Red Hat Develops Online Desktop 119
pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"
Lemme boot the terminal (Score:2, Insightful)
Competing with Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
And therefore they're reimplementing the Windows 98 Active Desktop...?
What about when you are offline? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lemme boot the terminal (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Red Hat really relevant anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
After dealing with their nightmarish support system this month after a bug caused me to lose connection to my SAN, and dealing with the scam that is RHCE certification (30% pass rate is BS -- they're just milking retakes at $750 a pop), I can say that Red hat is really going downhill fast. They're becoming more and more focused on the bottom line and less on the little guy who got them to where they are.
Re:Lemme boot the terminal (Score:3, Insightful)
Online services == less freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competing with Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.
Google partner? (Score:4, Insightful)
They may not end up competing with Google, rather they may end up partnering with Google. Google has a lot of the apps available right now.
Re:What about when you are offline? (Score:3, Insightful)
The new metaphor... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I know Sun came up with that one a decade or so ago, and they were spot on, but it wasn't quite there.
The real winners will be the ones who can come up with transparent computing. By that, I mean if the machine is standalone it uses local resources, disk, cpu etc. If it's plugged into a network it automatically makes use of the best available hardware on the LAN.
It's all so manual at the moment.
Long live the desktop metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
If the desktop metaphor is dead, why is its replacement called the "online desktop"?
Re:Is Red Hat really relevant anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is Red Hat really relevant anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if we don't use their distribution, we still benefit from their effort (lots of OSS development going on at RH), so what's the problem?
Re:Competingwith Microsoft Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's online offerings have matured, and are quite powerful, but there's still the disconnect when going offline. Not until I can work offline and seamlessly integrate/sync when I go back online will it be really effective.