451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
The irrelevance of desktop Linux
Matthew Aslett, November 2, 2007 @ 8:09 am ETCan Google save desktop Linux? Or more accurately, can online applications? I have previously been skeptical about the potential for Linux to ever make serious in-roads on the desktop market. The problem as I see it is that desktop Linux is stuck in a Catch-22 situation where ISVs will not support it if they don’t see support from major hardware vendors, and hardware vendors are not interested because there isn’t the mainstream ISV support to drive demand.
Throw in the fact that Microsoft provides the software that most consumers would consider necessary for desktop machines and which also drives the vast proportion of PC and laptop hardware revenue, and there is no economic incentive for any of the IHVs and ISVs to promote Linux in the manner that would be required for it to make a dent in the market.
Yes, Dell has introduced Linux PCs and notebooks, Lenovo is working on a Linux notebook, and HP is testing the market but these moves are about fulfilling the limited demand for desktop Linux machines, rather than attempting to create new demand. The hardware vendors are not trying to change the dynamic of the market because there is no incentive for them to do so while Microsoft software is the primary revenue generator.
But what if the dynamic of the market was changed by something else, such as the use of web-based applications making the choice of desktop operating system less relevant? We’re clearly nowhere near that situation yet, but its that possibility that makes the Everex gPC so interesting.
Available from Wal-Mart for under $200, the gPC is configured to run “Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google Product Search, Google Blogger, Google YouTube, Google Maps, Google News, Meebo (instant messaging), GIMP (image editing), Firefox, Xing Movie Player, RhythmBox (iTunes substitute), Faqly (tech support), Facebook, Skype and OpenOffice.org 2.2″ according to ZDnet.
The whole thing runs on gOS, a version of Ubuntu that is optimized for web-based applications. It is not the Google Linux that has long been rumored and denied but it does have the company’s seal of approval.
“The gOS is an alternative operating system that makes it apparent that Google is your entire computing experience,” gOS founder David Liu told ZDnet. “When you make Linux look pretty and put ton of Google apps on it, you pacify it for consumer. You could say gOS is Google inspired but not official stamped.”
Whether this sort of web-PC will take off depends on how quickly web-based applications are picked up by mainstream consumers, but it is a change in the market dynamic that opens the door slightly to Linux. After all, if the Internet effectively becomes your operating system then why do you need Windows?
As the PC increasingly becomes a device for accessing online services the technology that runs on the PC itself increasingly becomes irrelevant to the consumer. The less relevant the desktop operating system becomes, the more likely it is that Linux will start to make in-roads.
UPDATE – Of course just because the OS is irrelevant to the user, does not mean that the OS is irrelevant to the vendor. There is of course a market opportunity for supplying the underlying technology that connects people to the Internet (be that via the PC, TV, kiosk or other device). The opportunity lies in no longer thinking about the desktop as being defined by the traditional PC. (For more on this, see my follow-up, the client opportunity for Linux). Red Hat is already thinking along these lines.
NB: I should perhaps clarify that I am talking specifically about the consumer desktop market here. The dynamic in the business market is slightly different although clearly the rise of browser-based applications means that there are increasingly good arguments for Linux on the desktop for a significant number of business users.
Comments (25) Categories: Linux,Software
With a blog title like this, get ready for the trolls! I’ve been skeptical of the Linux Desktop, as well, due in large part to its failed track record over the past decade. There have been plenty of opportunities in that time to take hold, yet it has not. Ubuntu’s more recent success is reshaping my thought process on this issue a bit, but overall Linux Desktop market share growth is moving dog slow. I’ve been hearing for too long now that the Linux Desktop is poised to take off.
The Linux success story is the server.
You mean people don’t actually read the whole post before commenting? I am shocked!
Watch and see!
“The less relevant the desktop operating system becomes, the more likely it is that Linux will start to make in-roads.”
And the less relevant Linux becomes. If the browser is the platform then does it matter all that much what the OS is underlying the browser? I don’t think so.
It’s similar to the world of Java. With Java as the platform, do people care so much what the OS is that they’re using?
I agree. Another example is the mobile phone. The vast majority of people don’t know or care what the OS is, as long as they can get access to their services.
