For years the old joke in the Linux community has been about usurping Microsoft for world domination. The diehards joke about how we (as in the Linux community) are going to get Microsoft off the desktop, how the real home for Linux is the desktop, and how one day we’ll take over.

Well it’s pretty obvious that Linux world domination on the desktop is never going to happen. However, that doesn’t mean that Linux still can’t achieve the domination that the open source community has pined for all these years. The skirmish for the desktop may be lost, but the battle for computing is only beginning, and the new front is in the mobile computing space.

Although Linux ultimately failed to gain a strong foothold on the desktop, its use is exploding in mobile devices. What is happening is that a bazillion phones and little PCs and ultra mobile devices are all being built to run on Linux, and that is the path to dethroning Microsoft. Today there are as many of those devices on the net as there are Windows machines, and Microsoft knows it. That’s why they are pushing so hard to get into the mobile space.

As it stands, there are only two operating systems that look like they will survive: Microsoft, because they have infinite money and Linux because the rest of the world has infinite money. It’s simple for me to say, but that’s the way it breaks out. Basically the battle for computing is too big and costly for any one company other than Microsoft to win. So if someone is going to displace Microsoft, it’s going to be something that’s Switzerland-like, like Linux.

If the alternative to the monolith and monopoly of Microsoft is the rest of the world – as opposed to just one other company that can operate at the same level of uniformity – then the challenge and the weakness of the rest of the world is fragmentation and lack of interoperability, which is clearly what Google is trying to solve with Android and what Motorola is trying to solve with LiMo.

Google’s insight, which is true and certainly not unique to them, is the anchor that Microsoft has on the desktop that is impossible to displace is applications. It was a quirk of history that computers evolved the way they did, and that this sort of monolithic Wintel thing developed along the way. It’s arguably impossible to break that on the desktop.

However, the Internet relaxes people’s personal attachment to Wintel immeasurably, because they’re not dominated by applications that run on that device except for the browser, which is very neutral. As Google sees it, the browser is what will break up the Microsoft stranglehold. With the proliferation of Linux, mobile devices are now neutral and you can have a very capable device that runs no Microsoft software whatsoever. In fact, we at MontaVista are helping our customers build those things today.

We made a quote for IBM once, “It’s just about the future of computing.” That was true back then, and it’s just as true now.

ShareThis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Embedded Linux.