Dear Mr. Jobs:

I write to you on the occasion of your death to congratulate you on making a difference. As more of a technology visionary and businessman than a true geek (that was your erstwhile partner Steve Wozniak, or “Woz”), you may not recall that this was the concern of a dying James Tiberius Kirk at the end of the movie Star Trek: Generations. Granted, you never saved the planet by travelling in time to rescue whales or anything like that (at least, you left no public record of such feats), but, way back when, you knew a good thing when Woz showed it to you.

Some might say that you were the mercenary and Woz was the real techno-saint, but left to his own devices would Woz have formed a company to sell the Apple I back in 1976 or sought venture capital to expand and sell the Apple II in 1977? Or would he have been content to hand out his genius for free at the local computer club? If the latter, I might never have had an Apple IIe. That was a sweet little machine back in the day — thanks to the both of you Steves for that.

You also knew better than Xerox what they had when you visited their research facility in 1979 and saw what they were doing with graphical environments, and that curious pointing device, the mouse. You took these ideas, ran with them, and had Bill Gates playing catch up until 1995 (and yes, your devoted fans might say that Windows never caught up to the Mac).

When you were edged out of your own company in 1985, you simply went on to found another computer company, NeXT Inc. There you made the uber-elite NeXT computer — no compromises, including on price. Your target market was institutions that could afford it, including CERN in Switzerland where Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server and browser on one. Eventually an ailing Apple would buy your company and get an OS that would allow them to catch up to, and arguably pass, Windows, and also get you back as the CEO.

Once back, you didn’t stay in the PC comfort zone. No, you could see the future, and the future was in people’s pockets. Along came the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. You left Apple in such good shape that the day after the announcement of your death, Apple’s share price didn’t change much at all. Such was the confidence of the market.

Personally, I’m not so sure. Your personal stamp is all over Apple. It is so much the product of your vision. I don’t see how Apple can be Apple without you. And Apple has been without you. What happened is a matter of historical record.

But don’t let that worry you. Assuming that there is an afterlife, move on to your next project. Or better still, take a break for a lifetime or two. You packed enough into this one that you deserve it.

-Eric

Steve Jobs Timeline

Back in March, I criticized Apple for not including support for Adobe Flash in their iPad tablet. Their reasoning seemed to be, at least in part, that Flash was going away, to be replaced by HTML 5 with support from javascript and CSS, to which I responded that may very well be, but Flash wasn’t dead yet.

The writing is still on the wall today, but now in a large, animated font. This looming threat to Flash comes from Adobe themselves, with the preview release of their HTML 5/Javascript/CSS authoring tool, Edge.

What difference will this make to the average web surfer? Probably not much. Sites with annoying special effects and sound and other hoopla offered up by Flash will no doubt offer the same via HTML 5. But your back button will likely work, and you will be able to send links to interior pages, because the whole thing will be written with open standards designed for web browsers — it will be the same old web you’ve always known, just on steroids.

Indeed, Adobe isn’t doing much here that hasn’t been possible for years, at least with regard to the final product. But what a chore it was! Extremely time consuming, and even if you went to all the trouble to test your technical magnum opus in the top ten web browsers at the time to ensure it worked in all of them, one browser would go up a version, change its behaviour, and break your work. Just not worth it.

So even though Adobe doesn’t own the underlying technology as it does with Flash, if it can make the difficult easy, their new product will fill a huge niche. But couldn’t the competition do the same thing? Yes, but could they do it as well? Give the devil his due, Adobe is very good at what they do. Plus they will have a first-to-market advantage. They will establish Edge as the Photoshop (also an Adobe product) of HTML 5. And don’t look to the open source world for a free app that does all this and does it well — their track record when it comes to multimedia authoring is mostly dismal.

Who this will be a real boon for is the non-technical designer types who are drawn to Flash like moths to a flame. Easy to use Flash authoring tools mean that they don’t have to have a lot of technical knowledge in order to realize their glorious visions. Sadly for them, Flash has lots of problems, many to do with the fact that it’s mostly graphic, not text based. Search engines can’t read it, spider it, summarize it, and Flash sites usually don’t do well in rankings. And that’s only the half of it.

