Christmas Past
First it was punch cards - one card per line of programming that could be entered into the OS/360 mainframe at the rate of about 7 cards per minute. Then it was paper tape and pricey pizza pan sized hard drives that fed machines with system names like ¨RT-11¨, ¨PDP-8¨´ ¨RSTS¨.
Next came the era of TSO, mainframe virtual machines (VM/CMS), and drives the size of large cake platters that held a whopping 200 megabytes. Along came GE timeshare, MCI mail, Compuserve, and the legendary VAX/VMS.
Long before the guy on TV started selling computer training, John Q. Public signed up for public seminars in BASIC and UCSD Pascal for home computers with names like ALTAIR, and then ATARI, COMMODORE, TRS-80, APPLE II, APPLE III and APPLE LISA.
For a brief shining fifteen minutes of fame the technology golden child was UNIX, and then came IBM, LOTUS 1-2-3, Microsoft, Novell and Corvus. Suddenly every small business saw ways to improve their productivity with ¨personal¨ desktop computing.
The Microsoft powerhouse has dominated the desktop through two technology life-cycles. The first was the DOS era. From humble ¨command prompt¨ this era was extended to the end of the 20th century with an overlay product called Windows for Work-Groups,and then Windows 95 and 98.
The first Microsoft era ended with a whimper called Windows Millennium, but during this time, the company had sowed the seeds of the next cycle. By relentlessly and iteratively polishing and extending a basic suite of word processing, spreadsheet and email essentials - and by re-engineering the desktop operating system, Microsoft was able to launch the Windows NT (New Technology) era.
Christmas Present
The second era of Microsoft dominance on the customer facing screen may have peaked with the 2007 Office Suite and Windows Vista.
I have had a front row seat to information technology since those punch card days, and not every ¨just-around-the-corner¨ expectation has panned out. (¨Where are the flying cars?¨) But, it is possible that the open source software movement will soon disruptively overtake and overwhelm the binary only/¨Digital Rights Management¨ model for business productivity software. This, of course, has been foreshadowed by recent changes in the digital music industry.
License activation & management, software-deactivations, system wrecking auto-updates, and ¨muddle management¨ software support (¨Let´s not and say we did¨) have all become a bureaucratic millstone that users unwillingly bear daily. When some small business expresses abandonment fears over ditching ¨supported¨ binary applications, I remind them of this: ´If you are willing to pay, there is someone on this earth that is willing and able to fix a bug in open source software. With the binary-only products, a thousand other urgencies compete with your needs and your bug report goes into the system without an escort.¨
It is true that open source requires the industry to come up with a different answer to the economist´s ¨free rider¨ problem, but the cost accountant´s approach which pro-rates cost and profit to every installed instance is not the only solution. I´ll have more to say about that at another time.
Christmas Future
Does Mr. Gates feel a disturbance in the force? I have been using Linux and Open Office as my primary desktop for several months now, and I am not going back even though the new is far from perfect. As a once-upon-a-time UNIX user, I have an advantage most do not and I don´t recommend this transition (yet) to every business user.
In some ways, Linux feels like a return to the Windows for Work-Groups era. Before Windows 95, peripheral drivers were a bit of a challenge. However, improvements are relentless, and the Linux community is grinding away at these issues just as Microsoft did during its rise to preeminence. Ubuntu/Linux, for example, commits to an automated and consistent refresh cycle of every six months. I have now seen three iterations of this product and each upgrade has been as simple as a ´mouse click´ download, and as painless as installing a browser plug-in.
If the Linux world has a ¨Windows-95¨ like initiative to bring legacy equipment and all new peripherals (scanners, printers, etc) into the platform, then the multi-million unit sales of cheap , open source net-book and net-top devices could transform the technological face of the workplace over the next two years.
