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Linux Making Inroads, But Not At Windows' Expense
zaphod123 writes "According to this article, the stories about Amazon (and others) switching to Linux have been misrepresented. The Linux install has replaced a proprietary Unix system, not a Microsoft Windows product. This is still "A Good Thing" for Linux, but not the downfall of Microsoft that some have foreseen."
>When asked whether the company would ever consider replacing its
>Windows machines with Linux, Busch said absolutely not, noting
>the lack of "robust office packages" on that platform.
I often think that this excuse really is more like "we can't get naive users to use it without being crippled". Linux distros need to test their software on non-Unix people more. Humans. Typical office people who, if you ask them if they have a Mac or a Windows box, say, "Yeah, I think so".
>And Busch threw another wrench into any mass Linux migration by
>noting that the overall cost of Linux and Windows 2000 is almost
>identical after you factor in support and maintenance.
in other words, after you get done with the hassles of Linux, and the hassles of Win2k, the hassles of Linux are a little bit more. time=money, so the cost of that extra hassle is the same as the cost of Windows & its apps.
So much for free-as-in-beer.
This hassle is invisible to the Linux developers cuz they know how to fix or work around glitches when they arise. So it seems "easy to use" for them.
Try it on grandma. then report back.
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
it still is good news in that they decided not to change to a m$ based solution. they went for linux.
-1: flamebait should really be -1: inciteful
Solaris, their operating system, has few advantages over Linux, nowadays. Frankly, without adding the GNU tools, Solaris is virtually unusable! (And, who's gonna pay $10k for their compiler when GCC does the job?)
Sun is about to hit a brick wall. Unless they change direction dramatically, Linux is going to gobble them up, just as SGI consumed Cray. Cray was meaningful for a long time, until the capabilities of "Minis" (as Supercomputer folk like to refer to UNIX machines) silently approched the power of super computers at a fraction of the cost.
The same is happening with Linux-Sun. For a small fraction of the cost, Linux on commodity hardware (Intel) is approching the power of Sun's products. It's inevitable, without some sigificant change.
Because of its robustness, modularity and stability, Linux is highly able to replace Solaris, HP-UX and AIX type licensed OS's in the enterprise. The people who buy these systems buy them to get the best technical solution to their problems and consider cost of ownership, which is high in any OS choice given the task, secondarily.
Trying to get Linux to beat Windows on the desktop is fighting yesterday's battle. Want to kill Microsoft? Sap it's growth, which is in server OS's and embedded systems (XBox, Pocket PC, etc.)
The amount of energy spent by the development community in trying to be the next Microsoft is astounding, but very few vocal developers seem to even focus on what Microsoft is trying to become.
To borrow a phrase from the Old West, "Cut 'em off at the pass" and focus on making an OS that runs devices better than Windows ever will, an OS that runs DB2 and Oracle better than any other and an OS that can be extended and integrated with server side applications at compile time with more ease.
If you take away Microsoft's revenue growth, you take away their stock price. Take away their stock price and you take away their monopoly.
Technology Marketing is what happens when people turn their hard work over to people paid to manipulate others.
I know you all read the article, but did anyone read the web address? http://www.wininformant.com. It's part of the Windows 2000 Magazine Network. Their motto is Windows news and information. Does anyone here see any potential bias when the website says that Windows will rule for the foreseeable future?
One fellow used to cast things in terms of products for the mass market, and products for the elite class of users. Sure, there's going to be a huge market for the 'computers grandma can use', just like 'billions & billions served' - but there's also going to be a small but vocal and powerful minority of very experienced users who just don't want a computer with the training wheels bolted on and whizzards to hold your hand thru all common tasts. In the democracy of 'market choice' it will become increasingly important to ensure that the rights of the minority users who know what they want and already know how to do it don't get trampled on.
Yes, I do it the difficult way because it's more educational and I want to know what's going on and be in control. Notice how every time your super-automatic wiz-bang box craps out *I* have to come over and fix it or figure it out for you??
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I have to admit-- Linux for community documentation, support, and features.
But-- FreeBSD is STABLE (check longest uptimes at Netcraft when you get a chance). If I could go for 4 years without rebooting with Linux... They have even dethroned Irix when it comes to stability.
So yes, they are a very practical alternative to Linux. It is really that Solaris and HP-UX are not so practical or cost effective in the small ISP market.
I actually now believe that Linux will form a shield which will allow BSD to grow into certain niche markets, such as high-availability web servers (currently MS and Sun).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The point of Linux isn't to wipe out Windows, or even to compete with it. Linux is about creating a free operating system that people will choose if it's the right tool for the job. Linux doesn't have to hurt Windows to be sucsesfull, it just has to keep improving. Just because Microsoft wasn't hurt by this doesn't mean that it isn't a victory for linux.
