The question is, when will the year come where [Linux on the desktop] is the easiest and most attractive option? I'm a little bearish about that being soon.
I used to be, but I'm coming round to the view that with all of the big commercial players, now including Microsoft, pushing heavily towards services and "the cloud", the decay of their traditional desktop offerings will create an opportunity for a Linux-based (or other OSS) platform to become relatively attractive a lot sooner.
This is partly about the operating system itself, but it's just as much about the applications. Building a direct competitor to MS Office is something few sane people would consider attempting, given market conditions and the effort required. Implementing a native desktop competitor to a typical on-line "office suite" today is something a small team of smart people could do, reaching functional parity within months, and there is nothing close to a dominant incumbent in the market yet, nor is the user experience for these web applications anywhere near as polished.
In short, as they lower the barrier to entry and open up the market, they make it easier for Linux-based applications to catch up. They also make it more attractive for someone to invest significant resources to polish up those applications as a commercial venture.
I don't think the rest of the world is moving on, at least not for long. Full cloud has too many fundamental drawbacks to become a universal solution. It's the buzzword of the moment, but it's taken a very long time to get there by tech industry standards, and it's still underwhelming even today.
With execs at the big publicly held software firms looking to the next quarterly financial call, they're all going with the hype anyway. That creates an opportunity for a disruptive movement that shifts the market instead of pandering to it. My guess would be that private clouds, software-defined networking and a bunch of tools that better support things like remote working and BYOD will steadily push full external cloud solutions out of most large corporations, and smaller scale tools based on the same basic ideas will emerge to support SMEs.
And that brings me to my big question: What is the only operating system in the world that is already demonstrably a credible platform for all of server, desktop and mobile computing?
I used to be, but I'm coming round to the view that with all of the big commercial players, now including Microsoft, pushing heavily towards services and "the cloud", the decay of their traditional desktop offerings will create an opportunity for a Linux-based (or other OSS) platform to become relatively attractive a lot sooner.
This is partly about the operating system itself, but it's just as much about the applications. Building a direct competitor to MS Office is something few sane people would consider attempting, given market conditions and the effort required. Implementing a native desktop competitor to a typical on-line "office suite" today is something a small team of smart people could do, reaching functional parity within months, and there is nothing close to a dominant incumbent in the market yet, nor is the user experience for these web applications anywhere near as polished.
In short, as they lower the barrier to entry and open up the market, they make it easier for Linux-based applications to catch up. They also make it more attractive for someone to invest significant resources to polish up those applications as a commercial venture.