Hi guys,
Not to self-impose a troll tax or anything, and I did read the entire post
, but there may be one important point missing. We saw recently some server market numbers that indicated a slowdown of Linux while Windows remained strong. Peter Galli had a better followup article explaining why it is difficult at best to accurately measure the number of Linux servers deployed and in use. Basically, because it is free and open source software, easy to download or boot from disc on most hardware and distributed and copied repeatedly (and legally), Linux is far different. Hardware bought without software pre-installed doesn’t count for Linux, even if the open source OS is installed on it later. And, of course, there is the use and repurposing of old hardware that, ironically, may be counting for Windows market share. You don’t run Windows or Mac on those machines. It’s almost always Linux.
There are also other reasons, such as industry norms and practices that make research and analysis of Linux different.
I would argue the same hidden deployment holds true for the desktop. Three out of four computers in my office used to have Windows, but now have Linux. I doubt they have been accounted for in market research. Do I think that this hidden relevance is anything more than 5%? No. In fact, I’d guess it is more on par with Mac OS X at ~3%. That’s still not much, but it’s a big reason for a little relevance, particularly if it means introducing end users to Linux.
JL
Good point Jay, I am sure the current demand for Linux is bigger than the box-counting says it is, but I also think that this is the demand that Dell, HP and Lenovo etc are currently targeting. Don’t get me wrong -it’s good that they are, but as you say I don’t think it will push demand beyond 3/4% ant time soon.
[...] Lawrence Solum wrote an interesting post today on [...]
It’s happening regardless of the punditry. Witness the Eee PC and other “new form factor” PCs, or the country of Georgia going desktop Linux on all it’s educational PC, or the multiple regions in Spain (Extremadura is well known, but Gran Canaria is on the waggon now too with KDE/Linux). We’re seeing roll outs in major fast food chains in North America, city governments in Europe….
… and yesterday my niece, a vet student in Hawaii, IM’d me asking how I was doing. I mentioned the push towards KDE 4.0 and she said, “Yeah, my friend $NAME in Florida is really excited about the release.” My niece is not a techie in the least, but it’s the stuff of conversation these days among more and more of populace.
Every year we see this expansion … online desktop or not. I think tieing the “web” with the local desktop is an exciting and even critical set of developments that will see increasing investment, but they will not be the silver bullet that propels things.
Instead, look at the Toyota model of growth. Yes, I know that means the boring work of actually paying attention to how markets work historically and outside of just the IT world … but you may find eye opening parallels.
They had less than 2% of the market in the 70s, hardly more by the end of the 80s …
I suppose you would’ve discounted them too, just like GM, Ford, Daimler/Chrysler (or the companies that would become Daimler/Chrylser), etc did. We know how that turned out.
History may not repeat exactly, but it does as they say certainly rhyme.
Growth is happening, the rate of growth is increasing and the entire community is making strides that 5 years ago people were saying we couldn’t. Well, we have. People keep pouring it on, and we keep moving.
I never discounted Linux on the desktop entirely, what I did say is that the opportunity for Linux on the desktop lies in thinking beyond the limits of the desktop PC. As I stated in the follow up – http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2007/11/05/the-client-opportunity-for-linux/ – Open source has been successful where it causes disruption. Making Linux look and feel like Windows with the hope that it might gain more than 4% of the PC market is not disrupting the market.
Hi:
I just picked up my eeePC yesterday ( Nov5 ) from a local retailer. It is a cool linux ( Xandros ) OS that appears to just do everything I need.
-Wireless works out of the bos
-Internet no problem. Google, and open office.
-configured printer no problem, usb mouse and external monitor, no problem.
-I have got-to hand it to Asus, They did an awesome job on the idea and Xandros
for the clean sleek OS. I am in love.
-took me about a day and found ctrll+alt+t and I got terminal (nirvana from there on )
-openOffice, google apps, webcam, and the list goes on and on…
-Just for curiosity I bought an 8Gig SD card and now am installing ubuntu7.10 on it.
From what I read, it needs a bit of tweaking but it works, … and well. Ongoing experiment
I would never drop 2G to buy a laptop but for $400, all I can say is WOW.
Asus/Xandros in one yank pulled the bottom out of the laptop market. This thing sings.
I am in Love, as much as you can be in love with a laptop.
