| By Steven Berkowitz |
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| September 19, 2003 12:00 AM EDT |
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Tuesday saw Dell president and COO Kevin Rollins deliver the keynote at the
TECHXNY show. Rollins’ major theme was the embracing of open standards by the tech industry. In his view, open standards represent a maturity, a stability and sense of reliability in the IT world that enables innovation. Such standards yield a solid base of commodity pieces which can, with imagination, be combined into non-commodities. Think rack-mounted servers networked into Beowulf Clusters. Or, in Rollins’ example, flour and sugar combined into Krispy Kreme.
The language Rollins used to deliver this content was intriguing. He spoke of the “standards based approach to innovation.” In illustrating the recombinatory innovation idea, he noted that IT spending is moving away from “costly, proprietary systems.” Most tellingly, he praised the “Open Innovation” model, explaining how more perspectives on an issue yield better solutions that are quicker to market, echoing the open source aphorism, “many eyes tame complexity.”
It was fascinating to see the president and COO of Dell Computers stand up at TECHXNY and tout the business and technological benefits of open source. This is simply another proof that this methodology has grown beyond mere relevance into a central organizing theme of IT. Interestingly, while he spoke in the language of the movement, not once did he use the words “open source.”
After the keynote, I asked Rollins where Linux fits in this non-proprietary world. As expected, it is almost exclusively in the enterprise. That’s where the demand is and that is where Dell’s focus lies. In fact, Dell had once offered factory installs of Red Hat 6.1 on their mainstream platforms but discontinued that a couple of years ago as there was no demand for it. When the demand is there, says Rollins, Dell will build it.
Of course, Dell will build you any system you want. Dell’s with Red Hat installed at the factory are priced on parity with the same systems running XP Professional. Consider that Red Hat Enterprise WS Standard Edition sells for $299 before decrying unfair licensing costs.
There is an opportunity here. It is a little subtle and starts with a Catch-22. The demand for consumer Linux machines must reach a certain critical mass before manufacturers will offer them. Most consumers, however, don’t even know that Linux is an option, and won’t know until manufacturers start offering it. There is a way out of the circle. Next time you need a new computer to run Linux on, don’t build it yourself. Get the vendor to install it for you.
That may sound like blasphemy to some of you, but there are many different ways to contribute to the open source movement. Instead of, or maybe even in addition to, reporting bugs and writing code, you can participate in a little guerrilla capitalism.
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