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Sep. 22, 2009

IBM's vice president of the Linux platform, Bob Sutor, opened the annual LinuxCon conference held in Portland yesterday with a few predictions for the open source desktop, telling Linux developers they won't thrive unless they simply specialize in what they do.

Sutor unsurprisingly praised Linux for its "cloud efforts" and hardware-specific ubiquity. But he also gave his opinion that winning hearts in the open source segment is also a different story and that there are still some challenges to face in the short term.

"Most people say, I don't want to be bothered. It just works. I want to do the other parts of my job, and I want to go home. So I think it's going to be a major portion that determines possibly some of those futures. What are we really trying to do with this thing? I think making it a complete drop-in replacement is a dead-end strategy," said Sutor.

He also drew up several possible scenarios for the Linux desktop in the years ahead, including Linux going away altogether, one distribution dominating Linux desktops, one distro dominating all desktops, Linux reaching parity with Microsoft and Apple, and desktop Linux disappearing altogether and making the whole issue moot.

"They've also got more money," Sutor said about Microsoft and Apple. "But even more important than that, they've got the market share and the mindshare. We need lots of different attacks on this problem through lots of different technologies."

"I think the Linux desktop is critical to that, but it has to find its niche of what it does really well, at what price point, and which people," said Sutor.

He added "you shouldn't be thinking of it as one great desktop for everyone. You have to do what we call market segmentation."

He also argued that it's a mistake to try to sell or convince people to use something when they're not interested and will never use it. "Don't waste your time," he said.

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Source: IBM.

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