"Yeah, Microsoft is evil because they have taken away our choices, let's crush them so that the thing we like becomes our only choice" Why do we have to be for this camp or that camp? Why can't we all enjoy the best software available reguardless of who developes it?
well, they switched from Unix to linux. it *could* have been Unix to windows. who lost? if you've taken any business/financial/economics classes, you know what opportunity cost means. linux might not have managed to erode the windows market (at least in these cases). but seems to me , has managed to stop windows from eroding Unixes market share further.
i mean, around the time when NT4 came out, everyone and their brother were replacing big iron (with unix) with multiple NT boxens. seems like we've managed to check that. it's only a matter of time before linux invades the NT/w2k/(whatever they're calling it this week) market.
you gotta stop their advance before you can make 'em retreat.
if i were a redmondien, i would not be happy because linux is merely replacing Unix. i would be extreamly unhappy that linux is replacing Unix. it could have been winNT/(whatever...) that was replacing unix. opportunity costs for MS. no new revenue streams. no new market shares.
gottsa love how MS and winformants can put a spin on things.
These guys just don't learn... Linux isn't about market share - it's about making a good OS! Linus and Alan Cox don't get up in the morning and think of ways to cut into Microsoft's pie, they try and improve the existing Linux system. Woz said it in his recent interview... he cut his hacker teeth building computers that competed against their previous versions, always improving.
As for Wininformant, yay well done. You caught the fact that a Linux win wasn't actually a Microsoft loss. Here's some more news for you: WE DON'T CARE.
shut up man
After all, Microsoft has been trying to take the
"enterprise" business from the unix vendors for
years. If linux replaces a traditional unix vendor,
you can be sure they at least considered, and rejected microsoft when considering Linux.
There are no more "field" trips to a desktop. If it gets screwed up, you tell your management software to blow down a new image. That's the whole point of a corporate desktop. You don't bother remote admin because it's cheaper to send down a new image. Personal files on the desktop? Sorry, it's not yours, it's our machine and all business related files are on the network file server like our propriatary file management app makes you do. If you saved a file locally, tough, you shouldn't have been doing it.
Install their own software? They don't have the rights. If they do install their own software, their violating the AUP of the company. It's our desktop, not theirs.
When it comes down to the high TCO of a desktop, it's supporting the USERS with the APPS. That will remain whether it's NT, Linux, or Mac. Users are users.
Linux may make inroads into the corporate world (aside from small pockets of developers) when:
1. There are tools that plug into our management systems to adequately manage the desktop.
2. When we decide to stop spending millions of dollars developing our custom file management, accounting, billing, purchasing, instant messaging, telephone billing, office directory, HR, Benefits, the IE only Intranet, Remote Access, PKI, and the apps that integrate all the above, and start spending that money plus 100x more on hiring Linux coders, buying a duplicate server for each backend since they are mission critical apps we're not going to test the Linux clients hitting live servers, hire Network Admins to take care of the new test servers, hire trainers to train users how to use Linux and StarOffice, hire a slew of more technical support to handle the increased number of phone calls during the transition, hire a slew of people to handle all the document conversion issues that will inevitably come up.
Actually, it will NEVER happen because the first thing the CIO will ask is "Where's the ROI?" And when we show him the numbers, and say that converting to Linux on all the desktops will never pay off but we may break even in 10 years of not having to purchase Microsoft Office licenses for each desktop, the plan will get shitcanned. That's why we won't see Linux on the corporate desktop.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
I think part of the reason this "Win vs. Linux" cost of ownership battle rages on and on is because we're comparing apples to oranges.
Individual user workstations are rarely "mission critical". If they crash once in a while, productivity doesn't really diminish. (Sure, they have to spend a minute or two rebooting and logging back in, and sometimes they might lose the file they were last working on - but that's the extent of it.)
Servers, on the other hand, obviously pose much bigger productivity issues if they go down. Every user connected to one is cut off from what they were doing until it reboots.
Linux shines on servers for this reason. It's markedly more reliable than the average Windows-based server. If nothing else, it saves you from doing a lot of reboots when you reconfigure things. (Make a change to Apache or Samba configuration? Just stop and restart the daemon; not the whole machine.) Win2K and XP are better than ever about imitating that functionality, but they still ask you to "restart the machine for the changes to take effect" far too often to be convenient on a server.
On a workstation though, the rules change. The biggest factors become ease-of-use and training. Most employees come with a chunk of Windows knowledge in advance. Sure, some have no clue, but even temp. agencies requires experience with using the mouse, getting around Win '9x, and using MS Office apps. When you have hundreds or thousands of employees, it starts to look really good to use a lesser-quality operating system if it means most of your workers can already get around in it with no additional training.
This is something that only time will change (and then, only if people stick with Linux and keep making efforts to improve it over the years).
Because they do too much?
Nobody is ever gonna be enthusiastic about a machine set up as a print/file server that some hoodlum down in the mailroom has turned into a Web Server and is also launching DOS attacks on his enemy's Quake server from.