Red Hat Summit: "The Desktop Paradigm is Dead"
You have to wonder what the heck Red Hat is thinking when CTO and VP of Engineering Brian Stevens says to the keynote attendees "we believe the desktop paradigm is dead."
Stevens made that public statement in response to a question from eWeek's Peter Galli, who must have tracked Stevens down as the reception last night after I ran into Galli as I was leaving the reception. Peter's a good journalist, and asked a good question: "when is Red Hat going to move to the desktop?"
Stevens' strong reply in this morning's keynote illustrates a larger point. While we now have to sort through all of the corporate-speak and find out what Stevens meant by they're going to move to a more collaborative and cooperative environment and harness online services to build a "online desktop," his statement is indicative of something that we are going to see a lot of from Red Hat in the near term.
If you ask when Red Hat is going to play in a particular sandbox, the answer you are likely going to get is: they will be building their own sandbox instead.
Red Hat is not going to try to go head-to-head with individual companies and technologies on their competitors' terms. Instead, this looks to be a company that wants to define the rules of its own game.
Red Hat doesn't want to follow the crowd on the desktop. They want to start using the application services model they picked up from their JBoss acquisition and shift that from the middleware space over to the client space.
They're being kind of cagey about it, with no real timelines or roadmaps yet. The only thing I heard during the keynote was from Brian Stevens who said that these online services would start showing up around Fedora 8.
There's going to be an press conference again at noon where I think they're going to specify some of these client issues, and talk more about their whole services oriented application model. More later.
I suggest that you not give much credence to vendors discussing non-existent products. The key to these types of announcements is to figure out who the audience is. In this case, it is not customers, because the customers have already told RedHat what they want, and it isn't RedHat desktop.
So they are really talking to competitors, and that would be primarily Novell and Canonical. Now, those 2 have to consider what their response will be. Maybe RedHat is just planning to supply Point of Service and/or kiosk terminals and slapping a fancy brand name on them. Or maybe they are looking to build on their JBoss investment by supplying low end workstations that are custom designed to interface with AJAX web apps. Or maybe they are just going to rename RedHat desktop, stuff it in a bottle, and throw it in the ocean.
But Novell and Canonical have to spend at least a few cycles preparing for whatever is announced, and that takes away from their efforts in the server market, which is RedHat's bread and butter. So it is really just low grade FUD.
Later . . . Jim
Wow, looks like I should go get that free eval of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop I've been procrastinating about, now that RH has declared that all those boxes in my org are now obsoleted...
Sooo, RH is going to be competing with Google now? I'm betting on da 'Goog winning this one.