Yesterday I watched Apple’s Steve Jobs unveil the iPad. Jobs clearly can create revolutionary products; he can also produce spin like no one else. Yesterday was no exception.
His main message about the iPad was “a magical device at a breakthrough price.” He repeated this many times throughout the pitch and twice at the end. This phrase demands an honest response: how will Linux-based devices compete with the iPad?
You might expect the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation to state with full confidence that Linux-based competitors will crush the iPad. Linux *can* compete in one area. $499 - $829 may be a breakthrough price for Apple and their margins, but it’s no comparison to the price competition Linux-based devices can offer. Vendors creating Tablets, slates, phones or other devices do not have to pay the per-unit pricing of other platforms. Apple products command a premium and Jobs will never cannibalize their pricing power. While I do believe that Linux can compete, and win, on price, I’m left to question: what about the magic?
Apple is unmatched at creating a cohesive experience. While many question the revolutionary impact of the iPad, Apple’s consistent user experience is far closer to magical than most things currently running Linux. It may be easy for us to bash Microsoft every other week, but Apple is a true competitor. They have the polish, the focus on usability and ease of use, the application and hardware integration all to make using their technology a seamless and elegant part of your day, instead of a constant struggle with technology. The Linux ecosystem needs to do better competing on “magic.”
This is not to say that there aren’t projects and products in the Linux that are innovative and focused on creating a magical user experience. A few that spring to mind:
- The clutter UI project is advancing the state of the art in Linux-based desktops
- Android-based phones like the Droid or the Nexus One are getting close to the “magic” of the iPhone
- Moblin-based notebooks and tablet devices that are in development
- The Ubuntu projects recent focus on usability and user experience
- The Palm Pre and their Linux-based smart phones
- Nokia’s Maemo project and the N900
The issue is that while all of these are incredible efforts, Steve Jobs is hardly standing still. We have to do better.
With all this talk about “magic,” there is another important element to consider: freedom. Apple is the most locked down closed system imaginable, from the software ladened with DRM, all the way down to the custom silicon they use for their Apple A4 chip. Commercial success is important, but freedom is also important.
Where the Ipad will really impact Linux-based devices is in the embedded space. Amazon Kindle? It doesn’t look so hot if Apple gets a distribution deal with enough publishers. (Even if they don’t, they will likely freeze the market enough in the meantime to seriously dent Kindle’s numbers.) GPS providers who use Linux? They were already under seige from smart phones but this doesn’t help.
So my question to you: How can the Linux community get better at creating magic? While we’re strong on price, we still have a ways to go to compete. The Linux Foundation isn’t just going to complain about the need for more “Magic” on the Linux platform - we are going to do something about it. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for big news on just how we will accomplish this. In the mean time I would love to hear all of your ideas.
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True. The ease of use is maybe the factor that is making things to differ.
I can say that IdeaPad U1 is an nice implementation of what Linux can do
in this “magic” part of these devices but more work is needed.
Apple is indeed a great company when it comes to usability of their products.
I think that more things is yet to come. Linux is everywhere portable devices.
Maybe tablets is a place where things must be taken more seriously.
I think the problem lies in the structure of the Linux community. Open Source is best when people produce something they will use themselves. That’s why so many of the really great programming tools and frameworks are open source. But that’s also the reason why all Linux platforms are behind on the user experience. Linux nerds have very different needs than a designer or a common user like, let’s say my mom. Another problem is that there are too few designers in the open source community and I think there is not a lot incentive for designers to work on an open source project.
Another, and probably the biggest problem, is that development on the Linux platform is not centralized like in a company. How should a consistent style and experience be enforced? Even if there were many great designers in the OS-world who would coordinate them, to come up with a coherent look and feel? There even would have to be someone with enough authority to force everyone to stick to the agreed style. That’s never gonna happen. Sadly so.
According to me, Linux Community does not work as a family. I am not talking about Distro wars here but about duplicating effort. Why does Canonical still develop the UNR interface? Moblin is a clear winner. Why not switch to Moblin interface?. This would benifit everyone. Again, Ubuntu guys have worked really hard to improve User Experience on the Desktop. Why not use the same stuff with upcoming Gnome Shell. I’m sure Gnome guys will not borrow stuff from Ubuntu like the upcoming Me-Menu or the Notification system. In fact, Gnome Shell has now a new notification system. They could have easily used one from Ubuntu.