HTML 5 and associated technologies, on the other hand, are totally kosher open standards that use the web browser and all it has to offer, rather than simply using it as a frame. If Adobe can satisfy the Flash-addicted elves of the web design world (and they won’t be easy to satisfy, so good thing Adobe is planning more preview releases as features evolve), then there will be richly designed multimedia sites which sacrifice nothing of the power of textual information and the properties that made the World Wide Web the ubiquitous force it is today.

AND you’ll be able to view them on your iPad.

So, it turns out that phones running the iOS 4 update of June, 2010 log date and location wherever their owners take them. The data sits there on the phone. It is not transmitted to Apple, so the charge cannot be made that Apple is actively spying on its customers. But do take extra care not to lose the phone or have it stolen.

Apparently this data is also transferred to your computer when a sync operation is performed, so even if this inspires you to destroy the phone (you’ll really want to pulverize it to nix the storage component), the data will remain on the computer.

Of course, in this time of people voluntarily surrendering large amounts of personal information through such things as Facebook and Twitter, perhaps this is a feature. It may be that some enterprising app maker has already created an app to post your whereabouts for the past year to your Facebook page with just the push of a virtual button! If not, be sure they’re working on it. (Code already exists if, for some reason, you want to privately track your movements). This would make things easier for private investigators and spooks – learning a person’s past whereabouts from their Facebook account would be a lot less grief than having to steal their phone.

Of course, this sort of tracking can be done with an Android phone as well, but you will have to go through a lot of bother figuring out the feature and activating it, and you won’t have data from before the time you did. Apple thoughtfully keeps all this data for you right from the start. And the user has agreed to it. They gave Apple the right to collect such data at the end of a long licence agreement, every word of which I’m sure they read and considered carefully.

From the time of Apple’s first Mac they have been marketing to the clueless, removing from them the burden of having to know stuff. Heck, you have to jailbreak their appliances just to get administrative access. Trust Mother Steve, she’ll take care of you. But don’t even think about lying to mom about where you were last night.

A couple of posts ago I wrote of the Motorola Xoom tablet, extolling its virtues while trying to convince myself that I don’t need one. And truly, I don’t. My little netbook is all the portable computing I really need. What I might want, and might actually get (if it was in the budget), is another question.

This question has recently been complicated by the announcement of Apple’s iPad 2. Uh oh, Motorola, has your leapfrogging the leader been leapfrogged? The short answer appears to be: No.

The most telling comparison I was able to find was over at The Mac Observer. Though one understands they might have a bias, given the name of their site, here’s what they manage to come up with: “The iPad 2 is clearly the best when it comes to size, weight, price, and battery life.” I suppose that’s one way to sell the smaller, lower resolution screen as a good thing.

Of the Xoom’s virtues, they write:

The Xoom is the clear favorite in four categories, starting with its display resolution (1280 x 800 compared to 1024 x 768 for iPad and iPad 2). Some users who fancy holding a tablet up as a camera may fancy the Xoom’s back-camera flash, as well. The Xoom also features stereo speakers, a feature Apple doesn’t offer, and the device includes a full GB of RAM. The iPad featured 256MB, and it appears as if iPad 2 has double that, at 512MB.

What they don’t note, and isn’t clear from the accompanying chart, is the megapixel rating of the iPad 2′s cameras. And don’t go looking for that information on the Apple site, because you won’t find it. That suggests it’s not worth boasting about, so if you’re one of those strange people who, as macobserver puts it, “fancy holding a tablet up as a camera” and care about the resolution of the pictures you take, the choice is clear.

Also missing from their comparison is consideration of support for USB and SD. Again, that may be because the iPad 2 doesn’t support either. The Xoom does both.

Also no mention of support for Flash (though it does come up in the comments). Apple has developed an allergy to Flash, believing that HTML 5, CSS, and javascript are better alternatives. Consequently, iPad 2 offers no support for the junky legacy product. I’m not unsympathetic, having predicted the demise of Flash myself a few columns ago. But here’s the thing — it’s not dead yet.

With regard to price, a not maxed-out version of the iPad 2 will save you a few bucks over the Xoom, but as Wolfgang Gruener concludes in his article 5 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy The iPad 2, you could save even more “if you . . . consider the original iPad, which we hear is seeing dropping prices. The crappy camera, the software update and the dual-core processor may not be worth the extra expense.” Now may be the best time to buy the original iPad at clear-them-out prices.

