Microsoft surrounded?

By David Berlind, News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Oct 7, 2004 9:15:00 PM

Yesterday, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Marc Andreessen chided Microsoft for halting development on Internet Explorer, characterizing the decision as one that opened a window of opportunity for Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari to deliver a one-two punch. (At the Berlind household, as a security precaution, no serious Web work -- on-line bill pay, e-commerce transactions, eBay auction participation -- is done without Safari.)

For Safari to really become part of Andreessen's one-two combination, however, Apple's OS X operating system (and its premium-priced desktop/notebook hardware) has to get back into the medium- to large enterprise desktop game. So far, Apple seems content to let that market go. Though Apple hasn't said so much as "boo" to corporate buyers while they've faced years of costly Windows security transgressions, a satisfaction threshold was apparently crossed at AT&T, causing the telecommunications giant to begin an evaluation of Linux and Mac as potential alternatives to its current desktop standard for tens of thousands of users -- Windows.

Linux is showing promise for the desktop, but, as I've said before, Linux (and by Linux, I mean most distros) must aspire to OS X's ease-of-use -- especially in the areas of networking, management, and resource sharing -- before it can become a serious desktop contender. Leading the way on that front (according to ZDNet's readers) is the Gentoo distribution. But this week, Novell also reminded the world of its desktop Linux initiative, announcing that availability of SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 for desktops -- a distribution of the open source OS that is designed to appeal to consumers as well as technical enthusiasts -- is slated for early November. Talk of a surge by OS X or Linux on the desktop wouldn't be complete without an honorable mention of Sun. By the time Sun is done with it, Solaris could end up being the closest thing to a marriage of OS X's ease of use and binary compatibility with Linux.

Despite the clear-cut advantages of OS X, the trajectory of improvements to desktop Linux, and Sun's ability to field a technically competent player, all three operating systems sorely lack the one thing that will likely be a factor in decisions by AT&T and other businesses to stick with Windows: a tier-one hardware partner as the sales channel. Perhaps that will change. If it does, it will probably change sooner for Linux or Solaris than it will for OS X since no vendor but Apple is in the business of selling hardware that runs OS X. (HP selling iPods does set an interesting precedent.

Maybe, if Apple sees desktop Linux or Solaris as a threat to its already tiny sliver of the desktop market, it will finally respond with a licensable Intel-based version of OS X. After all, it already has an Intel-based version of iTunes. Or maybe Apple and Sun should conspire to produce a PowerPC/Intel-compatible glob called Solaris GNU OS X. After all, Apple's XCode integrated development environment, which comes built into OS X, is supposedly an absolute killer IDE for Java development, and Sun needs all the help it can get in making Java development easier. Sun and Apple? OK, I'm out on a limb there.

The bottom line is that without Dell, IBM, or HP as a huge advocate of any desktop *ix, the Windows stronghold isn't likely to weaken any time soon. Had rumors of Google's entry into the browser wars been true, I might have thought otherwise (Steve Gillmor certainly thinks Google is Microsoft's grim reaper). But Google investor John Doerr squished that idea at the Web 2.0 conference.

Ah, never a dull moment.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check my blog Between the Lines or my archives.