We should learn to work together.
Another problem is The Problem of Many. Too many audio backends for example. You know what I mean.
Magic is often achieved by ignorance. Think back to midevil times when they thought many explainable phenomena were caused by “magic”. The same can be said for many others who love a device’s “gee whiz” capabilities without knowledge of the way it works and subsequently the alternatives which might work better for their personal needs.
Freedom is indeed a good thing.
@Owais Lone - I have to disagree with your first point. Choice is everything, it is one of the reasons so many flock to Linux. For example I personally dislike the mobile interface, does this mean it should stop development? No. And Ubuntu does recognize people like the moblin interface - they have a mobile remix as well…
That being said much of what Zemlin says he is spot on, given a bit of time for application development I think Linux devices such as the N900 or Google’s Nexus are bound to catch up and break things such as the iPhone.
~Jeff
In a way, I agree with Owais: I don’t think duplication in and of itself is a bad thing, but I think that not only are many all-Linux projects (Gnome/KDE, Canonical/Mandriva etc.) starting new projects that don’t exchange features/traits nearly often enough, but when many vendors of Linux machines use Linux they actually take Linux, GNU userland tools and Xorg and then develop their own UI on top of it. Think Linpus.
This is a problem, because in many cases it’s unnecessary and in fact delivers a lower-than-possible user experience. We shouldn’t be looking to projects that do the same thing and trying to get rid of one in favour of the other: we should be taking projects that act FOR THE SAME REASONS and combining them or parts of them.
Think Zeitgeist and Nepomuk for basic file indexing/searching (sharing code and possibly both contributing to a common back-end (strigi?)), and yes, the likes of Gnome and KDE (some code-sharing already happens between them, I believe: for example, to fix .desktop files to be a harder attack vector). I think the projects can, and certainly should remain independent when it comes to the big picture, but that they should much more often bridge the gap and communicate on common goals, even possibly derive sub-projects that fulfil these projects’ common needs.
This way, choice is retained while progress and stability in common areas increases. This could be a huge benefit of having projects open-source that could be leveraged to incredible effect.
Jim,
While you bring up important points, there’s another one that you didn’t mention. End users don’t buy technology, they buy integrated solutions that work with everything else they’re doing. In this case, this would mean integration with their home computing environment and one or more wireless suppliers.
I know that the open source community has built some outstanding, innovate technology. Who is going to be expected to create a complete solution based upon all these individual pieces of technology? In times past, the end user was expected to do this work. This, of course, limited the target audience to very knowledgeable and their immediate friends. It also limited the adoption of the technology.
If the community can band together and produce a complete, integrated, supported, beautiful and user-friendly top to bottom solutions, there are opportunities to compete with Apple. Without that team effort, it would be very difficult to win acceptance for an open source solution.
Dan K
Hi,
I (as a linux user) have a continuous series of debates with a friend who’s a mac user. While there are a lot of points where both systems are evenly matched, there’s one area where apple always wins is aesthetics.
It seems like nearly every application that is built for the apple ecosystem, even by third party developers, are aesthetically more appealing than their (usually more feature-rich) open source counter-parts.
I borrowed his Macbook and tried building a few simple applications and the reason for the apparent “magic” of the iPhone’s seemed obvious - even a simple set of buttons and text-boxes which utilize their well-chosen default design and fonts make the appearance desirable.
Giving people great toolkits like pango, cairo, clutter, etc is like giving people great brushes and paint and a blank canvas. On the other hand, apple gives you a few great paintings in stampable-form that you just press onto your canvas; you’re not given much flexibility, but whatever you do will look pretty. While projects like gnome-shell use clutter to make their application look great - they don’t have a team of experts poring over every pixel on the screen.
In my opinion, the “magic” will come when the GUI toolkits - qt, gtk, etc improve further - better widgets, better default designs, better usability and better typography. While there are plenty of Human Interface Guidelines, there are a sore lack of thumb rules to specify what will look good from a design perspective and what won’t.
