The Hindu : Is this the `Year of the Penguin'?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 02, 2004

Business

Business

Is this the `Year of the Penguin'?

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE JAN. 1. The Chinese name their years after various animals. On January 22, the Year of the Goat gives way to the Year of the Monkey. But the world's largest consumers of information technology may well decide that another animal deserves a nod in 2004. Will the burgeoning aspirations of common people in countries like India and China, make this the year of the Penguin — the mascot of the `Open Source' Linux movement?

IBM led the Linux trendies in 2003, putting its money (and machines) where its mouth is — even-handedly offering Windows and Linux flavours on many of its server end offerings. HP, Dell, Acer and other hardware biggies selling in India joined the trend and Sun could barely take the smirk off its face as it touted its Java desktop said, "We told you — it was always an `Open' and shut case!"

What about the `janatha' end of the PC business? Today in India, one can ask leading branded vendors if they will give you a standard configuration — but with a Linux operating system — and chances are most will say `yes', even if their print advertisements still seem to talk only of Microsoft.

Red Hat, the most popular Linux flavour is now joined by SUSE and Fedora as options for the consumer desktop. Indeed Red Hat seems increasingly to be pursuing the server end of the market and at least one web resource (newsforge.com) spoke last week of the `imminent demise' of the product known as Red Hat Linux... " though no one else seems to be readying obituaries.

Meanwhile, it is worth taking with a hefty pinch of salt, media stories, which project the Windows or Linux PC question as some sort of David versus Goliath. However if an inducement is needed, there is the threat that Microsoft is to stop supporting Windows 98 and Windows 2000 from end January.

The next Windows version, Longhorn, is expected to be a radically new, vastly improved product; but it's at least one year away.

Last week, Epson announced an inkjet for around Rs. 2,500. The trend is universal so HP, Canon et al will match this in a matter of weeks.

However the cost of refills is stuck somewhere around the Rs. 1,000-1,500 mark and if one is the mythical good customer and buys new cartridges all the time one will effectively pay for the printer many times over within its life span.At the Comdex show in the U.S., HP hinted that it might enter the TV business. No, this is not a New Year prank news item.

IT majors, particularly those like LG, Samsung and others who make large numbers of monitors, are pushing consumers towards the thin and cool flat panel LCD monitor albeit at almost twice the cost of the old cathode ray tube. TV makers like-wise are dangling flat screens, particularly in the larger, 29-inch and more, sizes. What more natural than that PC makers throw in a TV tuner and TV makers offer basic PC functionality, thus giving us two monitor applications for the price of one?

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