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Open Source Making Inroads in Small Businesses
prostoalex writes "In a story mainly about new OpenOffice release, NewsFactor Network quotes an interesting finding of Jupiter Research analyst: "Open-source productivity suites did "surprisingly well" in the mid-size business market, with the OpenOffice suite alone claiming a share of about 6%. Furthermore, [Joe Wilcox] found that some 19% of small businesses ran Linux on their desktop, and a whopping 26% ran Linux on their servers.""
It's more like 70% for big companies.8 ,17096,00.html
http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/0,133
It's not saying they're *exclusively* using linux, and it's unclear whether this is server or desktop.
I work as a technology consultant, independant mainly to very small mom and pop shops and small offices. Many have upgraded PC's in the last few months and just now have Office XP/2002 and here 2003 is comming out at the end of the month.
These people express a disgust that every 18 months, what the buy today won't be powerful enough to run that in the future and its been cheaper to buy $700 boxes every 2 years and chuck 'em than to go through, upgrade hardware and software.
Many more use FreeBSD and Linux daily. I have helped 4 businesses set up ecommerce sites through Yahoo, they have no idea what the hell FreeBSD is, but that is what powers their site.
Also, I have a portable FreeBSD box called my Apple iBook that many take a look at and two mom & pop stores have switched to using Macs for Point of sale and other uses and love them because they are easy to use and don't crash.
I started out in the graphics/video production field with wedding businesses and most switched around 2000 - 2001 to Dell's and PC's. Many are now switching back to mac because of their lost time and work with system crashes.
Now to the kicker: I set-up a Linux or FreeBSD box with KDE set up and most people can pick up how to launch Mozilla and Netscape w/o any proablems. In fact over the next two weeks, I am converting one office over to Linux on all of their PIII 700 boxes they have. Total cost: About $2540. ($2500 to hire me to do it, $40 for a copy of RH). Most couldn't tell a difference between OpenOffice's Spreadsheet and Excell and since it can read/write MS office formats (at least for now) they have interoperatblity.
Their office file/print server has been Linux for "at least two years" one employee remarked, but I don't know I didn't set up their LAN. Well I know its RH 6.2 on IBM hardware, how long its been there...
Why did they switch? They had spent over $6000 US in the last two years just on support calls to wipe off viruses on these machines not to mention the cost in lost time due to data being lost and computer downtime. The hardest issue was to find a replacement for their accounting/payroll/inventroy software. So I recommended buying one new Dell just to run the software package as it would proably take longer and be a hell of a lot more to reset up 4 years of data on a new system and the PR person wanted an iMac, so I recommended getting her one so she can run QuarkXpress and Photoshop.
People and businesses are sick and tired the MS upgrade game every 18 months and I think Linux is poised to make some grounds in the business world. Red Hat and SuSE has done a wonderful job of taking Linux from Geekdom to so easy grandma could use it. Still the lack of commerical software is hurting the platform. OpenOffice has made some tremendous gains in terms of functionality to the point where it now can be used.
Special software is getting there too, like the NOLA Enterprise Resource Planning software, phpprojekt group ware, are good resources for medium sized businesses. What is lacking is some good small business software like Quickbooks that is extremely easy to use and designed for small business. Maybe there is something out there, I just havn't found it yet.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.