Big Blue bets big on little Linux

    Thursday, August 24, 2000


    Canada - Toronto Star
    Fast Forward Section

    By Richard Morochove

    LAS VEGAS - Why is the world's largest computer company so involved with an
    upstart operating system created by a university student?

    At last week's Solutions 2000 conference for software developers, I was
    astonished to see the emphasis giant IBM placed on coming out with
    solutions
    that are Linux-compatible. If you look at market share statistics for
    personal computers, Linux is used by a tiny percentage of PCs, even less
    than the Mac.

    Has Big Blue taken leave of its collective business senses? Didn't IBM
    learn
    a costly lesson from the billions of dollars it poured down the drain to
    support the OS/2 operating system? If OS/2 couldn't beat the juggernaut
    known as Microsoft's Windows, why bet big on little Linux?

    IBM's gamble isn't as risky as most bets placed in Las Vegas, if you buy
    into the company's pervasive computing strategy.

    According to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP Technology & Strategy, IBM
    believes
    we're still in the infancy of the Internet. Today's information highway
    experience is like a drive along a dirt road in the country, where you're
    dodging sheep and cows.

    Within five years, he sees one million businesses, a billion people and one
    trillion devices on the Net. Most of these trillion online devices will not
    be PCs. They'll be handheld computers, like those from Palm Computing,
    Web-enabled cellular telephones and specialty computing appliances we
    haven't yet seen.

    Wladawsky-Berger says Linux is doing for software applications what the
    Internet did for networks. To take advantage of the great boom IBM expects
    in software for Linux, IBM has Linux-enabled almost all of its products,
    ranging from powerful supercomputers down to a wristwatch.

    IBM's Linux watch, announced a few weeks ago, is the smallest device that
    runs Linux at this time. The watch is just 56mm wide by 48mm long by
    12.25mm
    thick and weighs just 44 grams. It comes with a touch-sensitive display,
    rechargeable lithium-ion battery, 8MB of flash memory and 8MB of DRAM
    memory.

    The Linux watch is designed to communicate with PCs and cellphones using
    two
    wireless methods, infrared and radio frequency.

    Of course, you don't need all this just to tell the time. You'll use the
    smart watch to view condensed e-mail and receive pager-like messages. It
    also has organizer capabilities such as a calendar, address book and to-do
    list. Planned future enhancements include access to Internet services for
    the latest information, such as stock quotes, news, sports scores, traffic
    conditions and the weather.

    Wladawsky-Berger says it won't be unusual to see people talking to their
    watches on the street, to process their e-mail.

    The Linux watch isn't quite ready for prime time. The battery life is short
    and your wrist would get rather warm. The watch is designed to show how the
    efficient operating system requires so little code to do its work, it can
    be
    easily embedded in low-power computing devices. IBM sees this as a
    forerunner of pervasive wearable tech, such as smart identification badges.
    `Only the deepest sinners know how to repent. We all need Linux.'

    John Prial, IBM's Director of Marketing & Strategy, Pervasive Computing,
    sees most of these new devices communicating wirelessly with other
    computers
    at your home, business and across the Internet.

    There won't be any one device that does everything well, the digital
    equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. Rather, we'll use a number of inexpensive
    computer devices for different purposes.

    You'll make a call using a smart cellphone to a businessperson in Japan.
    Both of you would speak in your native language, while the phone performs
    speech translation on the fly so you can understand each other.

    A bank will give you a wireless handheld banking computer that allows you
    to
    access your funds at any time from any place. And, not co-incidentally,
    it's
    hoped that the ease of use of the integrated electronic financial services
    will bind you to the institution and make it less likely that you'll switch
    your business to another bank.

    Your car computer will plot the most efficient route to the concert you
    wish
    to see. If traffic jams are so bad that the computer predicts you'll be
    very
    late and miss most of the concert, it will place your tickets up for sale
    on
    the eBay auction site. Then it will use its stored memory of your
    preferences to arrange other suitable entertainment for the evening.

    Do you really want a computer making these types of decisions for you?
    Prial
    concedes that to obtain the greatest leverage from your personal
    information, you'll need to share your trust with a software application.
    If
    the stored profile closely matches personal preferences, then he expects
    busy people will welcome an electronic assistant to help organize their
    lives.

    For many years, Big Blue practiced account control, using proprietary
    hardware and software to keep businesses buying only IBM products to ensure
    compatibility. How is it that IBM, of all companies, would so warmly
    embrace
    Linux and Open Source, where any qualified programmer can develop an
    application that works with standard devices?

    "Only the deepest sinners know how to repent," explains John Patrick, IBM's
    VP of Internet Technology. "We all need Linux."
    ---
    Richard Morochove, F.C.A., is a Toronto-based computer consultant. A
    portion
    of his travel costs were paid for by IBM Canada . You may e-mail comments
    to
    richard@morochove.com