One gotcha about the Xoom: While it’s intended to support Flash and SD, it may or may not, depending on the version of the OS. Ask before you buy. If it’s from an earlier batch, you may have some geeking to do to bring it up to scratch.

Nevertheless, it appears as though Apple has gone from first-to-market leader, to having to play catch up. Stay tuned to see if the iPad 3 finally delivers on the promise of the form. Perhaps by that time Flash really will be dead. Hopefully Steve Jobs won’t be.

Okay, I’m starting to want a tablet. No, not the iPad for which I expressed my underwhelmedness back in February of 2010, but the Motorola Xoom to be released this quarter, perhaps even as soon as next month.

What’s so great about the Xoom? Well, if you’re one of those who have been waiting for Apple to add all the features they omitted, like camera, usb support, multitasking, SD card support, and so on, your wait may soon be over, at least if you’re prepared to venture outside the Apple fold. The Motorola Xoom will be everything the iPad ought to have been at its inception.

Check out this vid, and note when the Motorola spokesperson refers to it as a tablet PC.

 
If one had to summarize the difference between the iPad and this, one could simply say that the iPad is an internet appliance whereas the Xoom is a tablet PC. This may change as Apple is forced to compete on features. A mockup of the iPad 2 was displayed by a CES exhibitor for a time until it garnered too much attention and Apple quashed it. While a mockup can’t be regarded as final or definitive, it suggests that it will sport a camera as well.

What its final configuration will be is uncertain, but it does seem likely that Apple will have to add features, a camera being only one of them, if it wants to remain competitive in this space.

The Motorola Xoom runs the Android Honeycomb operating system, which is the latest version of Google’s Android OS originally designed for phones, but retooled by Google specifically for tablets. Boasting an Nvidia Tegra 2 1GHz dual-core processor with a gigabyte of RAM and 32 GB of storage (expandable with SD), it packs enough punch in a well-designed package running a skookum OS that it won CNET’s best of the CES show this year. They note “We believe the Xoom is the most potentially disruptive technology among the nominees; it’s a true competitor for the iPad and will be one of the first 4G-compatible tablets to hit the market.”

I don’t need a tablet. I’m typing this on my faithful Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s fine, really it is, all I need in a light, portable computer. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I have a feeling I will be repeating this a lot. Just because the Xoom looks cool, sleek, sexy, and doesn’t allow its form to interfere much with its function as a PC (I could always get a Motorola bluetooth keyboard), that doesn’t mean that I need it.

I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet. I don’t need a tablet.

Last year at this time I predicted that a small revolution in web apps would occur in 2010, thanks to the introduction of Google Chrome OS, and may have implied that this would have a negative effect on the iPhone. I also expressed the opinion that, if all went well with the Google branded Nexus phone, Microsoft would follow with one of their own.

This year I will have to revise and amend somewhat, since Google did not introduce Chrome OS mid-year as planned, so the fallout from that will have to wait until the first half of 2011. Daniel Eran Dilger has written a piece on this over at appleinsider.com. Perhaps not surprising given the source, it has a bit of a pro-Apple bias. Dilger notes, for example that “Unlike the Chrome OS, these machines [Apple laptops and desktops] can run native Mac apps, can host X11 Linux apps, and can even run Windows apps in a virtualization environment.” This suggests that he doesn’t get it, in spite of having extensively quoted Google’s intention earlier in the article:

”Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems,” the company blogged last summer.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up,” the company explained.

“They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.”

It is Google’s intention to out-iPad the iPad by offering a world where you don’t have to worry about apps or backups or where your data is, a world in which everything “just works.” A paranoid geek like myself won’t allow Chrome OS anywhere near any of my devices, because I care about where my data is and who has access to it and things like administrative access. It’s bad enough that they have my email, I’m not handing over everything to the buggers, even if they are my favourite corporation.

But that’s just curmudgeonly old me. If they can deliver on this vision of drop dead easy computing, Steve Jobs will find himself in the position of having to play catch up, and Microsoft will then play catch up to Jobs. Technologically it won’t be difficult for either of them. The killer will be that while they sell their stuff, Google gives it away free. That could be a very difficult dime for them to turn on.

In other 2011 news: I’m not going to predict the demise of the iPhone. That’s one area that I think is fairly secure for Apple. Though with Nokia’s introduction of the N8, I wonder if the iPhone won’t become just a normal smartphone, ceding the high end to others.

