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Where Will IBM Drop Windows?
TurboProp writes "An article by the Associated Press on Friday (1/09/2004) Says that IBM has plans to abandon Microsoft operating systems on it's internal desktops by the end of 2005. The news originated from an internal IBM memo published by the Inquirer, a British technology news site. Further stories from the Inquirer, indicate that IBM May already have begun dumping windows. While this all bodes well for Linux users, and would seem to be a good PR move for IBM, executives at IBM seem to be trying frantically to put a much milder spin on the story. They say that the memo was taken out of context. I really can't imagine why they wouldn't be posting it on billboards."
Enjoy their linux commerical here.
Yep!
AC
They were all over the TV during last night's NFL playoff game...
www.ibm.com/open
It already is to a large extent.
Example
Personally, my Thinkpad has everything working except:
Wireless Networking - Intel to release driver Q2 this year I believe
Modem - Never tried it
Power Management - Troulbe with suspend to RAM
Other than the above which I'm confidant will be worked out sooner rather than later it works fine with Linux (Gentoo to be specific).
My wife worked for IBM in Portsmouth, England and they were using OS/2 on the Desktop up to 1999, when they started to migrate to Windows. Jonathan
From the comment:
Just a quick note that we all should remember:- It's = it is (contraction)
- its = possessive of it (possessive)
Try to remember it in this fashion: If you know the sex, use the apostrophe (think phallic). If not, no apostrophe.It's a rule we can live by ;-)
...tizzyd
In theory, yes. In practice the level of total support for Linux-on-Not-x86 is very low.
The whole point of IBM supporting Linux is to leverage commodity, broad-based technology. That basically excludes PowerPC (unfortunately).
IBM has already written their own OS on their own hardware many many times. Linux is supposed to break that cycle.
In some ways. The desktop is more advanced. Other than the single input queue which really sucked, no matter how good it looked on paper. The drivers though? 16 bit only. If your drive won't run on a 286 it won't run on warp. (not true strictly, you can write 32 bit drivers if you want to go through a lot of work interfacing to the 16 bit system, figguring out for yourself where your memory is and all that. Not worth it)
If IBM had out half the effort into OS/2 that MS does into windows it would be a lot better yet, but as it stands windows is catching up, and in some way surpasses it.
My IBM ThinkPad R40 launches Knoppix just fine, and the local computer science department is going to be giving me a hard drive upgrade to dual-boot once I get into the CSC 112 class.
I have run into precisely two faults with my Knoppix games. One, it won't speak to the integrated modem (now that I'm back in the dorm with my LAN connection, not an issue!) Two, I can't turn off the touchpad (sorry, I prefer the TrackPoint and keep brushing up against the touchpad irregularly).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
> They should have done that when they launched OS Warp almost 10 years ago - instead, they pre-installed Windows everywhere - from their retail machines to their own network. OS2 Warp was technologically speaking more advanced than other flavors of Windows of the time.
> What were they thinking???
You're assuming that "IBM" is a single monolithic company; it's not.
IBM's OS division was solidly behind using OS/2.
IBM's PC division was solidly behind using Windows - they wanted to keep selling those PCs at the same prices, and didn't want an increased price from Microsoft on Windows.
Didn't help that IBM didn't write many drivers, and charged a very high price for the development kit compared to NT.
So, "IBM" had a little inter-division warfare going on, and OS/2 paid the price.
I think it's great news. I like that they're playing it cool too; seems like maybe they're positioning themselves to represent "levelheaded business people" who are making the move away from MS.
./er, and I use it at home all the time (I'm using it now!). But as much as I'd like to use it as a work desktop, the required functionality just isn't there.
The reason they're playing it cool is because it's ridiculous. I hate to rain on the parade, but I can assure you, Lotus Notes hasn't been dumped, and it isn't available on Linux except as an internal skunk works project running on WINE (and it doesn't run any too good, either).
Notes isn't the only problem. There's all sorts of applications we use internally that aren't (yet) available on Linux. The panel they showed listing the internal apps available doesn't even begin to compare to the necessary apps that are available on Windows. There are something like a hundred apps available on Windows that are frequently used by employees, and dead few of them are can be replaced by anything available on Linux.
Additionally, as services is now our largest business, many, if not most of us, work on customer sites. And that means we have to be able to exchange documents and file formats with our clients, and I sure don't know of anything in Linux world that's compatible with applications such as Microsoft project.
The only Linux desktop available internally is an (unsupported) hack of RedHat 7.2, and my experience with it was that it isn't even close to an acceptable replacement for the Windows desktop.
In short, this is a wildly exagerated claim. While it's entirely possible that IBM will eventually support internal use of Linux, it's highly unlikely it's going to be anywhere near to replacing windows by 2005.
I love Linux as much as the next
It's just not gonna happen anytime soon.
Hmmm...
Notes runs in some ways better under wine and Linux than under Windows (Notes under wine is the way I've been doing it for well over a year now). Zap-Notes (when Notes misbehaves) is nearly instantaneous when you're on Linux, and at best it's killed the instance of wine when it really screws up -- never my whole computer.
Ditto for MS Office under wine (not to mention there are MS-free alternatives).
Most everything else is web-based.
Maybe it depends on what you do and what your perceptions are, but honestly Notes and Mozilla is probablly *all* the software that a good chunk of IBMers need to do all of IBM's business.