I apologize if I sound too excited ( even though I am ) but this is just a shining
example of how Linux is so versatile.
Windows just struck a deal to offer XP on the eeePC, I am sure the MS engineers are going to be working long hard engineering hours to compete with the Xandros version.
Vista has very small chance of running on this thing ever.
This is a monumental day for Linux, Congratulations, and yes it brings a versatile tiny linux laptop/desktop to you today.
Showed it off to my friends at work, and just seeing the desire in their eyes made me smirk. Needless to say a few of them will be running out to get one of the few 3EPCs that are showing up in limited quantities.
The thing is just so COOL.
I bet M$ did not know Xandros was putting this sweet heart together when they signed
the patent agreement, I don’t agree with it, but in this case I think the pluses outweigh the negatives. I was watching a movie last night on Linux with Hah, legally paid for codecs. Yeah baby
Congratulations to Asus and Xandros, Job well done!!!
Next year the thing will probably have a bigger LCD and be half the price I paid yesterday. You know waht, for that price, I can buy another one next year. Bring
it on. My wallet is singing eeePC
PS: I am totally not affiliated with either Asus or Xadros, just very impressed at what they pulled off. Cheers.
Glad you like it – it does look like a nice little device.
Microsoft is doomed! As someone said, “This is not the beginning of the end – but the end of the beginning” (Winston Churchill re WWII).
This article was produced by the Microsoft shill factory. Sounds like commentary out of “The Wizard of OZ”, “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”. Linux IS taking over more and more desktops! The truth IS, Microsoft is losing ground in all areas day by day. Of course we experience the process of the defeat of the evil microsoft empire as proceeding at a “snail’s pace”.
And yet, soon, articles such as the above, and the overpriced sh**ty Microsoft operating systems will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Read the post.
but these moves [by major vendors to sell Linux PCs] are about fulfilling the limited demand for desktop Linux machines, rather than attempting to create new demand.
And there are more major vendors selling Linux PCs than ever. What does that tell you about the demand for desktop Linux?
It tells me that it has slowly increased to the point where the big PC vendors consider it a niche market.
Matt’s right. Linux may be getting bigger on the desktop but what he is asking is whether it is making “serious in-roads” today, at the OS layer. Today, it’s still not really doing that. Even the increasingly popular MacOS has way under 10% of the desktop market, remember (last figure I saw was about 5%) and ‘vanilla’ Linux flavours are likely not in single digits yet. Matt, have you seen any stats on this that will back up your argument better than I can with rough approximations?!
There’s plenty of stats out there that back up your estimations, although the problem Jay noted above is that the way the box counters count the boxes doesn’t address the way in which Linux gets deployed (naked and recycled PCs for instance). Even then it is not causing the sort of disruption I am talking about.
Is this analysis based on just the US, US + EU, or international? Several South American and African countries, and to some extent China and India, are taking a political stand on using Linux and FOSS software. With the markets in the US + EU saturated, growth will come elsewhere. GM and Ford ignored this to their extreme detriment. While MS is not ignoring it, the end result could easily be the same, especially considering the pushback even in the US + EU to the unwillingness of MS to fully support truly open standards (to put it mildly).
Later . . . Jim
There have been political moves across the world, but as we saw in Nigeria recently, Microsoft still holds a lot of the cards. My thoughts are that in developing markets there are huge opportunities for Linux but that again those gains will not be made on the PC but with new devices that make more efficient use of energy and processing power and better suit the user requirements. By that I don’t mean a low cost PC with limited functionality, but devices that are designed specifically to provide connectivity to Internet services without all the baggage of the traditional PC.
[...] Matthew Aslett over at analysts The 451 Group asked exactly that question over here recently – and as you can see from the comments on that blog, there is some disagreement over just how much penetration Linux has on the desktop! [...]
I installed Ubuntu 5.1 on an old PC several years ago. I am just an average user with no previous experience using Linux. I now have Ubuntu 7.1 on three desktops and two laptops and putting it on third laptop soon. I try to install it on friends desktops whenever I can. Linux does everything except run a scanner that requires XP (no Linux drivers). Linux will win in a fair contest. People don’t care what the name of the OS is. They only want to write, use spreadsheets and send email.
The problem is, they only know MS because that is what came on their PC.
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