Thursday, September 5, 2002
***Shelf Life***
A funny thing happened to Linux on the way to World Domination. It succeeded. That's the good news. The bad news is that its success has hit a few hitches, and it's unclear how long those hitches will last.
The success story is straightforward: All the former major UNIX vendors are now also Linux vendors. Linux has a seat alongside AIX at the IBM table, HP-UX at the HP table, Solaris at the Sun table and both SCO OpenServer and UnixWare at the SCO table. That picture became complete last week, when Caldera changed its name to SCO Group and said it was in business to sell every kind of UNIX on its shelves.
This means Linux will now compete *within* vendors on a level selling field. It's an SKU (stock keeping unit). As an SKU, it now competes for shelf space with other platforms. That's as true among customers as it is among vendors. For all the FUD Microsoft has thrown on Linux, the company has also legitimized Linux as the leading platform competitor. Similar FUD thrown on free software and open source have served to legitimize both as development methods.
Given Linux' advantages -- its reliability, flexibility, robustness, familiarity, popularity, development tools, available applications, etc. -- Linux is sure to grow. And much of that growth will be at the expense of incumbent UNIXes sold by companies that now also sell Linux.
In fact, the idea that Linux was a bigger threat to other UNIXes than to Microsoft's Windows has something of a common faith over the last few years. Here are just a few examples of that point of view:
The last item contained this line: "Industry analysts maintain that most Linux-based server market share growth comes at the expense of Unix systems, not Windows servers."
But as any retail veteran knows, the whole idea of offering a wider range of similar products is to increase the whole company's shelf space, not for one company to succeed at the expense of the others, even if that does happen to some degree.
Marketing competitive SKUs for the same shelf becomes an exercise in differentiation. You want your incumbent UNIX to be better for some apps than Linux. Put another way, HP, IBM, Sun and SCO will all niche Linux to some degree.
Linux' incumbent niche right now is in supporting Net infrastructure servers: Apache Web servers, Sendmail mail servers, Jabber IM servers. Its for jobs like that we're seeing Linux being niched.
Last week Jeff Gerhardt of The Linux Show reported on the Caldera->SCO announcement, and stayed for the whole GeoFORUM show in Las Vegas, which was attended by a large number of resellers who trafficked in all three of SCO's UNIX platforms, including Linux. I had one follow-up on the Linux Journal site. The three pieces are here:
These resellers are not coming from Linux. They're not even coming from UNIX. They're selling stuff they call "solutions" to a countless different customer problems. One piece of bad news is that generally their customers are still leery about Linux. On the phone yesterday Jeff told me that often these resellers will hide the fact that Linux is the platform under some infrastructural component required to support the reseller's main application. "They'll use a name the client's not likely to have heard of," Jeff said. "They'll say 'We're going to install a SAMBA server because it's a lower cost alternative to your Exchange authentication server.'"
Linux in this case becomes a zero-cost component. That too is a kind of niche. Where you want pure OS infrastructure that nobody sees, and you want it to cost nothing, Linux is your best choice. The big UNIX vendors can all now say, "Yes, we have that."
That's where the World Domination is right now. In the infrastructure.
Essentially, Linux is a non-commercial way to support commercial products. It's useful where what gets sold is not the operating system itself.
Where the next problem comes is with shedding the anti-commercial legacy that comes down from Linux' original community. You see that legacy when you look at the responses to the Caldera/SCO announcements on Slashdot and Linux Today, which were almost entirely negative.
There is nothing about Linux itself that is anti-commercial, other than the way many people in business interpret the GPL. But it is easy for many in the reseller community (SCO has more than 10,000 resellers) to look at negative community response of the only choice Caldera had to stay in the UNIX business, and see hostility there. And that's mighty hard to resell.