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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
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.
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.)