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META Predicts Linux Software From Microsoft in 2004
trandles writes "According to this story at NYTimes (FRYYY), META Group is reporting that Microsoft will begin selling Linux software in 2004. It also goes on to report that a META Group study comes to the same conclusion as the earlier (MS-funded) IDC study that Linux has a higher TCO than MS solutions for some applications." Remember, this is speculation on the part of META, and has to do with back-end software, not Office. (But if Microsoft wanted to, they could become the world's biggest producer of Linux software.)
This story was written by Reueters, not the New York Times. You can view this story at other sites with no registration. Yahoo.
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Actually, it should be this
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
Can you imagine a world in which you could choose whatever word processor you like as long as it's Word?
Welcome to the world of 75% of all offices.
You will use the software we provide as installed, or not at all.
Why bother when Wine Notepad (an almost exact recreation) is LGPLd?
Actually this time they said it was more expensive on the server side. This could be true or not, it all depends. If you are a small company and still have some windows boxes and just use Linux as a complement for some specific service it might be true.
Linux is typically good at handle many users, and a Linux admin can handle thousands of them. But what if you only have 100 people in your company, and still have to use windows for something on the server side. This could result in that you had to hire one extra sysadmin for Linux that was idle most of the time while you still had to have a couple of full time windows admins.
And to be fair modern windows version can keep alive for several months provided you only run one service/box. And if you have tvow boxes for each service you provide you can do schedueled reboots regularly like MS recommends and get very high uptime figures
This gives you slightly higher hardware costs and licensing costs but compared to hiring one more person it is still cheaper.
It is another matter if you apply Linux thin client systems for your desktops then you could expect large savings with Linux. This is waht the city of Largo did and cut their costs in half.
So what system that gives you the lowest TCO is something only you can calculate,it depends on your specific needs.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Well, the whole IE vs Netscape thing didn't really get them any profit did it.
It "only" provided a 90+% installed base of browsers which support their standard instead of the normal one. A standard which, surprise surprise, is fully accessible when using their http server (otherwise, forget about the neat extensions).
This is the main difference with "free-as-in-speech": a 100% marketshare in free software does not give you leverage to extend monopoly in another market. On the contrary, proprietary protocols give you this power (proprietary = either that the protocol is unknown or that it's supported only by a specific proprietary app). Netscape was dangerous because, even if is now portrayed at the poor victim of the gorilla, was trying to play the very same game with their "agressively embracing open standards" (= adding new extensions) which, surprise again, were better supported by their http server. Microsoft had no control on the platform where that server would be running: in particular it would not have been NT Windows-only.
What is all this hoopla about? Some soothsayer makes some outrageous prediction that is not backed by any data whatsoever, and all the world is acting as if it already happened!
;)
Hold your horses, gentlemen.
Their German subsidiary just sold a well researched and completely unbiased prediction that Linux won't stand a chance against Windows on servers and desktops to the Swiss a few months ago. The study claims that Unix scales better than Linux and yet Unix will become a back-end, legacy OS platform by 2003.
Oh, and they also pumped out a different study (which is, by the way, also completely unbiased and astoundingly well-researched) where they predicted Linux will grow from 25% to 35% in the next 2 years, only to be outpaced by... Windows 2000?!
ROTFL! Nobody in their right mind can take these people seriously! I don't even have to contradict them, they do it themselves!
BTW: The PDF is in German, but the pretty figures are all English, so you should have no problem understanding what they are saying.
PS: What good luck we have that their study is a PDF! In it you will find the assertion that Star Office has "uncertainties" opening MS Office files and thus you can't use Linux. Um, well...
http://www.isb.admin.ch/dok/dokumente/opensource/m etagroup-linux-w2000_2002-10-17.pdf
OK, I'm replying to this even though it seems to be a troll, because some of the points stated are very widely believed to be true (outside /. mainly).
... Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Theoretical mumbo jumbo aside, let's talk about personal experience. At our shop we have a few Windows servers and a few Linux servers. One of the Windows servers is always down. OS code and design aside, it's hard to automate housekeeping system tasks in Windows - that's why Linux will run a lot longer.
Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
All non-journaling filesystems are prone to interruption errors (like FAT32, too). Luckily there are many other filesystems available that are native to any decent Linux distro (I like ReiserFS personally). My impression is also that systems like ReiserFS store files much more efficient than, say, NTFS - but a minor gripe is that you can't have compressed folders just like that (like on NTFS).
Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices.
Linux should theoretically be more stable than Windows and many other unices. But there is indeed a problem with Linux' fault tolerance regarding hardware. This is more a philosophical problem, as Linux developers tend to say things like "if the hardware isn't 100% reliable my software won't run and you shouldn't have faulty hardware in the first place". Reality is, many hardware pieces are partly broken (be it some circuits on the board or a few faulty sectors on the harddrive) and Linux reacts very badly once it encounters those errors. But looking deeper that's not so much an inherent kernel problem as an issue in device drivers and filesystem code.
The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right.
In fact my experience with open source projects in general suggests that standards and specifications are implemented VERY strictly and correctly.
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
Yeah, some messages are a bit silly but hey, its not as if system messages have to be presented to the CEO each morning or something ike that. I think more serious problems are cryptic messages that defy any meaning (every system has them) and bad/lacking documentation.
Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
And yet, Linux is deployed on a large scale for many environments, in some areas it pervades even more than MS and other unices combined. Why do you think IT people do that?
-Dave
http://cyberknights.com.au/articles/true-value-of- linux.html
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What about the FrontPage extensions module for Apache? MS are not ideologues, they will do whatever suits their bottom line. And, as has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, they really don't care about performing u-turns.
I can't believe some of the arguments being posted here, especially the 'no-one would buy MS products for Linux' one. That's been the argument for just about everything they have ever produced, and, in almost every case, they have ended up with the lion's share of the market. A couple of years ago, the story was that no-one would use Media Player instead of RealPlayer.
And OSS wps are just so bad! Do any of the people singing the praises of Open Office actually use it in a corporate setting? I'm about to install W2K alongside my Linux network just so the clients can produce CVs that anyone else in the world can read more than one time in three.
Virtually serving coffee
This is no longer speculation. I was listening to CNET Radio on my way into work this morning and the Chief Research Officer of Microsoft was the guest.
He confirmed that Microsoft was going to start developing Linux software and said Office was not on the list of things they had planned right away. IIS, SQL Server, and other such products would be placed on the burner first.
He also admitted some other interesting things. Namely that by 2006 they expected Linux to be shipping on 40% of Intel servers and that over time, the TCO of Linux would come to be the same as Windows in the server market.
I can't find any references to an announcement by Microsoft yet.. but you should be able to hear the interview in archive format at cnetradio.com.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
I've seen it and no I didn't see any encrypted blobs in the XML.
Yes.. the MAC address of the NIC card is included in a .doc or anything you write using MS Office. This is how they caught the person in the Philippenes who wrote some virus that came out last year.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
Do you think there is any chance Microsoft could release GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd version of Microsoft Bob in a form of X11 window manager? It has very low system requirements (80486, 8MB RAM, 32MB HD) which makes it perfect for teaching kids the basics of computer usage (together with such projects like Debian Junior, GNU and Education, LinuxForKids, SEUL/edu, etc.) on low-end PC hardware. Some time ago, I was looking for a good window manager/desktop environment and, while there are many good applications, I couldn't find any graphical user interface itself, which would be similar to Microsoft Bob. What I need is not only something easy to learn, but also actually fun to play with, so the kids will want to learn the basics of computer science. Do you know any projects, which I could use here? (Free software would be the best.) Thanks.
~Christopher Doopov