How do you want to go today?

Back when Bill Gates was still talking about The Road Ahead (now behind us, I believe), Microsoft's advertising slogan was "Where do you want to go today?" The question carried a vehicular connotation. (Even though "go" in some languages, such as English, also refers colloquially to producing one's own fertilizer.) The message was that, in the world of personal computing, Microsoft vehicles were the only ones that got you anywhere.

I thought about that in the shower last Thursday morning (a week ago today, as you read this). I was in San Diego for the second annual Desktop Linux Summit, and slated to give a speech in the afternoon there. Although I already had a theme for the speech -- applying Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado" to the subject of Desktop Linux -- I suddenly realized that the notion of Going Places might more properly apply to Desktop Linux than to Windows, especially in the long run.

Neal Stephenson, best known as the author of Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash and other works of fiction, also wrote a slim volume of nonfiction called In the Beginning Was the Command Line (which is can also be read online here: http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine. In "Command Line" he compares operating systems to cars:

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

"Command Line" was published in November, 1999, three months after Red Hat set the record for a first-day IPO run-up, and one month before VA set the new record, which will stand until the next bubble comes along.

Red Hat and VA gave jobs to the yurt & teepee crowd. They also provided buildings to work in and even (in a few cases) suits to wear. The result was a collective car dealership that looked like Microsoft's and Apple's. (Be went out of business after Apple declined to buy them). But they still sold tanks. Or gave them away. Or both. For awhile. Eventually the Linux give-away business crashed along with everything else in the bubble economy. The yurt & teepee crowd is still there, of course, giving away tanks.

The number of suits in the Linux business, however, has grown quite a bit. There are big old companies like IBM, Novell (which now owns SUSE) and HP; plus smaller players like Mandrake, Xandros and Linspire. All of them sell customized tanks -- the equivalent of Hummers, perhaps. But none of them sell cars. By which I mean, none of them sell PCs of the sort that compete directly with Microsoft and Apple on the sales floors at CompUSA and Fry's. Sure, you can buy a generic white box PC and put your favorite distro on it, but that's not what Geoffrey Moore (or pretty much anybody outside the tribe) would call a "whole" product. When statistics houses like IDC say Linux ties or beats Apple's market share, they're including countless white boxes. It's nice that Linux is starting to kick butt in the generic corporate desktop box business; but let's face it -- those things are the modern equivalent of VT100s and VT200s and 3270 display terminals. They're not in the bicycle lineage Neal talks about with his car dealer analogy. Meaning, they're not personal. And they don't travel.

The most personal computers these days are the ones that travel. Namely, laptops.

It used to be that laptops traded performance and features for portability. Not any more. Your latest laptops have up to 80 gigs of drive storage, 2+ GHz processors, 1600x1200 screens, backplanes that support new-generation USB and FireWire, 802.11b/g wi-fi, advanced audio/video features, built-in speakers and burners for CDs and DVDs. Plus, in some cases, BlueTooth and other fancy stuff. That's actually more than you get with most desktops.

There are off-the-shelf XP and OS X machines that feature most or all of that stuff. We don't have that yet for Linux. When we do, we'll have ... what?

The answer came to me in the shower last Thursday morning. I knew exactly what kind of car the Ultimate Linux Laptop would need to be. The answer was filling the parking right there at the hotel where I was staying. That lot demonstrated Searls First Law of Renting Cars, which goes like this:

It doesn't matter what kind of car you want you want to rent. The car you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier.

And that's what I suggested to the audience in my speech that afternoon, one week ago: http://www.searls.com/doc/dls2004/. To test my theory, I asked, "How many people here will admit to actually owning a Chevy Cavalier?" Out of hundreds in the room, not one hand went up. Yet many in the audience had rented Chevy Cavaliers, or the equivalent, to drive to the show. I rented a Grand Am from Budget, because they were out of Chevy Cavaliers. So I asked if anybody in the audience owned a Grand Am. No hands went up. Later I counted several near mine in the parking lot.

Chevy Cavaliers, Grand Ams and other generic rental cars have two characteristics that make them ideal models for Ultimate Linux Laptops.

First, they're not bad, really.

Second, all but the stripped-down models come with a full complement of minor conveniences you want in a car today: cruise control, air conditioning, electric doors and windows, AM/FM radio, CD player, cup holders, automatic transmission -- and a wireless thingie on the key chain for unlocking doors and opening the trunk. Those are the equivalents of wi-fi, USB and CD burning in a laptop.

Two decades ago, John Updike casually said we live "in the age of full convenience." To put a spin on Geoffrey Moore, a "whole product" is a fully convenient one.

You wouldn't want to rent a tank from Hertz or Budget, even if they gave it to you for nothing. You want something that's standard, at the very least. Something that has the full complement of generic conveniences.

Now here's the kicker: we still don't have that, even from Microsoft and Apple, both of which are distinguished by proprietary stuff that's standard only to themselves. Also, the fact that 95% of the current population of PC users is familiar with Windows doesn't mean that the whole world uses the OS. Far from it.

One of the things I discovered at the Desktop Linux Summit is that there is a huge market for cheap and good PCs in what we used to call the Third World. That's where companies like Linspire and Xandros are making headway, if not headlines.

There is plenty of room to differentiate on top of a generic standard platform of compatible features. We've seen that in the automobile business for a long time. That business provides an excellent model because it's mature.

Of course there's plenty of room for improvement and always will be. But cars have arrived at the Age of Full Convenience. The rental car business demonstrates that fact with every Chevy Cavalier it provides to a satisfied customer.

When we see the equivalent in computing, the Chevy Cavalier won't be a Windows or an OS X laptop. It will be some kind of Linux. And when that happens, you'll also see plenty of well-differentiated, value-added and in-demand Linux boxes that most upscale computer customers will be glad to buy.