Linux Everywhere (Premium)

Bill Gates once remarked that Windows was the most versatile software that the world had ever seen. But one might much more easily make that case for Linux, a free and open source software stack that has proven far more adaptable to far more usage scenarios than Windows.

Yep, it’s a Linux world. And we’re just living in it.

A decade or so ago I was considering writing a book called Windows Everywhere. The title was an updated riff on the phrase “NT Everywhere,” which I had secretly witnessed the NT team chanting at an internal meeting following the release Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2, in 1998. It was going to be the inside story about how Windows took over the personal computing world.

And for a few years after that milestone, it looked like Windows was set to do just that. Microsoft merged its consumer-oriented Windows 9x releases with NT, and it established Windows Server as the de facto platform for the Fortune 500, establishing its enterprise cred in the process. Microsoft applied the name “Windows” to just about anything it could, and some it shouldn’t have. More important, it shut down any internal projects that would in any way threaten its core product and revenues earner. Windows everywhere, indeed.

Among the many successes of that era, it seemed, was the defeat of Linux on the PC desktop. Aside from a brief and temporary surge with netbooks, which Microsoft quickly defeated by creating the low-ball Windows XP Starter Edition, Linux never took off with end users in any meaningful way. And what was once seen as a very credible threat to Windows was minimized, and even openly mocked.

We were so naive.

I have two personal ties to Linux. The first came in the mid-1990s, when I was working in one of the computer labs at Scottsdale Community College in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a life-long tech enthusiast, I had long been curious about UNIX, though it was always some unattainable, high-end system. And then I heard about Linux, the free UNIX-like OS. Which was distributed in floppy disk-sized downloads.

Looking at an early version of Slackware Linux, which installed using a delightful, DOS-like text interface and then also ran mostly in a DOS-like text interface since the X-Window system was so buggy and hardware-specific, I wondered. Here was a system that could possibly do most of what Windows could do. There were free office productivity suites in the works, too, like StarOffice (later, OpenOffice). What if. What if those two products together could do even the top 20 percent of what users expected from Windows and Office? And do it for free.

What if.

My second major tie to Linux came in 2000. I was in Israel consulting with a company in Herzliya, and the CEO suddenly popped his head in the room. “You write about Microsoft, right?” he asked me. Yes. “Well, I have two guys in my office you need to speak with.”

The two guys, as it turns out, were from a company called Mainsoft, which had been secretly commissioned by Microsoft to explore what it would take to create a version of the Office productivity suite for Linux. So I spoke with them—using the CEO as a translator—for quite a while, got in touch with a third person they recommended I speak with, and took some notes. Which I then promptly sat on.

Paul Thurrott, ace reporter.

A week or so later, however, I consulted my notes and started doing some research. Mainsoft, as it turned out, had deep ties to Microsoft. Had, in fact, received access to the Windows NT/2000 source code at a time when such access was quite rare. It had also been porting Microsoft’s Win32 applications to UNIX for several years by that point. So I wrote it up. It’s still an interesting read, almost 20 years later, if I do say so myself.

Microsoft never did release a version of Office for Linux, of course. But I suspect that the real story there was that the company correctly saw Linux as the threat that it was, and that it wanted to hedge its bets. The recent meme that Microsoft has somehow only recently caught the cross-platform bug is, of course, nonsense. But we forget because Windows was so dominant for so long, and Microsoft got caught up in that too.

In any event, I’m sure Linux’s defeat on the desktop was reassuring to Microsoft. And, of course, it had other, even bigger worries in that era, like the sweeping antitrust cases that would distract it for over a decade.

But during this time, personal computing began a shift that would culminate in a new era defined by mobile and the web/cloud. And as it turns out, Linux—and not Windows—was uniquely positioned to capitalize on this change. Windows had won the PC generation. But the next generation—“mobile first, cloud first,” or whatever you want to call it—would be dominated by others.

I probably don’t need to explain the percentage of Internet servers that run on Linux and free and open source (FOSS) solutions like Apache. Or that the dominant personal computing platforms of today are based on Linux (Android) and Linux-like (iOS) kernels.

Less clear, perhaps, is the way that Linux has spread to virtually every kind of computing device imaginable, thanks to its small size, modular design, and, I bet, its low costs. It’s in smart devices of every kind, embedded devices in switches, cars, home security systems, and more. It is, quite literally everywhere.

Microsoft’s recent move to use Linux for the client OS part of its Azure Sphere stack is just the latest example of both the pervasiveness of Linux and of Microsoft’s ongoing embrace of this system. Combined, these two things tell us more than anything that the very notion of Windows everywhere was, at best, a temporary condition impacting a relatively small market. And that Linux everywhere, while possibly temporary as well, impacts a far bigger audience. Exponentially bigger.

If you’re looking for a comparison, consider my comments about antitrust with regards to Microsoft and Google, respectively. Whatever issues Microsoft may have caused, the potential audience there was about 1 billion people at best, and it impacted a market in which 200-300 new PCs were purchased every year. Google’s potential impact, meanwhile, is literally the entire planet: Through its web- and cloud-based services, Google can reach all of us.

Linux works the same way. It’s a platform with a nearly unlimited potential audience size. And each of use will interact with multiple Linux devices, including sensors, each day. Instead of just one Windows PC.

Windows everywhere. How cute.