT
infrastructure. There are real stories here.Over in the desktop space, Linux is still a long way from
being a serious threat to Microsoft. But that threat is bound to
become real when the Linux desktop feature set and ease of use both
match or surpass those of the latest Windows generation. We're
still in the "Then they laugh at you" stage of that one, but at
some point the laughing stops.In
The
Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen
describes how disruptive new technologies utterly transform their
industries and cause great companies to fail. Those technologies
are always easy to ignore or discredit at their early stages,
because they appear too simple, too incapable, too cheap, too
downscale, too unlike the stuff they will ultimately replace. But
they quietly keep getting better until suddenly the market wakes up
and smells the advantages. Then the market's path shifts from the
incumbent leader's steady series of innovations to the new
technology's course of rapid improvement and adoption. That's the
path desktop Linux is on right now.But this path may not be the one we're accustomed to seeing
from inside the traditional Linux market space (where a number of
leading vendors yesterday announced the
Desktop Linux
Consortium). In my recent conversations with executives
from Lindows, it became
clear to me that we're dealing with a different breed of animal
here: a mass market company. While Lindows does some development,
it's not driven by engineering. It's driven by a determination to
put a new bottom end on the desktop PC operating systems
market.In
Open
Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
(O'Reilly, 1999), Bob Young of
Red Hat spoke like a
mass marketer when he
said,
"The Linux OS gives consumers choice over the technology that comes
with their computers at the operating system level... Will that
user prefer to go back to the old model of being forced to trust
his proprietary binary-only OS supplier once he has experienced the
choice and freedom of the new model? Not likely." Four years later,
that choice is available from
Wal-Mart.com in
Lindows,
Lycoris
and
Mandrake
flavors. No Red Hat. The company driving a wedge through that
channel, and the only one selling a
$199
PC, is Lindows. I've also heard reports that Lindows
out-sells the others at Wal-Mart.com. If so, it's a controlled
study in branding.Of course, Lindows may not be the ultimate desktop Linux
winner; but what's interesting right now is that Lindows wants to
make a market in ways none of the old "Linux companies" are ready
to do: by shifting the conversation from Linux and its development
methods to the kind of stuff "consumers" care about, such as brand,
features and prices. Yes, Red Hat has
ambitions
in that space as well, but is Red Hat ready to play a disruptive
role in the desktop OS market? Should it? I don't know. I just know
there are a bunch of new stories here.Same with the embedded space, which is at the "Then you win"
stage. Last year it was a big deal that Sharp was putting Linux on
the Zaurus PDA. Now Sony and Matsushita (which makes Panasonic and
other brands) say they're
codeveloping
their own Linux distro for the whole of consumer
electronics. Hitachi, IBM, Samsung, Sharp and Philips are also on
board with the effort. This looks like a Game Over scenario, but
there are bound to be plenty of problems and complications along
the way. (Laptops, for instance. If these guys are so hot on Linux,
how about giving us a real Linux laptop?)All of which means that Linux will have countless real
problems to write about. The hard job will be finding problems that
don't announce themselves or that old story templates can't
possibly describe.You can bet the mainstream press will be covering Linux'
success the way they're covering Google's today, focusing on single
"on the other hand" topics. That's fine. But we're not here to do
that. We're here to talk about what's actually happening. There's a
lot of it going on, and we're counting on you to help us all find
out more about it.Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal. His monthly column in the
magazine is Linux For Suits, and his biweekly newsletter is
SuitWatch.

email: doc@ssc.com