Suitwatch, December 4, 2003

My main computer, the one I live with, isn't a desktop. It's a laptop. And it's been that way since 1992. I've had countless desktops and servers along the way (along with a larger number of laptops), but few desktops have served more than temporary duty as my Main Machine. Mostly they've served as heavy processing and storage devices, doing what my light-duty laptops couldn't.

That's still the case, for the servers. But the term "desktop" no longer applies to any of the non-portable boxes around here. On my desk is a laptop of the category they call "desktop replacement". And that's exactly what it is. It's a heavy-duty machine. More to the point, it's an all-duty machine. It not only does more of what I want than any desktop, but I can take it with me.

See, I live in three professional places: 1) in my office, 2) on the road and 3) on the Net. Of those three, the last two are what matter the most. Of those last two, only one -- the Net -- truly matters. Back in 1992, connecting for me was mostly a dial-up matter. Today it's all wireless. Everything I see, hear and write goes through a wi-fi connection. Most of what I've written in the last two years, both at home and on the road, has been across the Net's last acre, not its last mile.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I dreaded staying at the house of a friend in Silicon Valley who isn't a techie and whose connection to the Net consists of occasional AOL dial-up sessions. She has a large house, but only one working phone connection, and I hate to borrow it because the phone is at least as important to her as the Net is to me. So I figured I'd have to go out to the nearest public wi-fi hot spot.

But, to my surprise, I could get two good wi-fi signals in her kitchen, one of them wide open to the Net. As with most home broadband connections, the provider (in this case Comcast) had blocked Port 25, but I just ssh-tunneled to my mail server and went about my business. Bandwidth was more than sufficient for everything I needed to do. I don't know if the neighbor agreed with Nicholas Negroponte that leaving one's hot spot open is the networked equivalent of putting flower boxes outside your house, but it was in that community spirit that I felt free to indulge the opportunity. <http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/001071.html>

Later I went down to Fry's in Sunnyvale and walked the aisles to see what's up. The most astonishing things I saw were flat screen monitors, many with HDTV "cinema" shapes flanked by speakers, with prices falling so fast you could almost hear them whistle through the air. Fry's only sells in retail stores, so if I want to point to something amazing and cheap, I have to go to a place like CompUSA <http://www.compusa.com/>, where they're selling a KOGi F7AH 17" 1280 x 1024 monitor for $399 after a $100 rebate.

But that's not the kicker here. No, the kicker is that this thing is sold as a "Monitor/TV". It includes a TV tuner, a remote control and a video in connection. For approximately no extra money. Talk about the commoditization of television. As Neo so perfectly put it: Whoa.

Here's the significance: TV is now just another form of input for the home entertainment devices into which those things we used to call "home desktop computers" are evolving. Steve Jobs was right when he said three years ago that home PCs were becoming "hubs" for various other electronic home appliances: camcorders, MP3 players, digital cameras, DVD players, etc. In terms of input, what we call television is reduced to a set of streams pumping 640 x 480 video. Put a TiVo or some other DVR in that chain and the whole industry suddenly takes a back seat to... what? Try: everything else.

Many questions arise, especially if you're busy making money selling ads that DVRs let users skip over (to visit only one of many obvious threats to the industry). But that issue is off-topic. My point here is that home desktops as we knew them are morphing into home entertainment hubs.

Meanwhile, look at what's happening at the office. Desktops there are turning into cubicle furnishings. I interviewed Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, when the company announced its intent to start making desktops (the project later known as Mad Hatter) in Summer of 2002. That was the first time I heard the term "transaction worker" used to describe the huge population of office workers who don't really need Office. By which I mean, of course, Microsoft Office. Or at least not all of it. Mostly, Schwartz told me, these workers are running the company's own custom internal software, plus email, a browser and maybe some office apps.

Last month Sun signed a deal with the Chinese government to supply up to a million desktop units over the next year. One Sun insider told me the long-term agreement was to supply up to five hundred million of the things over the next ten years. Whatever the deal, the category is clear: we're talking about commodity droneware here.

A key part of this, of course, is the Java Desktop. I've seen it, and I'm impressed. The 3-D Looking Glass UI is pretty slick. But the message is still about the masses. These things are slated to become the Net's equivalent of Western Electric desk phones. Again, cubicleware.

Which is fine.

Meanwhile, what about LOTD -- Linux On The Desktop? That's been a grail made ever more holy by the extreme depth of the hole that persists around desktops in Linux' portfolio of success stories.

As of today, LOTD success still rounds to failure as far as the mass market is concerned. At Apachecon last month, Apple laptops running OS X (based on FreeBSD) far outnumbered every other kind of laptop at the show. Blake Stone, Borland's CTO, told me OS X was his "favorite Linux distro".

LOTD won't matter unless it happens on laptops, not desktops. Sun can sell a half billion Linux desktops to China and LOTD still won't be a success unless users in Japan and France and the U.S. Can plug a Sony camcorder by FireWire into a Linux laptop and have it recognized by the system. Same goes for playing a DVD with minimal battery-draining involvement by the main CPU, like Windows and Mac laptops do. They should sleep and wake without a hitch.

So today I have encouraging news. I just got off the phone with Mike Hjorleifsson, CEO of Element Computer <http://elementcomputer.com/store/>, which is selling a Linux tablet for $999 and a Linux notebook for $799. Both run Lycoris, with which Mike says the company has been working very closely. And both machines are based on VIA hardware <http://www.via.com.tw/>. More importantly, he says his company and those two others are well on their way to solving most or all the long-standing device driver problems. Suspend and resume will work. Batteries will last. When I asked him "Are you driving a truck through the hole Intel left open when it neglected to release Centrino device drivers for Linux?", he said "You've got it."

I have no idea if Element will make it, or if it's as good as its promises. But if they do what they say they're doing, they'll help level the one hole Linux needs to fill before World Domination is more than a promise.

Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal.