A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self-evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's all about how Linux can speed up your computer hence the sub-title 'Linux feels the Need for Speed'.
However a brief whizz around the computing licencing at CERN (which is currently making headlines with the switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider) shows that the biggest computing development to emerge from there since the World Wide Web is the EU Grid which is released on an Open Source basis. Hence open source computing is arguably at the heart of the LHC and if so will play its part in the 'End of the World' if the more apocalyptic of our brethern are to be believed. And, since the LHC is all about really great speeds the conflation was too tempting. So apologies for the click-bait. What follows is really more prosaically about managing the end of a relationship.
Leaving XP
It's a simple question but difficult to answer: 'How do you get folk who are perfectly happy with Windows XP to change to something else?'.
In a previous post I suggested that to a whole generation, a Windows XP desktop was for them a finished work, the culmination of a succession of exciting upgrades of hardware and software.
In the Open Source world at one time, fairly recently actually, it was received wisdom that although technical superiority would win out in the server market getting ordinary users to change to unfamiliar desktops was a step too far.
I am happy to say Microsoft has run square into the self same unfamiliarity problem with Vista and Office 2007. They are a bit too different to the 'finished work' without offering any must-have extras. It gets even harder for Microsoft when even official Governmental bodies like BECTA advise the public sector procurers not to change. Ironically this stricture appears not to apply to other Government organisations in education such as the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) who have clearly more money than sense.
Microsoft though has enough clout to follow alternative strategies for persuading its customers to change when they show signs of dragging their feet. The most obvious is by not allowing vendors to install XP on new machines and making sure lots of stuff, bit by bit, won't work on the old machines (allegedly). The Open Source world in contrast with its plethora of cool Linux distributions and manifest lack of clout (on the desktop) only has the 'hey that's a cool desktop - I must change' strategy to fall back on and that's a pretty weak opener in the desktop wars.
Why indeed would one now change desktops, why in the past were we so willing, eager even, to do just that and now are so reluctant?
Reasons to Upgrade
Readers of a certain vintage will remember the Intel hardware upgrades from the 286 to 386 to 486 to 586 Pentium processors, running parallel, Microsoft's OS went from Windows 3 to 3.2 to 95 to 98 and 2000 and Word went from Word 2 (very good it was too) through 6 to 97 and 2000. The amount of RAM fitted to a PC went up during this time from 16mb to 1gb. We all handed over our cash as soon as we could to experience the latest thing.
Of course power consumption went through the roof at the same time but we did not care much back then... No, what we did care about was speed. 486 owners were lightning fast when running Word 2 when compared to lowly mortals who only had a 286. I really coveted the next upgrade, I really did.
Unfortunately but seemingly inevitably, what was also happening during this period was the emergence of 'bloat ware'. Software got more features and more code to take advantage of the new hardware power until things became absurdly bloated.
The tale is told that even Microsoft's own engineers struggled mightily to upgrade the highly evolved XP to Vista's extra feature list but were defeated by the mighty code base and effectively started again using the simpler 2003 Server code. If true, this story provides an exemplar in what the Science Philosophers call 'paradigm elaboration'. Ultimately the accretion of ad-hoc modifications causes the edifice to collapse.
To cut a long tale short - as a result of bloated software, most computers are no longer fast, period. They are dog slow. MS Office 2007 is huge, so is Open Office (sorry guys). Running say Office 2007 or Open Office 2.4 on a budget laptop with Vista Home Premium is a dismally slow experience compared to the same machine running XPpro and Word 97/2000. Don't try this at home kids.
All good things come to an end however and this applies to this particular upgrade cycle. The emergence of new technologies may complement the status quo but sometimes they disrupt it. Those described below fall into the later category and have occurred at a time of hiatus in the prevailing paradigm.
Top 3 Disruptive technologies
The new Netbooks (so-called) low power (typically 6 watts) ultra cheap sub notebooks with 7-10" screens running a flavour of Linux (or at a push the undead Windows XP reincarnated by MS just for netbooks I wonder why?)
'Lightweight' operating systems and applications which use far less code and system overhead than their bloated equivalents.
Google's Chrome browser (or is it an OS or merely very cool spyware?).
What is so disruptive? Read on and then add them together and it will become clearer.
Quick Web
Just how disruptive these three will be will depend on a range of factors but I think the biggest driver will be as it was before, speed. Google seem to think so too. The open source browser application Chrome, out in beta for Windows, is a really really fast browser. Yes, it has a range of cool new features that will emerge as powerful incentives to use Chrome and yes, it may be the worlds most effective spyware , but the first encounter the user has with the browser produces that great feeling, raw speed.
