The desktop is dead; long live the desktop
Just before Christmas my publisher let me know that they have opted not to publish my Desktop Linux with Ubuntu manuscript. This is sad, as the manuscript is about 2/3 complete and the reviewer comments so far have been extremely positive. The publisher's problem is not with the manuscript, though; it's with the market. They no longer believe that Ubuntu will be the breakthrough distribution that creates a real desktop Linux market.
As I reflect on their decision, I don't think the problem is with Ubuntu either. As a desktop operating system, Ubuntu is a strong contender. I use it for all of my desktop work, and other than the occaisional heavily templated PowerPoint presentation or particularly macro'd Excel spreadsheet, I have no problems interoperating with people generating documents on Windows and Microsoft Office. I certainly find Ubuntu's own desktop applications to be of high quality, and friends and family on Windows are envious of my ignorance of the whole world of virii, spybots, adware, etc.
In general, Ubuntu could make a solid desktop OS in any business environment where the "knowledge worker" in question didn't have to run a specific "business logic application" that was operating system-dependent. And home users, with a little coaching from a Linux veteran, could do very well with Ubuntu. My wife has been using Linux for about five years now, and would never switch to Windows. She neither knows nor cares how an operating system works; to her it's just an appliance. It enables her to do what she wants on the computer without getting in the way, and her perception is that she has an easier time with Linux than her equally computer-naive friends have with Windows.
No, the problem as I see it has to do with the very concept of a desktop operating system. Ironically, Linux has reached maturity on this front at the very time when the traditional concept of a desktop operating system is becoming obsolete. More and more, the Web is the operating system, and the browser is the desktop environment.
Right now I have eight tabs open in Firefox, reflecting a variety of tasks I'm working on. Besides the browser, the only desktop apps I have open are Open Office, XChat, and a terminal window. and I find that more of my "word processing" happens online via something like a Wiki, and more of my instant messaging happens through a web browser as well thanks to Gmail's chat function.
This is just anecdotal evidence, but here's a more substantial case study. In my last job, I ran a product management team for a start-up. We had a total of four product managers working on various aspects of an ambitious web pubishing project, and a key partner/customer with whom we had to interface to develop requirements, track development, field bug queries, etc. This partner had three individuals who were very focused on our project, and formed a vital part of the product management life cycle.
Five years ago the standard tools for this situation would have been something like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office, and maybe something a little more high-powered like Clear Case. These tools were cumbersome at best. MS Project seems to manage you more than it lets you manage a project. While Word does have a nice revision marks feature for tracking and attributing changes, it gets quite cumbersome when you have more than two or three people editing a document, and it does nothing to solve the problem of keeping track of who has the current "canonical" version of a document.
Our product management team used none of these tools. We used one piece of software: MediaWiki. We had two instances set up, one that could only be accessed via the company intranet, and the other that was password accessible from the outside, what we called the "extranet" instance.
It took us a bit of time at the outset to templatize a set of wiki documents for what we needed for product management workflow: opportunity assessment, product requirements, engineering specifications... the usual suspects. Once we had templates for each of those, however, it was easy to create new instances and manage the whole process. With a little massaging of MediaWiki, we even created another set of "dashboard" documents that pulled key information from our product management documents that upper management wanted to see to track the status of projects.
We put a little work into templating the extranet wiki as well, and we had to go through a couple of training sessions with personnel from our partner to teach them how to wiki. MediaWiki is fairly easy to learn, though, with an almost WYSIWYG interface and a simple set of core tags. Our partner quickly went from "how does this work" to "can we make it do this"?
A wiki has obvious benefits for this kind of project management:
And that's the future of knowledge worker applications.
The consequences for Linux are significant, and generally not recognized by the Linux community. A desktop OS is the platform that supports an knowledge worker. As the knowledge worker's tools become increasingly Web-based, the requirements for that platform change substantially. This should be great news for Linux; it has always been a better architected network operating system than Windows. If we look ahead to what the platform needs to be, Linux has tremendous potential. However, that's not the way the Linux community thinks. Most Linux developers who think about the Desktop think about reinventing what is already on the Windows desktop.
We're chasing the past, instead of defining the future. Ironically, Microsoft has already figured this out with their "Live" initiative. Once more the Linux community is following where Microsoft is leading. Shame on us.
