10 Questions for CES

CES 2005 started
yesterday, as of when I'm writing this, here in Las Vegas.
The topical breakdown on the Flash-infested CES home page goes like this:

• Audio
• Digital Imaging
• Emerging Technology
• Gaming
• Home Networking
• Home Theater/Video
• Mobile Electronics
• Wireless

You can bet there's some Linux in all of them. To find out how much and
where, I did a search for "Linux" in the Search CESweb.org bar at
the top of the index page. It said:

    The page cannot be displayed.

    There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it
    cannot be displayed.

At the bottom it says, "More information: Microsoft Support".

Pretty quick dead end right there. Also, not a new one. Two years ago Don
Marti wrote:

just as (sing along with Poison, everybody... "Every rose has its
thorn/ Just like every night has its dawn/Just like every cowboy
sings his sad, sad song")...Every trade show has its embarrassing
buzz-killing back-stabbing bureaucratic drones. The Consumer
Electronics Association put a stupid browser detector on their Web
site to prevent you from registering for a media pass for CES
without one of the Approved Browsers--which naturally excludes any
of those innovative devices we go to CES for!

Although the CES site still is served up by a slow and disorganized
Microsoft Web server, at least I was able to register with a Firefox
browser. A small light of market awareness shines in the bureaucracy.

So, why am I at CES? One answer is there's no more Comdex. That leaves CES
alone with the distinction of being the biggest technology show in the
US. I believe CeBit in Europe still is bigger overall.
Peter Hirshberg calls it
"the world's silliest trade show", but that's only on
the surface. It's still a great place to hunt down cool Linux stories
that almost nobody else is talking about, mostly because they're too
busy providing the same Big Vendor Sports coverage as the other
thousand-plus reporters at the show.

I also want to follow up on last year's trends and stories. I reported
on
CES 2004
in two pieces:
"Hunting Palms in
the Desert",
in the April issue of Linux Journal, and
"Grass
Roots vs. Giant Roars", in a November Linux for Suits column.
The first piece expressed my disappointment at the lack of any Linux
publicity by any major and few minor vendors--only one year
after a landmark keynote speech by Kunitake Ando, President and CEO of
Sony, that positioned Linux as the new OS of Choice for consumer
electronics products. The second piece took the
CE Linux Forum, which Sony and a raft of other
Big Boys co-founded, to task for its relative invisibility. An anonymous
reader replied:

Doc:

CELF doesn't have an agenda of building a distribution. They have an
agenda of specifying/building open source technologies that enable
Linux to be usable in consumer products. They've done a fair amount
of that;
check
their 1.0 spec. There's at least one distro in the
market that delivers ALL of these capabilities.

Consumer products are not intended to be "development target
systems". Why would you expect consumer product companies to attempt
to provide their consumer products in such a way that they are
usable as development target systems? Is it wrong that they won't
spend any effort in this regard? Their usage focus is on the
consumer user experience, as it needs to be. Consumers don't care
what's inside.

Linux in consumer products is moving very fast and very deep. There
are multiple phones now on the market from the likes of Motorola
PCS, NEC, and soon Panasonic. There are multiple products from
Philips, with many more expected. The move to Linux in Asia is so
significant that Microsoft is one again moving to a FUD campaign:
witness Balmer's recent "we'll sue NEC and Panasonic for patent
infringement if they ship Linux based products" speech in China.

In summary:

• CELF has done good enabling work.
• Linux is moving forward extremely well in the consumer
  space.
• Openness of consumer products as a development platform is
  irrelevant.

Plenty of consumer products, of course, are intended to
be development target systems, or what our industry calls platforms.
Besides the big obvious one (PCs), there are hand-helds devices, such as
PDAs and MP3 players, to name only two.

Still, the anonymous writer's point of view is standard inside the
consumer electronics business, which always has been top-down and
few-to-many. When people in industries such as this one talk about
"markets", they don't mean the open and free places--virtual or
physical--where vendors and customers gather to do business and make
culture. They use "markets" as a synonym for categories, populations and
demographics. To them the "consumer electronics market" is a vast
population of faceless individuals that Jerry Michalski perfectly called
"gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash".