Chrome on Windows XP now not only speeds up browsing but its 'Add Application' feature makes using on-line applications (eg Google docs) simpler and much faster. One more reason then not to upgrade your PC but to speed it up with software choice. When its out for Linux frankly I can't see why I would use any other browser given that I have already sold my soul to Googleplex's logging computers.
Quick Boot
The netbooks such as the now well known Linux Xandros Asus EeePC which a year ago pioneered their introduction and proved to the world that there was a huge demand for such devices (thank you Asus) are not in themselves as supplied that quick. They after all have modest hardware specifications (and tiny power consumptions) but thanks to their embedded operating systems, boy to they do boot up quickly. Not quite instantly-on but only a dozen or so seconds.
Several mainboard manufacturers (New ASUS mainboard has 5-second bootup) for conventional desktop and laptop computers have cottoned on to the agonizingly slow boot ups endured by users and are increasingly offering 'fast boot 'options: yes you have guessed how, they use light embedded Linux distributions on board which offer the basic applications of word processing, browsing and so on. After a few weeks of no-wait computing, how many of you are going to opt for the 'agonizingly slow boot option' so that you can use Office 2007 to type that memo? A quick boot though is no good if the subsequent experience is slow.
Fortunately thanks to a few 'mad' developers who in the true Open Source tradition, ploughed their own furrow even when their project was not fashionable, we now have software which is truly non-bloat, let's call it 'quickware'.
Quick Software
In recent years a few developers dedicated themselves to stripping down full Linux distributions to produce lightweight distributions capable of running quickly on older computers or very fast on later models. Notable amongst this dedicated group are Puppy Linux and DSL Linux (Damm Small Linux). The entire distributions including applications were under 100mb and ran as so called live distributions. Essentially this meant booting from CD or USB Memory stick and running in RAM space.
These distributions are, or have been to say the least, for the minority... oddball Linuxistas. I confess to be a Puppy fan and have received my unfair share of derision in the Office for my visionary abilities but trust me one day quickware will rule the world.
How many of us Linux users are more productive with Compiz et al and every package under the sun installed as default? Linux has shown it can match and beat the eye candy of Vista Ultimate and MacOSx. Maybe now the thrust will be to make the desktop as fast as stable and as well engineered as our server products.
The following distributions have weighed in and show a very active rate of development:
wattOS : an ultra light weight, Ubuntu-based Linux distro.
I think the point made by this non exhaustive list is the day of the speedy distro is nearly nigh.
Take any of the above and boot it from USB onto a bare metal computer sporting a pentium class processor and half a gig of ram and it will fly; all we need now are some speedy applications to help it on its way. In the Open Source 'Office' portfolio let me suggest AbiWord as a replacement for Open Office or MS Word. It'll do all you want and will open in a twinkle of an eye; ditto Gnumeric instead of OO Spreadsheet or Excel. Don't believe me? Download them and see for yourself. Then there are Inkscape, Scribus....
It's all out there.
Conclusion
There is now the possibility that sanity may be coming to the PC's desktop. In many ways the XP generation with whom I opened this post have a point. XP circa 2001 does all they need it to do. Any improvement (for them) would be merely to do it all faster.
Performance has always characterised the server market and consequently I assert accounts for the superb growth of Open Source server deployments. The desktop has in contrast, especially recently, been characterised by 'features' to the detriment of performance. Computers have grown ever more powerful to take advantage of ever more irrelevant interfaces, or is that vice versa?
Now thanks maybe to an economic downturn or global warming or the imminent destruction of the universe by minitiure black holes or whatever, many users have had enough.
The solution is to break the upgrade cycle; just use free speedy software and become more productive! Open Source will love you, Google will love you, your boss will love you but I can't guarantee that Intel and Microsoft will feel the same.
For me, my next computer will be a GDium 10" notebook booting LDXE from an 64gb USB stick and with a Chrome browser. I can feel your envy.
The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.
In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and for the first time, electricity costs. The latter now make up 20% of the total ICT spend of a secondary school's £100,000-£200,000 annual total.
Missing from the earlier work, for which I apologise, were peripherals such as printers and photocopiers.
My motivation for revisiting the topic came from finding out that laser printer and photocopiers use identical technologies and typically draw 1.5 kw when active and 200 watts on standby. As I happen to be working with a secondary school at the moment I was able to investigate further.
The school's electricity cost accruing from printing and photocopying was under £1000 per year at current prices: I confess to a being a little disappointed I had imagined it was more and it did not amount to more than an extra few PCs.