Hopefully when the majority of the design folk migrate onto linux, and take the time to contribute and improve the general aesthetic appeal, we’ll see a lot more people attracted to linux the same way they feel about apple
Thanks!
@Owais Lone
The notification system in Ubuntu post 9.04 and the planned notification system for Gnome-Shell are two very different designs. NotifyOSD was designed to be a completely non-interactive notification manager only to deliver messages, not to query for user interaction.
The proposed notification manager in Gnome-Shell is designed on the data that was gathered from that “test” if you so will.
Gnome shells notification mananger is designed to be subtle but yet interactive, it could maybe be described as a part application tray. This mockup could explain it for you:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630-demo/
For further reading, look no further than the design document:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20090705.pdf
The magic isn’t in “more” or “better” features, or even in price—which fluctuates wildly over time—but in user experience. The iPhone had few features that other smartphones didn’t have. What it did have was an ecosystem around it, a revolutionary deal with the signal provider, and a singular concentration on the user’s entire experience. The magic comes when developers stop stating “I can do that better”, and start questioning “how can I enable my user to do that better”.
I actually just wrote on this subject:
http://jefro.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/user-experience-is-king/
Thanks for bringing it up! IMHO the best thing Linux developers can do is to think more about design and user motivation.
For me, there’s always an issue in balancing between individual innovation and group collaboration. When I look at some of the breakthrough “Magic” creations, they are often the work of one or two people: Thompson/Ritchie, Brin/Page, Torvalds, Jobs/Wozniak, Frederick Land, Chester Carlson, etc. Those people have such a clear vision of what they want to create that they are driven to do so, coordinating the work of many people to make it happen.
The principles of open source development, by contrast, include transparency, participation, and collaboration, rather than the closed and proprietary approach used in product like the iPhone. For that to work, you need a talented and committed set of project members who share the vision of the project leadership and are willing to follow that vision. It’s very hard to make that happen, especially over time, particularly since people have many different reasons for joining an open source project.
I personally think that it is much easier for an open source project to be a “fast follower” rather than a pure innovator, but I share Jim’s goal of creating more Magic on the Linux platform.
First, let me tell that I do like your blog and posts.
This subject is a little sensitive, a lot of people consider and see the Apple “magic”, personally I do not.
Let start with the beginning, I’m studying software engineer in Switzerland at moment so my ideas are not as common as anybody that you can meet on the street. (And please excuse my English mistakes since my native language is French.)
What I see trough the “magic” as you said of Apple products are not more and not less than pure fashion. I don’t say that Apple products are bad, not at all, as you said they are really well doing when we talk about user friendliness.
But business is business and Apple is doing too well on this lately, users get their freedom locked little by little, you are not only linked to a operation system, you are also linked to Apple products.
They sure do a lot of advertisings, which I’m pretty sure help a lot to get more and more consumers.
Open source products are far behind on this side, and I don’t think we do need it.
Now that I exposed my point of view let’s see how Linux can make more “magic”.
I do have a Android “HTC-HERO” which start’s to be little by little deprecated since it’s still use 1.5 android system. Of course and you could have find it yourself I flashed it with other rooms to get 2.1 system. So is it Linux fault ? Yes and no.
Let’s take a small example, Apple’s iPhone, they can make their customers wait months to get update and a simple copy paste function. Why ? They have the mass of users that Linux is missing. They are the one who decides and can make you trust that you have to wait until is available, because it’s difficult to do or whatever else.
I can do that too to my grand mother, explain her that that printing her a letter needs a better computer etc. (Sorry for the bad example) Because she don’t know the truth.
And that’s the same for 99% of the all world customers.
Nobody cares except few people interested on how it works.
What people care is : it’s made available yesterday ? Then I want it today.
And that’s the difference between Apple and Linux.
A new kernel is available, new android or whatever else ? Okay, where it is then ?
I do really think Linux should do more pressure on Hardware manufacturers, and they should also give some routines to follow to Linux distribution.
If we take some distance to this everything is in a pure mess.
