Linux will have 20% desktop market share by 2008?

unmadindu writes "Siemens Business Systems, after conducting an extensive survey on non technical workers ("secretaries and managers, not IT people") is predicting that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within the next 5 years. Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in enterprise settings, believes that the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade. Interestingly, they used Ximian Desktop, instead of KDE, because Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was "different enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be less like Windows. "

Comments

I think its realistic.

[HanzoSan]

From the current trend, people are switching to free, be it via P2P, or software itself, now that people actually know what open source is, and they are considering Linux.

Currently Linux has a few issues but overall, for the price (free), when it comes time to buy a new computer, why buy longhorn when you can get Linux for free?