The shock came, though, when the total number of sheets of A4 that passed through plain paper faxes, photocopiers and laser printers were calculated. It came to 4,450,000 per year. Or, in this school, 8,000 copies per child and one copy every 2 secs per year with a total cost of just below £100,000! The entire T5 airport terminal project only produced 8,000,000 copies per year and they ran 24/7.
The question was instantly begged 'is this normal for schools?'. It turns out it is.
Chosen at random, a City Academy and a few 'bog standard comps' (not my choice of phrase) produce similar numbers of prints as does my test school and have similar bills. To be fair, my school had 700 students and the others more like 1400, so they are more 'economical'.
Simple sums produce scale-up figures for the UK schools, these are: 20 billion prints at 500 million pounds per annum.
Let's take a step back. The last 20 years has seen the massive development of ICT in schools from a standing start to a ratio of one computer for every four students. The same period saw the first photocopier in schools and the first laser printer ( I remember carrying our one in ).
It would seem that the paperless office does not extend to the paperless school. In fact it appears quite the opposite. As ICT costs have grown so have paper related costs. Neither yet show any signs of abating.
It does not have to be like this.
Back at the office, (where I work as an ICT consultant) I cannot, hand-on-heart, claim that it is 'paperless'. But truly it is an event when the printer has to be run and usually associated with some cursing. Also, being an Open Source company, we get all of our software as downloads so not much is copied to disc either.
Obviously, everyone has a computer (laptops have replaced desktops by choice) and interestingly a notebook and pencil/pen at the ready. We have a library of well thumbed reference books too. Like us UK secondary schools all have networks and Internet access, but obviously they do not have a computer each.
Solution: give everyone one of the new open source netbooks and fully wirelessly connect the campus. Stop handing out work sheets, printing homeworks and e-mails etc etc, look at a flat screen screen instead.
To give every child in the country a new Linux notebook, would cost less than the annual printout bill. Within a school the old PC's and all but the web server would wither and die from lack of use (except for specialised applications) thus saving further millions. No more digital divide, no need for paper and no need for text books (they would all be on the server).
Thinking 'is this how it has to be?' is what really defines Open Source thinking. The new low cost, low energy computers came out of possibilities created by Open Source software development. Open Source software itself appeared as if from thin air as a result of thinking 'is this how it has to be, lets change it'
Schools are very conservative, they like to keep on doing what they have always done, and no one likes to think they got it wrong, but does anyone feel in a position to defend school ICT as it is, on a benefit-cost quotient?
If you are a student looking for an Office suite for college, let me inform you that Open Office 2.4 rocks; it's smart, easy to use, supports open standards, is free, can be distributed freely to your friends works on virtually any computer and now you can even get free training through the QCA approved INGOTs.
Best of all, Open Office.org's engineers have done a fantastic job reverse engineering MS's .doc, .xls and .ppt formats so that OO has an unparalleled ability to handle a range of file formats with fidelity, including VB macros. This achievement ranks with the other great interoperability open source project, SAMBA. The SAMBA team's duplication (improvement?) of MS's SMB networking protocol liberated Mac, Linux and Windows machines from their isolation.
Are Microsoft worried? I think they must be...
If you are a student and go to your favourite online today you will find something pretty similar to this; Vista Ultimate rrp £249.00.. student price £64.95; or amazingly, Office 2007 Pro rrp £395.95... a snip at £79.94.
These are some discounts, especially if we take into account that virtually the entire cohort of 16-19 year olds and 50% of the under 21s in the UK qualify. Education discounting has increased steadily over the years so lets run with this trend and see where it leads.
The trend is to zero; free, no-purchase cost, nothing; can this be a possibility?
If you're a very rich company and money is no object, heavy discounting is quite possible, maybe not sustainable on a global scale and maybe not a great way to promote your brand value either but it's the old story, market share versus profit. Can you grab/keep enough before you go bust?
Obviously, market share of the next generation of 'Office' users is everything: de Facto standards depend on near monopoly.
Imagine then Vista and Office 2007 is offered to students free (a bit like Linux and Open Office but with proprietary licencing).
Imagine also a soupcon of brand-loyalty gewgaws (aka lock-ins) such as a quirky interface (eg Mac Office 2008 ), quirkier file formats (.docx). Finally even better, one may predict that if you signed up to MS's MESH you can also expect a free laptop from an obliging ISP to run all that free software.
Is there any evidence other than the price crashes mentioned above to fuel this scenario?
In fact there are a few indicators.
