If you were to ask the average person about Linux, it’s likely you would get either a blank stare or a reply about an operating system that a bunch of anti-Microsoft geeks like to use. Both responses are unfortunate misconceptions. Linux has never been more in the mainstream than it is today, and it plays a very important role in advanced computing technology.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of the future will be dominated not by human users, but by billions of inanimate objects, otherwise known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco has predicted for a long time that about 50 billion objects will be connected by 2020.
Although skeptics feel such a prediction is overly optimistic, even their predictions expect the number of connected devices by 2020 to be in the tens of billions. Ericsson puts the number at 26 billion; Gartner Research places it at 20 billion.
So even if Cisco’s prediction of 50 billion devices doesn’t happen by 2020, it’s still hard to imagine that the number of connected devices would not reach that level eventually. Grand View Research predicted in 2014 that the global embedded systems market will reach $214 billion by 2020, and be a major contributing factor in future IoT growth. These systems will include computer module boards, and many of these boards will run on Linux.