You may have seen articles like this one over at pocketgamer.biz, suggesting that Nokia isn’t doing so well against Apple since the iPhone is outselling the N8 by six to one even in Nokia’s home territory of Europe. (Pro-Nokia site noknok.tv offers a rebuttal.)

This is a little like comparing sales of Rolls Royce to BMW, and, if Apple doesn’t up the ante soon, maybe Lexus. The techno-elite have already turned in their iPhones, and now it is just for little girls. (I’m only partially kidding — Sara Yin over at pcmag.com reports that when considering the purchase of a smartphone, men prefer Android, women the iPhone.)

Microsoft did not release their own branded smartphone this year, instead simply releasing a new OS for phones, Windows Phone 7. I’m not going to predict a Microsoft branded phone for 2011. I think Google’s motivation for the Nexus was sluggish uptake of Android by third parties, and if Microsoft finds themselves in a similar situation, perhaps they will adopt a similar strategy. But if they haven’t copied Google by now, I don’t think they’re going to, especially if it is strongly adopted, or even moderately well adopted.

So if I can’t predict the death of the iPhone, whose demise can I predict? Ah, yes, the overused and much abused Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. And who will kill it? A new specification for web pages, HTML5. This specification provides for much greater support of multimedia content. When those Chrome OS web apps come rolling out, they won’t use Flash. Look for them to be written in HTML5 with other supported specifications (for example, the latest in cascading style sheets [CSS]), and associated technologies. Flash will be a thing of the past.

The revolution has not been cancelled. Merely postponed. Until then, best wishes for the holidays and the new year.

Apple’s iPad has been out for awhile now, long enough for tons of opinion pieces to be written, so no need for me to add to the noise, especially when so many of my reservations have been so well expressed by none other than Adolph Hitler. Apparently, for him, the final straw was the iPad’s lack of multitasking.

 
Hitler’s final verdict is to wait for the HP Slate. More generally, one could simply say “wait.” The competition will no doubt include more features at better prices.

Remember, Google’s Chrome OS is on the horizon, and it could be just as much for tablets as for netbooks, as speculated on over at hothardware.com.

It would be an understatement to say that Hitler was wrong about many things, but in this case I think his take on the iPad is correct. Competitors won’t even have to scramble to come up with something better, they’ll simply include those basic features which people, dictators and regular folk alike, want.

Why did this happen? Was it a case of rushing so that they could enjoy the same first to market advantage they did with the iPhone? The inevitability of this product niche seemed pressingly tangible, though that was in part driven by the hype about their tablet, fueled by their own leaks. Was it as crunchgear.com implied, a play to squeeze extra money out of customers by selling them add-ons? There isn’t going to be a multitasking add-on, that’s just how the thing works, so some limitations can’t be explained that way.

Whatever the reason, it won’t be long before the iPad fails to carry with it the panache of other Apple products. Even the Apple fan boys may find themselves saying along with Adolph, “This is the first time in a long time that Apple has disappointed me so much.”

2010 could prove to be the year of the iPhone killer, but, if so, Apple’s bereavement will simply be collateral damage in the ever-raging battle between giants Microsoft and Google. Google’s Android on a Google phone won’t deliver the death blow, but it will be a sign of the end times.

Android is an operating system for mobile phones. Rather than come out with a device of their own, Google created an operating system and waited for device manufacturers to snap it up. An interesting strategy, but somewhat flawed, given that manufacturers didn’t exactly stampede over one another to release Android-based phones.

Perhaps compensating for their over-optimism, Google has now decided to release a Google phone. The official announcement is scheduled for tomorrow, January 5th, but Engadget is offering a sneak preview.

In terms of geek chic, I predict that this will be the phone to have in the first half of 2010, especially while it’s hot, new, and unavailable in Canada. But an iPhone killer? At the risk of sounding jaded, I have to say, no, it’s just another smart phone. A great deal of its geek appeal will be simply that you can’t get a googlier Android phone than one from Google themselves.

The real iPhone killer will emerge towards the end of the year, or perhaps in 2011. Peparing the way will be Google’s own operating system, Chrome OS, scheduled for release mid-year. While not quite the same as the Chrome web browser Google recently released, it might be regarded as a natural extension — a completely netcentric OS.