For example this April, as reported in a previous post, UK Gov in partnership with Microsoft launched a Microsoft-funded £6,000,000 computer literacy drive to bring office skills to those on the other side of the digital divide. For another, Vista comes with a trial Office 2007 suite which can only save in .docx format. As an aside .docx, (possibly one of weirdest, least interchangeable, impossible to reverse engineer format currently around) very quickly puts school ICT teachers in a spin when their students bring in their work and it won't open. Yet another indicator: one ISP already offers a free Dell Laptop with a broadband account.
Finally, the famous OLPC sub $100 (£50) notebook project has just 'joined forces' with Microsoft and now sports a Microsoft Windows XP hack. Just how much of the £50 is the cost of the OS. One suspects not very much.
All circumstantial evidence, not enough to convict anyone, but it will do to be going on with. Here is a plausible scenario:
We are witnessing a live race - Open Office versus Free MS Office. The latest generation of phenomenally successful education-targeted sub-notebooks and diskless workstations are all running Open Office on Linux (excepting now of course the OLPC).
Within a very short time a great many young users will have been exposed to Open Office. QCA approved companies like INGOTs in the UK will supply training (if needed) and the dominance of MS Office is threatened in a critical sector; future users.
So who will win this race? Open Office and MS Office are now both free for 'bona fide' students. Which would you choose?
Well, three and more years ago this question would have been a no-brainer, you would have chosen MS Office. What about now? Is this still true?
Open Office looks set to follow in the footsteps of Firefox and achieve significant market penetration.
If, in this case, say 20% are OO users, 5% MS Mac Office 2004, 70% MS Office 2003 and a handful were MS Office 2007/2008, then how does your student's decision look?
Both OO and MS Office 2007/8 (in our imaginary scenario are free of purchase cost to the student), the 'something expensive for nothing principle' is very strong, so free MS Office (which costs industry and the public sector hundreds of pounds per go) still is pretty compelling, especially with that free laptop!
And, after all, the young don't think too hard about the future of vendor lock in and they also always save in the application's default format (.docx). To cap it all Becta has just signed up for another three years of the now infamous MS MOU.
It looks like a win to 'free' MS Office.
Two things may be pivotal, the need for MS to protect loss of revenue and a potential backlash from a cash strapped Public Sector and bottom-line conscious business sector.
MS Office related revenue is a serious bedrock of funds for Microsoft. It can't just be given away to everyone. In the standard proprietary software business model free, or nearly free software has to be subsidised by those paying full rate. Microsoft subsidises education hardware vendors in the UK very generously already, even so their profit on turnover ratios are wafer thin. Any loss of perceived value for bundled MS products could well further erode profits, some firms will fail. Why, for example, would a school buy a desktop computer with Vista and Office 2007 from say RM plc when a 'student' could get the whole lot pretty much for nothing and bring it in on a laptop?
Meanwhile as stated before the Public Sector and Industry are paying full price.
To the mix above add a failure of OOXML to become a Standard Format and the inability of MS Office to use already standard Open Document Formats. In which case, as in much of mainland Europe, we may see a sudden and massive, corporate and public sector switch to Open Office as firms address their bottom line and worry about backward compatibility of their legacy files. Many still use Office 2000, not the ideal software to add a .docx compatibility patch to. Open Office however has first class legacy file support.
Circumstantially it looks very much like MS's strategists are relying on 'just one more generation' of Office users before revenue streams from the on-line Web 2.0 world crank up. The strategy may not work for another reason though, one that MS is acutely aware judging by the resources it is committing.
Uptake even of free software has its own problems. The Free Open Source software world has always struggled with the lack of cost of its products! Marketing 'free-stuff' as enterprise quality equivalents to 'very expensive-stuff' is not always easy as those of us in this industry know very well. It's counter intuitive and a lot of breath gets wasted explaining how FOSS even got to exist at all let alone how it became so good.
Open Office itself gets better each version, but soon I guess it too will be as glossy and as over featured as MS Office. Then how do you chose between two products other than by familiarity and personal preference? Why also would you stay with one product, unless you were locked-in by some odd format?
A strong feature of high quality Open Source Software has been adherence to open standards and the endorsement of really major companies supporting such standards. Factors like open standards have enormously helped the deployment of OSS solutions into industry. It follows that software with idiosyncratic non-standard file formats can't even be given away...
... now I understand. That's what all the fuss is about: ODF versus OOXML! No standard means no product differentiator which means dwindling market share even when you give it away. Exciting stuff.
The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.
If you are a student looking for an Office suite for college, let me inform you that Open Office 2.4 rocks; it's smart, easy to use, supports open standards, is free, can be distributed freely to your friends works on virtually any computer and now you can even get free training through the QCA approved INGOTs. 