Would you like to see a “linuxTablet” that compete with iPad, kindle etc ?
Well me too, but firstly, is there an interface for this kind of hardwares ? Will they use gnome, kde, xfce, android one ?
So let’s get back to the question, how to add more magic.
There’s no short answer, the real real trouble with open source is that each project work in his side, in a big company like Apple all projects have to work with each other, because there’s someone “A system” behind everything that can reorganize all the thing to reach the same goal.
I can wait, updates after update in Linux as far as I remember it’s always 2 steps forward 1 step backward.
Ubuntu - Canonical wants their product to be more user friendly, that’s true they did good stuff in that way, but when you look closer.
They switched to PulseAudio, in result the numbers of problems with sound just exploded last years. On 8.04 which is a LTS version a novice user is unable to play a video and use Skype or listen to something else at the same time.
Isn’t that 2 steps forward and 1 backward ?
Let’s try something else.
Kubuntu which I use daily, I do like KDE and Debian packages.
I installed it and had no problem, the install was surprisingly easy.
Getting on the desktop I decided to add a widget, and surprise, I couldn’t.
The widget turned into a red cross explaining me that the package needed on which the widget is depending was not installed !
I’ve numbers of problems that I can tell you on Linux, but I’m still using it,
So what’s the point ?
Linux is not ready for compete with Apple products, in therms of marketing, easy of use (even it’s close to).
I think Linux operating systems and open source projects deserves more than what they have today.
They need a Group support, people who decide and make decisions that everyone should respect. Linux need to be more clear about their goals !
There’s a lot of work done all around the world, sometimes lost, sometimes done twice because there’s not enough talk between the developers and industry’s.
Linux-Foundation is a good thing, but perhaps we do deserve more, we do need people that protect our rights and fight for Linux and Open Source community.
And I’m not only talking about talented developers which I think is only a side of the coin.
We do need lawyers, designers, industries support and advertising.
In other words if you could tell all people using a product based on Open Source work to shout very very loudly “We do need your help and we do listen to your needs!” then go ahead.
Because we do need it.
We need the tv to talk about Linux as they talk about Apple or Microsoft.
Otherwise you will never get the same magic or more.
You can always give more and more features, most people don’t care of it!
” 2 people talking ”
I have an Android !
- what’s that ?
The new phone blabla bla with this features looks pretty cool bla bla bla.
- ok.
“Other people talking ”
I have the new 3GS!
- Wooaaaa so cool, is it really faster ?
That’s the difference.
Sorry for the big reading, and if you read all the thing, well thanks at first for it and I really really hope to see some awesome news like I sometimes read about Linux !
You’ve clearly not seen the touchbook tablet (open hardware) loading the google chrome OS or android.
I’m not a huge google-nix fan (personally refuse to use it) but it is a very polished interface which is able to compete with the apple ‘magic’.
As I see it linux wins hands down when it comes to both pricing and freedom, but freedom is an abstract notion to most end users, and the competition seems to be about fashion rather than price.
Yes it helps that apple products are well designed, easy to use and to configure. Linux should definitely improve on that.
However it will be hard for the linux platform to play the fashion game. A better strategy would be show where the proprietary model fails, not by referring to freedom matters as such, but by developing well made software (also UI-wise) with desirable features that are out of reach for the closed source approach.
I love Linux and use it everyday. While I admire the Mac and its ease of use, I won’t buy one because I don’t want to be locked into their proprietary eco-system. But that is me. My friends on the other hand are much less philosophical. They just want the thing to work. The can go to one place and get everything they need. They don’t want to be hassled and they are not impressed by geeks.
They also like to impress others with their machines. Apple is cool! It “out-cools” anything and anyone out there, but at a price. So if you are willing to pay the freight then you can be cool. They want both form and function, even if they have to pay a bit more for it.
Seems to me that this group needs to be corralled and used to test Linux products. We need more feedback from regular people as well as geeks on what is cool and how to make it work without hassles and anxiety. So in addition to the cool factor we need to understand the anxiety factor and build software that eliminates pain.
