Red Herring's Tom Davey reports on remarks by IBM technology and strategy vice president, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, at the Venture 2000 conference held recently in Squaw Valley, California. Wladawsky-Berger's comments apparently reflect a growing sense within IBM that Linux is destined for wide scale adoption in a broad variety of embedded devices and appliances. Davey writes . . .

“He says adopting the popular, open-operating system is a customer-driven phenomenon that's inevitable in the evolution of computing. He compares what's happening to the computer industry's embrace of TCP/IP, the standard for transmitting data over the Internet, which replaced proprietary network protocols and allowed different types of computers easily to exchange data.

“. . . 'Linux is designed by the most brilliant people in the world and it can run on anybody's platform,' he says, sounding unlike a representative of a company that has been promoting obscure operating systems such as the AIX version of Unix and OS 390. He says the market for new sales of Linux hardware, applications, and services will make up for any revenue shortfall as customers turn away from these operating systems.”

“However, IBM isn't abandoning these other operating systems or Windows, Mr. Wladawsky-Berger says. He insists these various operating systems will continue to have specialized uses that won't easily be satisfied by Linux.”

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