http://www.it-director.com/article_pf.asp?id=1684 Peace, Love, Linux and IBM Wednesday 28th March 2001 Linux is one of the few technology issues that is really difficult for analysts to get their heads around. It doesn’t obey the normal pattern of technology take-up at all, and so it is easily misunderstood. If you consider the typical situation with software of any kind, it works a little like this: New company brings compelling technology to market. The pioneer adopters try it and discover that it is worth the ticket. The start-up company now has some revenues to prove its proposition and a VC or two will provide money to mount a marketing campaign and spread the word. If good marketing people are hired the product now gets promoted through articles in magazines, trade shows and the rest. Interest grows and if the sales team is effective and the various channels are handled correctly, sales increase. This provides more money for marketing. At some point competitors enter the picture and offer competitive products with similar capabilities and the market hots up. The original vendor may get acquired or may just grow to be big. Thus the technology triumphs in one way or another. This model simply does not apply to Linux. Its take-up has been quite different for many reasons. Linux began life as “shared community software”. It was created by Linus Torvalds, but with great skill and enthusiasm he gave rise to a community of interest, which enhanced the OS and shared the results of their labours. He had invented a version of Unix which the customer was in control of and which could run with an economic footprint on Intel processors, thus allowing the academic community (initially) to exploit old PCs for Unix tasks like mail server, web server, etc. It was quickly ported to other environments. The customers became the authors of the software and the whole activity was protected by the GPL, a license that discouraged users from exploiting Linux for financial gain and encouraged them to improve the product. It could have ended there, as an interesting experiment, but instead it spread like a virus. It probably spread so widely and quickly because of dissatisfaction with Microsoft. Also, the fact that it cost nothing at all gave it a competitive position that was immune to the assault of marketing bucks. So far, so good. A whole bunch of ISPs gradually adopted it as the least expensive option for their businesses and some built up vast server farms. Linux performed admirably. It was not only cheap, but robust and, although IT managers still seem concerned about this, it was and is better supported than any other operating system in the history of computing. (A bigger support team, faster fixes and so on – all done for free). The quality of support began to show in surveys of reliability as early as 1997, before Linux beacme the phenomenon it now is. It one survey that Byte Magazine published it came out ahead of AIX and HP-UX. That was when we started to track it. Soon most of the major software vendors were porting their products to Linux and, because Linux was cheap, they adopted low platform prices and in some instances, simply made their software available for nothing, to encourage take-up. OK, that’s enough history. Linux has made it in the server world. It is difficult to know how dominant it is, because it is actually impossible to count the number of server running it. Many college kids graduate as Linux enthusiasts. They get operational jobs in companies and put Linux solutions in place without the company even knowing about. There is no license fee, so nobody knows how to count the numbers accurately. There may be many servers out there that once ran Windows or NetWare or SCO Unix, that now run Linux. Apart from that there are some major Linux users now, including Weather.com and Google, two of the busiest sites on the web, plus Shell International and Telia, the largest telco in Scandinavia – and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Outside the server space, Linux is being used in a range of devices including the popular TiVo television recording device, which is really just a PC with a big disk that records 20 hours of television. The motivation for using Linux? Simple, it cost nothing and it is very reliable. Most of this occurred without much direct encouragement from any vendor, so Linux never had marketing bucks behind it - beyond a little noise from distributors like Red Hat and others, none of whom could make a difference. That suddenly changed recently with the announcement by IBM that it intends to invest $1 billion in Linux. This is paying for porting all IBM’s non-Linux software products to Linux. However what it is also paying for is an international advertising campaign to promote Linux. This is completely unprecedented. A company launching and aggressive marketing campaign for a product that it has no claim over and for which it cannot obtain even one cent in direct revenues. Nevertheless, IBM is in a strong position because it can earn revenues from server sales, consultancy, outsourcing and a lot of other things. Sun, Compaq, Dell and Hewlett-Packard could all have gone down this road, but none of them showed much enthusiasm to do so. For them co-existence was the only idea they could muster. They may regret this. As we understand it, IBM’s Linux promotion policy comes direct from Lou Gerstner and IBM intends to play this card for all it is worth. IBM is going to try to convince the corporates from the top down that Linux is ready for prime time. It scales, it’s robust and it’s versatile. Peace, love and Linux. This does IBM’s image no harm at all, but it is also the missing piece of the Linux jigsaw – the magic hand of marketing. If this campaign works then IT managers will no longer have to keep dark secrets about what is running in their networks. Linux is already the fastest growing server OS. It may now become unstoppable in the server arena. The Snark
