J.D.'s BorCon diary: Wednesday, July 12

An ongoing, on-the spot report from the 11th Annual Borland Conference.

It's the last day of BorCon.

In previous years, I've always been an exhibitor. So I've spent the last day of BorCon working in the Windows Tech Journal booth and missing all the keynotes and other presentations. Then it's booth tear-down time. That's an amazing thing...you wouldn't believe how fast the exhibit hall can come to represent a loading zone. Imagine your bedroom while you're packing for a two-week trip, but expanded by a couple orders of magnitude. The signs come down, the booth walls collapse, burly guys come and roll up the carpet...before you know it you're standing in a warehouse full of shipping cartons. It's really something to see.

CLASSROOM REPORT

I made my second conference presentation yesterday. I called it "The Linux Markets," and it was all about assessing the potential of Linux in different segments of the computing market.

Linux is proven as a Web server platform. Apache has emerged as Linux's first killer app, and the Linux-Apache combination accounts for nearly half the servers on the Internet. Fast growth continues...this is a place where Linux indisputably makes sense. (That's great because Borland has recently announced that Kylix will have special library support and tools for creating Apache-based applications._

There's a secondary sort of Internet server market that I find interesting. When I think of Web servers, I think of apps like Apache that serve up Web pages. But the Internet also connects application servers, audio-video servers, chat servers, fax servers, list servers, mail servers, news servers, proxy servers, and more. In each of these niches, there are Linux solutions.

The second major market for Linux is the IT market -- general-purpose servers that run applications and store data. Linux is slowly making inroads in this market. It's following the well-worn path of the original PC. Linux is brought into the company for one specific task, usually running Apache. (Just as the PC was brought in to run VisiCalc or 1-2-3.) Then, once the platform is there, early adopters launch pilot projects or stealth initiatives to see if the new technology can fit into the existing infrastructure. In the Linux world, this is happening first in smaller companies where the operating system's low price is a compelling factor.

How much progress has Linux made in displacing NT, Solaris, AIX, and other operating systems on IT servers? As near as I can tell, no one knows. There are a lot of reasonable assumptions and good guesses, but we await a market report that will give us solid numbers.

The third market is the one that excites me the most. It's the embedded market, where Linux is used in devices that aren't PCs or servers. This is a huge market. Did you know that only about 10% of the world's microprocessors are used in PCs and laptops? The rest -- one to two billion processors per year -- go into data acquisition and control devices, Internet appliances, telecom and telephony devices, set-top boxes, vending machines, point-of-sale devices, games, and the like.

This is a huge market. "Everything with a digital heartbeat will be connected to the Internet," says Scott McNealy, and I think he's right.

Consider your home thermostat. You probably have a smart thermostat that turns the heat down at night when you're sleeping and warms up the house just before you get up in the morning -- such devices have become so inexpensive they're standard in new homes now. Wouldn't you like to be able to communicate with that thermostat from your desk at work, in case you're coming home early or working late? How long would it take for improved heating-fuel efficiency to repay the cost of adding a cheap Internet connection to home thermostats? Better yet, don't you think your thermostat ought to do a better job of anticipating weather conditions and outside temperatures? What if The Weather Channel had a data sideband that your thermostat could tap?

Or what if you had a bricks-and-mortar company that placed vending machines in businesses and malls all over town. Wouldn't you like to be able to build an app that queries the inventory level in all those machines? That's not how it works now. Today, you hire a driver and buy a van, and you send him driving around 40 hours a week to check inventory levels. Vending machines ought to know when they're jammed, and they ought to send you an e-mail. How long would it take to justify that simple application of Internet technology?

Everything's going to get wired. The bandwidth is coming, the hardware is already laughably cheap, and Linux has exactly the right stuff for many, many of these applications. If you want to bet on a Linux boom, this is the place for it.

The fourth and final market I explored was the replacement-for-Windows market, the desktop. In this market, Linux has some real barriers. Its number-one competitor has a monopoly position. Linux is not especially well-designed for use as a desktop operating system for the masses. And there's little incentive for non-geeks to give up the operating systems they already have.

Nonetheless, despite virtually no marketing and demonstrably primitive distributions, Linux gained four percent of the desktop market in 1999, according to research firm IDC. It's easy to scoff at that number, and in my presentation I did. But Dan York of the Linux Professional Institute stayed after class to chat about that. He noted that Apple has spent 16 years pushing the Macintosh as hard as it could, and has managed to achieve market share of five percent. Linux hit four percent without a single full year of marketing.

The four percent number is also tough to verify. Linux is free, so it's reasonable to guess that some percentage of the people who acquired Linux CDs retired them to shelfware, maybe without ever installing them.

On the other hand, the IDC numbers do not include copies of Linux that are downloaded over the Internet instead of distributed on CDs. And it doesn't have any way of tracking the numbers when Linux is installed on multiple computers from one CD.

IDC's numbers are the best we have, but there are still some wide holes in our knowledge of Linux's market share.

WINDING DOWN

After I post this article I'll be done with my BorCon responsibilities except for the Advisory Board wrap-up meeting this afternoon. Then, as conference-goers pack up and head for home, I'll check my bags and leave on vacation. I'm going to Russia for pleasure, can you believe it? I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

Keep hacking.

JDH