What doesn't can be made to run under wine (and I think for large entities it's cheaper to have a small army of people making sure everything needed works under Linux than paying MS licenses).
What about remote administration? Windows still pales to UNIX from decades ago, and is a joke in this department compared to Linux (and people bemoan X's network transparency).
It's far from fanciful -- Linux on the desktop inside of IBM makes, IMHO, practical and financial sense, and it's made more sense in large entities like IBM and governments than Windows for quite some time now.
Are you using the RPMs available internally (there's *tons* of more software available than what the screenshots show in these articles, BTW -- including office and Notes pre-wrapped in Wine, ready for the C4EB Linux internal, totally unofficial but tolerated, linux distro).
I know I have more stringent software requirements than management and secretarial people, BTW, and I've been running Linux exclusively and painlessly at work for well over a year. Esoteric DOS apps run great under dos emulators (take your pick), and Wine does a ton of things already without any tweaking or even seeing a command line (download "installer.exe",click on it, and shortcuts even placed in "start" menu). I run and have installed several engineering "windows only" apps literaly this easily.
I added the Ximian desktop to the RH7.3 (I'm pretty sure it's RH7.3 based -- maybe you tried it a really long time ago?) I run, and even based on aesthetics and usability Linux has left Windows behind.
Anyways, another viewpoint from "inside".
PS
Yes, sharing documents with the outside world is important, but is this really an issue anymore? I'm constantly in touch with outside vendors, and it's just never been in an issue for me (Word, Excell, e-mail, PDFs are the bulk of communication for my line of work -- and none have ever been an issue for me).
I realize that we work in pretty different enviroments, but maybe all that means is that, today, IBM could only switch 50% of it's employees to Linux (not sure what the breakdown is). I would also question your assertion that the bulk of IBMers work at customer sites -- maybe it's where the biggest revenues come from, or maybe it's where the biggest profits come from, but I do think that it's enabled by the fact that IBM makes everything under the sun hardware related (that's armies of research, development, and manufacturing engineers that never visit customer sites, not to mention management, techs, secretaries, manufacturing *complexes* with 100's of operators, etc.)
You should be able to turn the touchpad off in the BIOS. (Done it myself on my R40 so yours should be no different)
Good point. The sites I support have people who depend on macros they inherited / were given by other employees. Some of them are very elaborate, and asking them to rewrite something they have no idea how it was written in the first place is asking a bit much. An asking the IT staff that already has 90+ trouble tickets to handle with some being months old due to number of tickets opened daily plus projects, emergency reports, people walking up and interrupting them with dumb questions, etc, is not practical either.
I.E. an IT infrastructure that is already stretched to its limits buy cost reduction initiatives is not going to learn how to write macros or how to migrate them.
Yes, I am speaking from experience. I get requests like "please install program x on 70 computers in the next couple of days because 70 people are changing jobs, oh, I know you have 87 trouble tickts and IT staff was just moved into its present office and still have stuff to box up and relocate, but this is important!". No warning, no overtime is possible, just somehow make it happen without ignore any of your other responsibilities. Sigh...
I can't afford a sig!
I work for IBM. I have never seen a single Macintosh at the company. At first I thought it was strange but I've become used to it. There were some Macs used in advertising departments in several acquisitions but they were all surplussed. IBM was big on OS/2 and now then they switched to Windows 98. Now they use Windows 2000 or XP for the most part. However lots of engineers, developers and researchers use Linux, AIX or Solaris on their desktops. There is even an officially supported version of Red Hat for internal use which comes preconfigured with WINE to run Lotus Notes (the corporate email, calendar and groupware client), MTS (VPN connectivity), a "piece love and Linux" screensaver, ISSI (corporate software distribution and installation software) and SameTime (corporate chat client).
And that is just the everyday features of the interface. There were far more advanced items. Want to change an applications colors? Drop a color onto the part you want to change from the color app. Want to change a font? Do the same: either system wide or for that app only. Ever use an app like Relish? Want to schedule an appointment? Drag off an appointment from the appointment icon (template object) on the desktop. You can scatter the appointments around the desktop, folders, file system, *wherever* you wanted. Want a list of appointments? No problem: you can still bring up a boring old list. In other words, you had the same traditional list-type tools of any other PIM, but the ability to work completely object-oriented if you wished.
There were *so* many ways of making OS/2 work in an intuitive fashion. Even where your intuitive and mine were completely different. It was more than customizability, it was more than features, it was more than options. It was all of that and more.
If all you ever did was use OS/2 like a Windows or MacOS desktop, you would have never seen these features. All you would have seen was an ugly desktop. That's why saying, "Just look at it in Bochs (which, by the way, can't run OS/2: I've worked with the developers to fix this and it just won't!)" demonstrates that you don't understand the power available within the Workplace Shell. It has nothing to do with looks. It has everything to do with power. Ugly? Yes. Different? Somewhat. Surpassed in polish, style and traditional GUI features by modern GUI's? Definitely. Surpassed in sheer intuitive usability, advanced features and depth of integration into the file system, network and application interface? Not at all.
Again, I've heard that BeOS is very similar. In fact, I've tried to find a place where I can easily get BeOS and play, but only just to see. I just wish there were a live OS with even half of the features I used for nearly a decade with OS/2...
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
No, but the full Solver package is available from the company that MS licenses Excel's Solver from.
So it could be good enough for them to make it work eventually for OpenOffice.
However, hopefully the current RAND() errors in Excel are not duplicated in OpenOffice!