The real Window for Linux

THERE'S AN opening for Linux to grab a much larger market share on the consumer desktop side over the next twelve to eighteen months, but penguin advocates need to pull their act together and hope a couple of software companies - or one big hardware company - decides to throw their weight into giving Microsoft heartburn.

A window of opportunity to displace Windows XP is based on three factors: the declining price of hardware, Microsoft's current pricing and philosophy on software licensing, and the general lack of innovation in the hardware arena. AMD and others are beating their chest about supplying $100 PCs to the downtrodden around the globe, yet First Worlders can get a $299 to $399 PC out of the local Big Box or via mail order that includes a $100 Microsoft Windows XP load "tax."

And the desktop boxes I'm talking about are these huge 23 pound bulky towers that end up getting shipped in bulk around the globe and include parallel and serial ports, plus multiple PCI slots and open bays. It shouldn't be long before someone takes a Via-like approach in using a small form factor motherboard to make a MiniMac-esque package that weighs in under 10 pounds and takes up a third to a quarter of the shelf space for under $200.

At hardware prices under $200 bucks, it becomes a no-brainer to throw in a Linux distribution onto the hard disk rather than having to mess with Microsoft OEM licensing. It may be left to the consumer that if they really want Windows XP, they'll have to pay and install it themselves. Today, XP is installed by default and it isn't going away tomorrow, but again, every penny is going to count real soon. Major manufacturers haven't yet made the leap to equating Linux as Just Another Operating System for the consumer world, so the Penguin bigots need to lobby someone like oh, Gateway, to take a trip down Linux lane for the mass market world. Or start lobbying one of the Big Boxes to start stocking boxes that are pre-loaded with Linux. But one big hardware company needs to take the plunge.

Microsoft's current pricing just doesn't work with cheap hardware. If you have a $399 PC and $100 is Microsoft software that's 25 per cent of the total cost. Go down to $299 and Microsoft becomes 33 per cent of the total cost. At $199, it's 50 per cent. As I noted last week, the only way to work a five user licence through Microsoft is to incorporate. For a four user household, that's just silly, not to mention the overhead to manage license keys. Again, the Linux bigots need to start beating their chests louder on software licence management being a part of the total cost of ownership and overhead that a household shouldn't have to deal with.

Combine that with the farce of Windows XP Home, XP Pro, XP Media Center, and Tablet PC. A Microsoft official confessed last week that the distinctions in the XP family were artificial and sometime in the future, people should be able to just buy and plug in the components they need. Certainly, there's no real need for the Penguin crowd to come up with a "Linux Pro," but a distribution flavor that could be favorably compared with Media Center wouldn't be a bad thing.

Finally, there's little in the PC hardware world on the horizon that's going to require any special software magic. Linux already has the lead in deployed 64-bit distributions on the server side and there's work on dual-cores, but for consumer desktop usage, multiple cores and 64-bit are meaningless. Let me repeat this for the fanatics: For consumer desktop usage, multiple-core and 64-bits are meaningless. You aren't going to get a significantly faster word processor, you aren't going to get a significantly faster browser. You might get faster Microsoft Outlook Express, but that's only because the code is so ugly to begin with.

The ball is in the Penguin's court. And if you don't think Microsoft is vulnerable, you need only look as far as some of the tinkering Google and other software companies are doing and project out a little farther as to what they might be able to do over the next 24 months if they really put their hearts into it. µ