 |
|
|
LM: Why did you form VA Research?
LA: I formed VA because there was a need. Personally, I wanted to run Unix on a PC, but I didn't trust a PC company to make a Unix workstation. Unix workstations are up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Theyoften run as servers. They have thingslike SCSI I/O busses, and remote management features. PCs usually don't have those features.
Another problem was that no one would support anything but DOS or Windows on their hardware. If you found a hardware problem (and I found lots of them), you had to reproduce it under DOS/Windows. On top of this, if you ran Unix on a PC, you'd often get stuck in a finger pointing match between the software vendor and the hardware vendor. I hated getting stuck there.
I felt there needed to be a place where people could work on advancing Linux development. That meant a place where people could work on Linux full time, with access to the latest state-of-the-art big systems. For example, we just hired Ted Ts'o, who works on large scale filesystem support. We were able to give Ted access to a system with 2 Terabytes of disk space. This is something that Ted justwouldn't be able to afford on his own.
And I wanted to make cool computers. I've always been an engineer at heart. I would always open up the latest system and begin dissecting it, looking for ways to make it better.
LM: You're the "A" in VA Systems, right? Who is the "V?"
LA: The "V" was James Vera. When the company became a full-time business James decided to stay at Stanford. We kept the name, though.
LM: What's the story with you and Yahoo? Is it true that you turned downa chance to get in on the ground floor?
LA: Dave Filo, Jerry Yang, David Ku (who was at Escalade last I heard), and I wrote Internet business plans together. When Yahoo began, I had already started the Linux computer business and was selling systems. Yahoo was running off of Jerry's DEC workstation in his office at Stanford. We all knew the Internet would be big, and we had this vague notion that there was a business in it somewhere. At the time, I don't think they really had any idea how Yahoo could make money. We floated around several business plans for a while, and finally we ended up following separate paths. I continued with Linux, and they continued with Yahoo. Certainly they ramped sooner, but we're catching up.
LM: What do you think of the state of software innovation in Linux? It seems that a lot of people are proud of the fact that they have taken Linux and made it look like Windows.
LA: You're looking at the wrong user interface. KDE is a great example of making Linux look like Windows. Youshould look at some of the stuff that's starting to come out of the Enlightenment project. Gregg Zehr, my VP of engineering, comes from Apple, and he and I started talking Gnome and Enlightenment, and he said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. User interfaces are old. We knew how to do them at Apple. It isn't going to change." But then he sat down with Mandrake, and Mandrake started showing some of the things Enlightenment could do. And Zehr said, "We're going to clean this up, and a year from now, I'm going back over to Apple, and they're going to be so darn envious."
LM: Who is Mandrake?
LA: Geoff Harrison. He is the co-author of the Enlightenment Window Manager, which is the default window manager on GNOME. They've created this really fast, lean window manager that lets people create these sort of arbitrary back-decorations on windows.
For example, you can have a completely transparent background, with floating text hanging anywhere in the middle of the screen. Now that in itself sounds strange, but the point is they are all creating new ways of visualizing work and new ways of interacting with the user interface.
LM: We were talking earlier about the business desktop. How much do you think business people want to learn about computers?
LA: Gregg Zehr's motto is, "One button, no instructions." And that's what I think business desktop users want.
LM: If the Open Source model is so good, why hasn't it come up with the next Microsoft Office?
LA: Give us time!
LM: It's been years.
LA: We just got the operating system! Look, we did the compilers, we did the utilities, and then it took us six years to get the operating system. It could take us another five years to have an Office suite. It's a hard problem and it isn't going to happen overnight, but people are working on it.
LM: So why not just use Word on Windows?
LA: People run Windows because it runs Word. They don't run Word because it works on Windows. People don't want to run Windows; it's Windows that most people have problems with. If people could, they would be happy to run Word on Linux. I think that there are bugs in Word that people would like to fix. If it were Open Source, it would be better. But right now if Word were available on Linux people would run it.
LM: What do you think would happen if Microsoft made Office available on Linux?
LA: The business desktop would go to Linux immediately. I'm not sure about the home desktop. Business people want to have a very small number of system administrators who tightly control what's available to users. They don't want users to be able to install their own software; they don't want users to be able to break the systems; they want users to be constrained within their own space, and they want all of that to be remotely managed by a system administrators, sitting in -- you know --Tulsa, managing machines in New York and San Francisco.
LM: What do you think Microsoft's stock price will be say two years from now?
LA: I think Microsoft's stock will continue to do well. Microsoft is a big company. They have this dominant position in the market and Linux is eating away it. But Microsoft is such a big company that it's going to be more than three years before its stock takes a hit. Look at IBM. IBM went through this period when it was the most profitable company in America. But five years later? Its stockprice went through the floor! But IBMre-invented itself, and now look at its stock price.
LM: So what would a re-invented Microsoft look like?
LA: Microsoft is going to face this issue down the road as Open Source becomes more prevalent. Maybe they will do more Open Source. Maybe they will turn into the leading Linux applications vendor. If Microsoft doesn't re-invent itself at some point, it will go the way of Apple. The iMac is a great product, but it's not a re-invention of how Apple does business. One big problem for Microsoft is that they are beginning to run into a serious software scaling problem. That's one reason they can make a really good browser but not a really good operating system. The thing about software design is it's so easy to create more code. In hardware design, adding transistors is actually hard, so there is a self-limiting factor in the design. But in the case of software, anybody can spew out thousands of lines of code that are junk.
LM: Isn't that a problem for Linux as well? Doesn't Linus want world domination?
LA: Oh! But world domination is not the same as making a single piece of software that does everything. Linus is just making a little tiny piece of software that other people can build around, and the end result of people building on this piece is world domination. See, I think Microsoft has this tendency to pull everything in around the operating system. It's a fundamental business control model. It's at the core of their business.
LM: Do you think Linux will be competing with Windows CE in the embedded device market?
LA: Yes. Linux is something that a lot of embedded software people are looking at. When you're looking at a $100 or $200 device, a $20 operating system is hardly insignificant. Plus, people worry about being tied to one vendor. I think the PalmPilot a is great example of how a device can succeed without necessarily having to be based on Microsoft. I think that it could inspire a lot of people to go to Linux.
LM: Does it upset you that AT&T got a $5 billion investment from Microsoft as long as AT&T used Windows CE in its set-top boxes. Isn't that an example of how Microsoft has to pay people to use its software?
LA: Very rarely has Microsoft's software succeeded on technical merit. Oh, they did some very good applications. But look at Microsoft; they have succeeded at least as much on marketing and on buying into markets.
LM: Do you think there is anything stopping Microsoft from distributing Microsoft Linux?
LA: They can't do a Linux distribution. We win when they do that.
LM: Do we win? Or does it just shift the market away from the existing Linux players into Microsoft's marketing machine?
LA: Well, a Microsoft Linux would have to be fundamentally Open Source. They have to give back their changes, their enhancements. Let them make it better.
LM: The chance of them doing that?
LA: Zero.
Lee Gomes covers technology for the Wall Street Journal.
|
|