1/17/2007 -- When I first started working in technology, I was struck by the fact that all the major companies we were doing business with were American. It didn't matter whether it was hardware or software; it seemed as if the only viable players in the market were domestic companies. Puzzled by the fact that importing was the rage in so many other fields, I asked a number of people what they thought about this and they all pretty much had the same answer: Other countries are good at imitation, while Americans are good at innovation. As long as the technology continued to change rapidly -- processors doubling every 18 months and applications adding features exponentially -- America would always have a lead in the market.

Contrary to what you might think from the previous paragraph, this article is not about importing and exporting. It is not about buying American, or anything of that sort.

Actually, this topic came to my mind while I was reading one more article on Mono. For those still immune from the buzz, Mono is basically the open source implementation of the .NET framework. Microsoft came up with .NET as a programming architecture to replace and supersede many of the languages it was already marketing (C# being a big one). The company, Ximian, was formed to essentially re-engineer .NET as an open source solution (bypassing royalties for Microsoft), and it was purchased by Novell. I'm simplifying it a bit, but principally, what Mono allows you to do is program for Linux and other operating systems the same way you would program for Microsoft operating systems. That's hot news in the Linux world right now.

Previous news has included such things as:

• WINE, which allows Windows programs (think binaries and games) to run on Linux.
• OpenOffice.org, which allows you to work with MS Office documents and files on Linux.
• Refinement of the X-based desktops (GNOME, KDE, etc.) to look more and more like Windows.

These all constitute ways in which Linux can do the exact same things as Windows, causing many in the community to look at these and wonder why more people aren't adopting Linux. The reason, simply put, is because they constitute imitation and not innovation. In the minds of most, just doing the same thing as someone else isn't a significant reason to switch.

In expanding upon Michael Porter's groundbreaking work on competitive strategy from 1980, many -- like Messrs. Schmitt and Szyperski -- have pointed out that the first to market tends to have an advantage over the competition, and simply matching that is not enough. Just because Linux does everything that Microsoft does is not a sufficient reason to switch to Linux.

If the Linux operating system is to truly gain a foothold in the market, it needs to do something that Microsoft's operating systems can't do -- either at all, or as well. With the only possible exception being Web hosting (and I won't even grant that fully), I can think of nothing else that makes Linux a better operating system than Microsoft's.

Yes, it's open source, but what does that mean to Joe User who just wants to put together a slide presentation this afternoon without missing his kid's recital this evening? Yes, it is available from more than one company, but what does that mean to the manager trying to hire support staff who have experience with the Linux OS? (What, you know Red Hat but have never worked with SuSE?) Yes, it is cheaper to acquire than Windows, but what does that mean when every large Linux company now wants to sell you a maintenance contract?

Apple had a niche with graphics and layout -- an area that Microsoft could not excel at. Over time, that niche was whittled away a bit, but Apple continued to innovate and focus on it. Macintosh became the standard in graphics and printing shops.

What does Linux have? Will all of the open source developers spend 2007 trying to give it the same features that Microsoft has just added to Vista, or will they come up with something new? For the sake of the community, I hope it's the latter, since we already have a Vista.