The PC business threatened and undermined the consumer electronics
business by introducing open platforms, low costs and high degrees of
flexibility and usability. With a platform like that and with the huge
assortment of tools that grew around it--including all those we know and
love from the free software and Open Source development
communities--almost anyone could join the category and make money, by making
useful products.

I predict that, in the long run, Linux, free software and open source
will finish the job of leveling the consumer electronics marketplace--while
the spotlights continue to point at HP, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and
other Big Boys. Linux will infiltrate and undermine the Existing Power
Structure simply by being useful.

There is a huge difference between Linux and its proprietary competitors
in the freedoms it provides to developers; also in the size of its
development community. As Ted T'so explained to me a couple of years ago,
other equally useful and cost-free operating systems are out
there, but no other operating system in the world has a development
community as large as the one that exists for Linux--nor is any other OS
gaining more expert practitioners every day.

That's why I believe World Domination by Linux is as inevitable for
consumer electronics as it is for everything else--including, yes, PCs.
In the long run, more people will make money because
of Linux than with Linux.

But how much movement in that direction will be evident at CES? That's
the overall question I bring to CES while I am covering it again this year
for Linux Journal. Here's the whole list, or as much of it as I can come
up with before the show. If you have more or other leads to visit at the
show--no press releases, please, write me at
doc@ssc.com.

Linux-Specific Questions:

• How many exhibitors will feature Linux in their exhibitor
  write-ups? Last year there were only 11 out of more than
  3,000 exhibitors).
• Will CELF have a presence at the show? How? And in
  what?
• Is anybody making free PCs that run on Linux yet? Are
  they closed?
• Who will be doing cool stuff with Linux, whether they promote it
  or not?
• Will DIY (Do It Yourself) have any presence? Meaning, how much
  support will there be for individuals to develop their own
  consumer electronics products? I'm interested in VIA, whose
  Mini-ITX
  boards support DIY work everywhere.
• How clear is it becoming that the term "consumer" is obsolete in a
  networked marketplace where customers and individual developers
  are highly involved? Don Marti says, "If you treat your customers
  like "consumers" you will get your ass kicked by people who
  respect customers". So, how evident is that principle at CES
  2005?
• Will DIY broadcasting, or podcasting, have any presence? We know
  the satellite radio guys will have huge booths; but even there, I
  see room for podcasts as sources of programming--I hate to use the
  word "content".
• Will any of the home audio and video systems have open
  architectures to support original contributions and adaptations
  by customers and third-party developers? Or will they be the
  closed systems I've usually seen in the past?
• Will TiVo and other set-top boxes or home multimedia boxes take
  advantage of Linux's open nature? There was one company last year.
  How many, if any, this year?)
• Will OggVorbis formats have any
  support?
• Are there rampant GPL violations? (That's a question from readers
  of last year's report.)

In addition, here are some follow-up questions from last year, a few of a purely personal
nature:

• Will IBOC digital radio have any adoption? Or will the licensing
  costs, for example, keep early adopter types, such as college
  radio stations, out of the game?
• Speaking of radio, will C. Crane and Sangean be back, and what
  will they be offering?
• Will anybody--for example, telescope manufacturers--who makes stuff that
  hooks up to PCs start providing support for Linux, alongside
  Windows and OS X?
• Will flip-out viewers show up on more digital cameras? They are
  extraordinarily handy for photographers who like to shoot a lot of
  candids--such as me, for instance.
• Will anybody offer a radio that receives both satellite services,
  plus AM & FM?

I'll be reporting from the show for Linux Journal. Stay tuned and see
what happens.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux
Journal. He writes the Linux for Suits column for Linux
Journal.
He also presides over
Doc Searls' IT
Garage,
which is published by SSC, the publisher of Linux
Journal.