Despite my love for Linux, the truth is, that there is more pain associated with it than average users are willing to bear. We need to do everything that we can to make sure that we don’t inflict pain or anxiety on those that use Linux or the programs it supports.
I appreciated this article because it was honest. I wouldn’t have expected this coming from the center of the Linux universe, but this is the type of discussion that needs to be launched and sustained. A great Linux will have both form and function and more pleasure than pain.
Magic is an interesting idea. Of course its just smoke and mirror tricks, but the effect on a believer is real, profound and even mind-expanding.
Lets assume it’s just a technicality that a large coordinated team can create a device with similarly seamless user experience using Linux.
Apple’s magic is their brand. It would take 35 years and huge investment to build up a similar property: an idea, positioned in the minds of millions, that attracts legions of followers, creates desires and enhances peoples experience of the real products.
To compete, Linux needs a brand that has similar power. More than that though, it needs to marry quite oppositional sets of values.
- Values of Linux
- freedom
- flexibility
- Values of normal people:
- need a tool to do X
- impress peers
- will pay what its worth to them
- not interested in engaging with the technology itself (although customisation is a huge factor in peoples’ satisfaction in their iphones).
- not interested in abstract or theoretical problems/limitations until they are confronted directly. (e.g. the computer wiped my ipod)
Some impressions I’ve noticed in people:
- Many reject Linux because it lacks a perception of corporate stewardship, quality control and professional focus.
- The many distributions and desktop systems are seen as a negative - a source of fear and confusion, the unknown.
- People are already traumatized from using systems they have paid for and learned to trust. They don’t want to try something new if it seems like its going to be more of the same.
- Free implies cheap, nasty, amateurish.
Its a gigantic Marketing challenge, and by that I mean cap M Marketing where resources of a whole business system focus together (usually a corporation, but in Linux context a community of partners) to identify a new product type, develop, build and distribute it; then guide it through a product life-cycle.
I’m not sure that can ever happen without a visionary leader who has the power to co-ordinate the resources required. The established pattern is that corporations see a need and innovate, then later other corporations imitate and compete, and even later the open source community makes a free version of sufficient quality to actually use. That is at the very core of how Linux came into being.
I am a Windows XP user, who is still trying to decide on whether to change to Windows 7 or a Linux distribution.
I like what Linux as a kernel with its distributions has accomplished. I however feel that there are a few problems that need to be addressed:
1. Educating the public needs to be more
aggressive. For example, I have downloaded
Open Office 3.1 and am impressed so far. I
may even introduce it to someone at work,
who wanted Access on their home computer.
Yet people do not know they can replace
Access. (I was one of these).I like
playing music videos and chess. People do
not know that you can use flash in Linux,
and that Youtube now offers HTML5 support
with Chrome as the supporting browser.
These factors now make Linux a viable
alternative for me.
2. Better application development. I believe
that a lot of applications are developed
by talented open source programmers whose
only goal is to see if they can develop
something. There is then no effort to
develop the application further for more
use by the general public. Linux
applications should be much better than
Windows applications as much as possible.
3. One Debian or Red Hat based or combined
common language for programming with one
big central repository, or eliminate the
need for a repository all together ie
be able to download new applications
directly as in Windows. Will then be able
to get new games as soon as they come
out.
I admit I do not know much about Linux. Please correct any misconceptions I may have shown in this post.
[…] think so, as does Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. But it’s going to require a very different kind of open source than we’ve hitherto […]
The way we get better at creating magic by not being anti business. Linux at it’s core isn’t anti business, but the community can be. The community will never be tight knit enough to produce the magic on our own. If we encourage businesses to monetize Linux, and provide constructive criticism, and lots of positive feedback where appropriate we will probably get much better results.
Too little focus on usability and the GUI has plagued the Linux community. Android is a huge step in the right direction. Honestly Apple has always produced excellent software, and the new products really are the best they have ever produced. But there is a real advantage through open source, the power of community. Linux will survive and evolve and should take the best ideas from Apple as it has from Unix. A common UI with a powerful yet simple Graphical programming environment would be a great help. UNR and Moblin are OK but they are far from the usability and polish of the V3.1.3 on my iPhone (and presumably the iPad).