Just before Christmas my publisher let me know that they have opted not to publish my Desktop Linux with Ubuntu manuscript. This is sad, as the manuscript is about 2/3 complete and the reviewer comments so far have been extremely positive. The publisher's problem is not with the manuscript, though; it's with the market. They no longer believe that Ubuntu will be the breakthrough distribution that creates a real desktop Linux market.
As I reflect on their decision, I don't think the problem is with Ubuntu either. As a desktop operating system, Ubuntu is a strong contender. I use it for all of my desktop work, and other than the occaisional heavily templated PowerPoint presentation or particularly macro'd Excel spreadsheet, I have no problems interoperating with people generating documents on Windows and Microsoft Office. I certainly find Ubuntu's own desktop applications to be of high quality, and friends and family on Windows are envious of my ignorance of the whole world of virii, spybots, adware, etc.
In general, Ubuntu could make a solid desktop OS in any business environment where the "knowledge worker" in question didn't have to run a specific "business logic application" that was operating system-dependent. And home users, with a little coaching from a Linux veteran, could do very well with Ubuntu. My wife has been using Linux for about five years now, and would never switch to Windows. She neither knows nor cares how an operating system works; to her it's just an appliance. It enables her to do what she wants on the computer without getting in the way, and her perception is that she has an easier time with Linux than her equally computer-naive friends have with Windows.
No, the problem as I see it has to do with the very concept of a desktop operating system. Ironically, Linux has reached maturity on this front at the very time when the traditional concept of a desktop operating system is becoming obsolete. More and more, the Web is the operating system, and the browser is the desktop environment.
Right now I have eight tabs open in Firefox, reflecting a variety of tasks I'm working on. Besides the browser, the only desktop apps I have open are Open Office, XChat, and a terminal window. and I find that more of my "word processing" happens online via something like a Wiki, and more of my instant messaging happens through a web browser as well thanks to Gmail's chat function.
This is just anecdotal evidence, but here's a more substantial case study. In my last job, I ran a product management team for a start-up. We had a total of four product managers working on various aspects of an ambitious web pubishing project, and a key partner/customer with whom we had to interface to develop requirements, track development, field bug queries, etc. This partner had three individuals who were very focused on our project, and formed a vital part of the product management life cycle.
Five years ago the standard tools for this situation would have been something like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office, and maybe something a little more high-powered like Clear Case. These tools were cumbersome at best. MS Project seems to manage you more than it lets you manage a project. While Word does have a nice revision marks feature for tracking and attributing changes, it gets quite cumbersome when you have more than two or three people editing a document, and it does nothing to solve the problem of keeping track of who has the current "canonical" version of a document.
Our product management team used none of these tools. We used one piece of software: MediaWiki. We had two instances set up, one that could only be accessed via the company intranet, and the other that was password accessible from the outside, what we called the "extranet" instance.
It took us a bit of time at the outset to templatize a set of wiki documents for what we needed for product management workflow: opportunity assessment, product requirements, engineering specifications... the usual suspects. Once we had templates for each of those, however, it was easy to create new instances and manage the whole process. With a little massaging of MediaWiki, we even created another set of "dashboard" documents that pulled key information from our product management documents that upper management wanted to see to track the status of projects.
We put a little work into templating the extranet wiki as well, and we had to go through a couple of training sessions with personnel from our partner to teach them how to wiki. MediaWiki is fairly easy to learn, though, with an almost WYSIWYG interface and a simple set of core tags. Our partner quickly went from "how does this work" to "can we make it do this"?
A wiki has obvious benefits for this kind of project management:
- Simultaneous editing by multiple users
- Excellent version control for documents
- Keeps documents accessible from anywhere you can get online
- Easy learning curve
And that's the future of knowledge worker applications.
The consequences for Linux are significant, and generally not recognized by the Linux community. A desktop OS is the platform that supports an knowledge worker. As the knowledge worker's tools become increasingly Web-based, the requirements for that platform change substantially. This should be great news for Linux; it has always been a better architected network operating system than Windows. If we look ahead to what the platform needs to be, Linux has tremendous potential. However, that's not the way the Linux community thinks. Most Linux developers who think about the Desktop think about reinventing what is already on the Windows desktop.
We're chasing the past, instead of defining the future. Ironically, Microsoft has already figured this out with their "Live" initiative. Once more the Linux community is following where Microsoft is leading. Shame on us.
Labels: desktop linux ubuntu browser web
posted by Mark Stone at 8:01 AM
1 comments
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