Ten Reasons Why: Now things might get interesting:

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September 27, 2002

Now things might get interesting:

According to MSNBC, the first AOL computer is hitting the market. It's a low-cost box from Microtel powered by a Cyrix C3 processor and comes installed with the Lindows OS, a Linux distribution designed to look and work as much like Windows as possible (so much so that Microsoft (unsuccessfully) sued them). Lindows uses WINE, a Windows emulator, to allow it to run many Microsoft Windows applications. The default browser is Netscape 7, and AOL is creating a version of AOL 7.0 (the application for accessing the proprietary AOL networks) for Lindows. I presume this must mean that AOL is re-coding their application to use Netscape's Gecko rendering engine as the browser instead of Internet Explorer's.

I've long been a skeptic about Linux on the desktop. Linux's strenth -- diversity and customizability -- is precisely what makes it a poor choice for the average consumer who buys their computer at Sears. It will take:

standardization* of a GUI interface ,
an easy migration path from Windows applications to Linux applications, and
a big pot of corporate money to assume the risk of taking on Microsoft.

At one point, several years ago, I though Corel Linux might have enough oomph to get it done, but Corel (and Corel WordPerfect Office Suite) had already become a bit player by that point. SUN's acquisition of StarOffice was a clear move in that same direction, with the next step being SUN's recent announcement that they'll begin shipping a personal computer with Red Hat Linux as the OS. But Corel didn't have the capital to pull it off, and SUN doesn't have the consumer recognition. If AOL gets off its ass and embraces a simplified Linux distro like Lindows, it could poke into some of Microsoft's market. Don't get me wrong -- it won't unseat Microsoft. Gates' fortress isn't the consumer market, but the business market -- all those machines on everybody's office desk run Windows, and that's not going to change because of AOL & Lindows. But eating away at Microsoft's consumer market -- something only Apple has made an effective run at -- is still a Good Thing™

* By "standardization" I don't mean "adherence to open standards," I mean "everything the same." This is the sticky issue that open source zealots don't understand. Consumers aren't interested in source code and, for the most part, they aren't interested in choice either. Consumers are interested in sameness. It's an ugly fact, but it's true. Choice -- difference -- complicates purchasing decisions. The more complicated the decision, the less likely a consumer is to purchase it. When we're talking about operating systems, this means that they want an interface that's the same as everyone else's. Consumer's don't care about the code; 99.98% of humans don't understand it and don't want to understand it. Nor do they want to make decisions between KDE, Gnome, tvm, or the command line. They just want what their neighbor has.

Posted September 27, 2002 10:50 AM