There is one reason why Red Hat is looking at dipping its toes into the general desktop arena - a fear that Oracle and Novell could take away enough of its server market share to affect the company's bottom line.

These fears are compounded by the fact that Microsoft stands behind Novell - and if there's one company which Microsoft wants to hurt, it's Red Hat. To a large extent, these fears are largely ill-founded.

It's quite clear that this so-called global desktop is something conceived in the backseat of a car. There's no clear statement about how it will differ from a two-month-old version of the Enterprise Desktop which was released in March. There's a vague comment about the global desktop including Red Hat's attempt to mimic MySpace, a project called Mugshot.

And then, of course, there's the BS: Red Hat global desktop "delivers a modern-user experience with an enterprise-class suite of productivity applications." Ah, now it's all perfectly clear.

There's a good lesson which Red Hat can learn from the one man who could have won a Olympic track gold for India - something that country of more than 1.1 billion has still not managed to achieve.

Milkha Singh ran in the 400 metres at the 1960 Rome Olympics and was in position to take the gold as the race neared midway. Then he committed the one cardinal sin which no runner should - he looked back. That did it for him - he finished fourth.

One of the good things about various Linux distributions is that people who use them know what they are all about. The moment one distribution which has some kind of a following tries to be something else, it tends to lose traction. One would have thought Red Hat would have understood this by now.

Let's see how the global desktop fares by this time next year. Somehow I feel that it won't exactly be top of the pops. Neither will Red Hat.

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