Initially Android OS and Chrome OS will exist as independent operating systems, but eventually they will merge. At that point it may not be any specific hardware that kills the iPhone, nor even Chrome OS. It will be the so called “cloud” of cloud computing, where all your apps are “out there.” No need to buy little apps from app stores, all will be free, whether from Google Apps or other cloudware providers. Chrome OS will merely be the harbinger, the herald trumpeting the new day. Well, not that new, actually, since Google Apps has been around for some time now. But to the desktop user, Google Apps is just more free stuff from the fine folk at Google, whereas with Chrome OS it will be The Way.

So, the main contenders in the OS wars of the future will be Google and Microsoft, and Apple and Linux merely unfortunate bystanders. All a mobile phone will need to access the cloudware universe will be net access and a good browser. Opportunity for device mystique will be diminished, possibly even to the point of neutralizing Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field. Meanwhile, the netbook niche will be even more challenging for Linux if it has to compete not only with whatever Microsoft comes up with to replace XP on netbooks, but also with a new contender, Chrome OS.

Of course, this only so much speculation. What seems certain, however, is that once the dust settles on the Google phone, if it looks like success, count on seeing a Microsoft phone as well, perhaps as early as the end of this year. Microsoft always comes late to the game, but then makes up for it by leveraging their virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems. Given that this has little to do with the desktop and that Google has a significant lead, it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

Number 10: Virtual Reality
Number 09: Alternative Search Engines
Number 08: Voice Recognition
Number 07: Apple Lisa
Number 06: 10 GB Ethernet
Number 05: FireWire
Number 04: Bluetooth
Number 03: Itanium
Number 02: Zune
Number 01: Windows Vista

Yes, there you have it, Windows Vista is the greatest of the failed technologies. Now, for me, it would have to be alchemy, the promise of being able to turn lead into gold. Some say it has been done, but that is purely anecdotal and unsubstantiated. Some might object that alchemy is from too long ago, a product of the transition between the age of superstition and the age of science. To that I answer that the list above does include the Apple Lisa. Come on, if tech as old as the Lisa gets on the list, I don’t think sticking alchemy in there is too great a stretch, is it?

The other thing that sticks out is that the first three disappointments on the list are actually technologies, whereas the Lisa is a product. Then the next three items are technologies, followed by three products. With a little thought, they could have come up with four more technologies to replace the products. Right off the top of my head I can think of four I’ll give them for free: eBook readers, phone/pda combo, the $100 netbook, and sexbots.

What we need in an eBook reader is not even that terribly sophisticated. It should have a high rez screen, wireless internet, and native support for open source document formats. If you want to read eBooks in proprietary formats encumbered with digital restriction management (DRM), you should be able to do that with a downloadable plugin, but basic functionality shouldn’t require anything proprietary. As long as offerings push the proprietary, and are aimed at selling eBooks for little less than the price of the dead tree versions in DRM-encumbered formats that require expensive hardware, this is a tech which will remain disappointing.

I know people with iPhones who just love the things, but while they’re close, they’re not the badger’s nadgers when it comes to the potential of this class of device. I want a phone/pda that has a small actual keyboard, and an impossibly large screen for a small handheld device — let’s say 6×4 inches in a device that, closed, is only 2×4 inches. How is that magic accomplished? Simple, it has a roll up screen that spools up in the device when it’s closed. These flexible screens have been in development for seemingly forever. Any day now. Any day. I keep waiting.

The $100 laptop was the noble goal, unachieved, of the One Laptop Per Child program. They came close enough to give birth to a new category of device, the netbook. Netbooks are small laptops with not the hottest (literally and figuratively) processors, not as much RAM as most laptops, and often without a hard drive at all, using instead some form of nonvolatile RAM, like an SD Card. So far as I know, no one has achieved the magic price point of $100 yet, but as soon as they do, I’m getting one. Provided it runs Linux. At that price point, it’s not unlikely that it will, though by then it’s possible that Microsoft will have released its freely downloadable “Here-take-it-just-don’t-use-linux” edition of XP for netbooks. Or perhaps Windows 7 will live up to its promise to run on netbooks. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Finally, sexbots. For basic functionality, you would think this would be the low hanging fruit of robotics. The Lizzy Lie-Still and Larry Likes-You-On-Top models should be in stores now. The primary technical hurdles would be original utterances (ideally it should be able to combine elements from a large bank of vocabulary and sounds, not just repeat the same 20 phrases like a talking doll with a pull-string), stimulus/response/awareness of surroundings and what’s going on, and some appropriate movements (ideally unaccompanied by the conspicuous sound of servos) which can stop short of http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif full bipedalism given that these models are expected to function primarily on their backs. They would not be expected to be able to make breakfast.

