ACK!!'s Journal: Niche Market for Linux largely untapped

Something I sent to Zdnet ages ago.

I fully agree that corporate America will not and probably should not switch over entirely from Windows. However, there is a very viable niche market that few Linux distros have even bothered to pursue.

Say you run a shop where you program for a Unix platform, or maybe you have a large group of systems and network engineers that spend all day on the Unix command line.

They log onto their Windows NT machines and proceed to spend 90 percent of their day stuck inside an Exceed session or at the telnet or SSH client command line. Maybe the situation is even worse where you work with corporate IT spending money for a group of engineers or developers to have a Windows NT machine and a Unix workstation as well running two boxes out of the same cube.

If there was no market for these people, Exceed and other companies doing the same thing would go out of business. In addition, commercial Unix manufacturers would stop making workstation configurations all together. They have not.

The real market for the Linux desktop in corporate America are these people stuck spending 90 percent of their day in Unix on top of Windows or with two machines.

So, what is the solution?

A fast Intel box running Linux (SuSE is a great end-user distro) with KDE 3.0 (a really sweet desktop environment) with CrossOver Office for running Winword when the project manager sends them that complicated template with embedded graphs and images that even StarOffice chokes on.

The real key for Linux distro makers is to stop thinking of the operating system as a commercial Unix product or, worse, as a end-user Windows-style product.

MacOSX in its now BSD glory gives Linux a clue to where its head should be in viewing itself:

        * Base layer--kernel, file system, and command line innards.

        * Compatibility layer--all the Wine tools needed to run MS-Office or other programs right out of the box.

        * Interface layer--an integrated desktop environment where everything, including all system tools, have the same look and feel. (SuSE almost has this right with even its Yast2 tools available from the KDE Control Panel.)

When Linux companies stop thinking about the OS simply being the base layer with all the rest of the pieces as being simply add-ons for the adventurous, then and only then will there be a true Linux desktop choice for the masses.

Until then, it would benefit many companies that make extensive use of Unix in their IT environment to start looking at Linux for their Unix developers and sysadmins tired of living in two conflicting worlds.