With the lack of something amazing from the Consumer Electronics Show, or Mac week, and nothing happening on the bleeding edge except for the activity of corporate lawyers, it becomes time to ponder if this might just be one of those ‘rebuilding’ years that sports teams are always talking about.

When talk of a rebuilding year comes up, all excitement leaves the conversation, and wistful looks into the distance, and dreams of what may come appear. It is a sure sign that no bursts of quality play and winning streaks are in the near future.

Consumer electronics, and especially computers, seems to be in a rebuilding year right now.

AMD, still feeling the pain of the problems with the first run of quad-core Barcelonas, is promising, in best Schwarzenegger fashion, that ‘They’ll be back!’. Intel, with no threats from the AMD camp on the near horizon, has decided to let a few production dates slip by. The graphics arms of the industry, ATi and nVidia, are making changes, but they are incremental, and evolutionary, not revolutionary, as we might have hoped for. Via seems to be making a small comeback with its PC-1 platform, but how many people are going to buy a low end PC and get really excited about it?

In the software realm, no news is coming about anything startling or earth-shattering. The big news here is the one about how the little companies get swallowed up by the bigger ones, like the old cartoon about the many levels of fish that eat each other. Microsoft has certainly not helped things with the extreme poor showing of Vista - and by that I mean that, no matter how much futzing is done with figures, perception IS reality, and the perception of the general public is that Vista is a bust. Everyone is awaiting the flavor of Linux that will make the reviewers say that this is the Windows killer - the OS that will draw the many away from the dark side, and into the light of Open Source.

Is that going to happen? Not if the Linux people don’t start working together. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of different distributions do nothing to bring the average user into the fold. Microsoft loves this, because the Linux users’ self - dividing behavior means that the conquering part is easy. Instead of so many different distributions, which mainly change the exterior of the OS, perhaps there should be something called simply Linux, and then the rest should be marketed as simple ‘glamour’ and ‘utility’ packages to add on. Possibly that is too much to change at once. There could therefore be Linux with KDE, Linux with Gnome, and Linux with Xfce. This would make choices smaller, and serve to eliminate some of the confusion.

So what does Joe Average think? If he wants to have something wonderful, exciting, and interesting he must tell those who try to innovate what makes for that excitement and interest. The big guys need a little help in this time of rebuilding.

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Tags: rebuilding, excitement, innovation, ces, mac world, ati, nvidia, amd, intel, linux, vista