Again, like the eBook reader, sexbots are a technology where the bits and pieces exist here and there, but seem not to have been put together into one satisfying product. You’re telling me Toyota can make a robot that can play the violin, but it can’t make a robot that can fake orgasm?

Of course, Sony’s take seems to be that we are the robots, and only through using their technology can we become human.

Oh, Sony, you are so evil, so thoroughly evil in everything you do. RIAA Big Four member label, infector of people’s computers with root kits, purveyors of mind rot — both the content and the means of delivery. I think you may be more evil even than Microsoft. Is such a thing possible? Let Google be the judge.

Wow, turns out Microsoft is still significantly more evil than Sony. That’s pretty evil. Perhaps, when it comes to technology, what’s most disappointing isn’t the actual tech, but rather the corporations who produce it.

Still no sexbots. Perhaps they’ll be one of those techs like videophones — featured in scifi, but, once the technology is actually available, not really generating the interest scifi authors anticipated. Or perhaps it’s economic. Maybe there are some amazing million dollar sexbot prototypes even now hidden away in labs in Japan or somewhere, just waiting for the cost of their components to decline, or for cheaper methods of manufacture.

This year I think I’ll play it conservatively with regard to predictions. 2009 will look pretty much like 2008. Perhaps processors will be a little faster, maybe more cores available in more affordable chips. The one striking thing, which isn’t exactly new but which we should expect to see more of, is an emphasis on energy efficiency, at both the consumer and pro levels. Energy efficiency could mean longer battery life for consumers in their various electronic gizmos, while for business it translates to lower energy costs for server rooms — less power, less heat, less air conditioning, less cost. The PR benefit to “going green” is incidental; there are real bottom line cost benefits to energy efficiency.

Some prognosticators might be tempted to declare 2009 the year of some iPhone killer, but that would be nonsense. Apple makes lovely bits of hardware that have always been able to hold their own within their sector of the market, namely design-conscious people who don’t mind being milked on price. Apple will lose a bit of market share as other players enter the touch screen phone market, but one has to remember that if the market had been established by another company’s product and then Apple came out with the iPhone, Apple fans would still have lined up to get one. Steve Jobs has a captive audience that would buy his excrement if it was nicely packaged and called iShit.

That said, Nokia is poised to challenge Apple in the touch screen phone market with its N97.

And while it’s traditional to predict that the coming year will be the year of Linux on the desktop, this year let’s be more modest and predict that 2009 will be the year of Linux on the netbook. Netbooks, if you haven’t heard, are very small and affordable laptops. Arguably the machine which lit a fire under this product category was the OLPC XO, followed by the eee pc, and others like the Asus Aspire One.

While the emergence of netbooks caught Microsoft off guard, the company is now competing aggressively and pushing Windows on netbooks any way they can. Obviously, netbooks having more limited processor power and memory, Vista is not an option, so Microsoft has extended the end of life of XP Home until June 30th, 2010.

You’d think Linux could eat Microsoft’s lunch, given that the netbook market is one of limited hardware resources and retail price. The regular cost of Windows XP is almost as much as a cheap netbook itself. But herein we see one of Linux’s weaknesses, namely the lack of a well financed, central head office that can do battle in a swift and organized way. When Microsoft’s interests are threatened, Lord Balmer sends forth the nine riders on their black horses who visit every corner of Middle Earth doing whatever it takes to keep Windows dominant, practically giving it away where necessary. If Linux has a chance to dominate here, and I think it does, it’s not only because it’s the superior choice for a low-cost, stripped-down machine, but also because companies like Asus and Acer offer it as an option. Seriously, simple as that.

A great many people still have no idea that Linux exists as an option on the PC — like the school teacher who discovered students playing with it and became concerned that they were up to no good. She emailed the Helios project leader saying “At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.” Yikes.

Perhaps we Linux zealots should downgrade our expectations even further and simply predict that the upcoming year will be the one when people discover Linux exists and that they have a choice. Hard to see how it can take over the desktop if people don’t know about it.

Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year.