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Yankee Group Survey Says Windows, Linux TCO Equal
prostoalex writes "A new survey by Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio shows Windows and Linux are viewed as equal by U.S. businesses. In the eternal OS wars, '88 percent of respondents said that the quality, performance and reliability of Windows was equal to or better than Linux.' Companies were also asked to rank the operating systems on security. On a scale of 1 to 10 'companies rated Microsoft's security at 7.6, double the rating in a similar survey conducted last year. Linux's rating was mostly the same at 8.3.' Conclusion? 'DiDio said that most companies -- whether large or small -- rarely take the huge step of replacing one operating system with another. Instead, they usually add a mix of Windows and Linux server software to expand functionality.' Microsoft used last year's Yankee Group survey results in their Get the facts campaign."
"Instead, they usually add a mix of Windows and Linux server software to expand functionality."
Thus, they have the ability to directly compare between both. If they find Linux to be infinitely better, they would switch. Different tasks -> different tools, however, so they use both.
webpage
DiDio is a total shill for Microsoft. I don't know why /. dotes on her every word. She isn't an unbiased source, y'know.
The non-biased information all says the obvious: Linux has TCO ownage on Windows. That said, I'd like to see a TCO study where Linux and Windows are compared to MacOS X, especially now that Apple has a relatively cheap model that could be a great replacement for enterprise desktops.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm just tired of DiDio. Isn't she the one who said just last year, that it will take Linux close to a decade to even be percived to be competitive to Windows? I better become an analyst to. How do I start? And there is Gartner too spewing "facts" about Linux all the time...
It's really too bad that we don't have access to the actual study. Without it it is hard to judge very much. I went to the Yankee Group web site and found their press release, which is a little bit more informative than the news item, but not much. Elsewhere on the Yankee Group site they reveal that the study will not be available until JUNE 2005. Funny that they are issuing press releases now about a study that won't be released for two months. I wonder if that is so that they can have their impact now and defer the hard criticism?
Anyhow, there was an interesting bit in the YG press release:
I think that this gives us a hint of what is going on. If MS Windows were really perceived as better than Linux, or even equal, the cost of making a change and general inertia would presumably result in little Linux adoption. The fact that the same businesses in which MS Windows has an overall reputation of being better than Linux are adding Linux or shifting partly to Linux suggests that there is actually a perception of Linux as better and/or cheaper. I suspect that what is going on is that the reputation questions were answered largely by managers with little firsthand technical knowledge, who have, however, been pushed by their technie subordinates to allow a shift in the direction of Linux.
In terms of security, Yankee Group's survey showed a sharp rise in companies' assessment of Microsoft's security level, bringing it closer to perceived security level of Linux.
May be more accurately phrased:
In terms of security, Yankee Group's survey showed a sharp rise in companies' perception of Microsoft's security level, bringing it closer to the assessed security level of Linux.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Seriously, this is so void of legible response that it makes it painful to read.
Your conceptions are clearly misguided on the basis that you seem to not know what you are talking about.
This is obviously not a jab at you personally or professionally. I'm sure you are extremely qualified and good at whatever it is that you do.
However, you are clearly lost. Bill Gates personal life and his business acumen and behavior are two completely different things. Praising the man for his general charity doesn't expound to his or the companies he works for behavior in the computing industry. Please learn to seperate the two. That said you would do yourself good to try other operating systems.
Hosting via Windows is russian roulette. I say this because i've done the real life test myself. I'm no windows professional. Infact, in Dec of 1994 I stopped using windows when an OS/2 warp disk of mine died and an IBM engineer at the time gave me a copy of linux. There are so many black magic items in Windows that it would take an increasing amount of time for me to learn them all. Windows isn't easy to learn, it's easy to click alot of buttons and try to get it working but that doesn't enable me to understand what is going on or what is happening with my computer.
This has lead me to believe that windows administrators simply don't care about their systems enough to know how they work. They just want a patch or a quick fix or to press a couple of buttons and reboot. I've even extended myself to try and find a good windows administrator to learn from. I hate windows, but I'm clearly trying to understand where the low cost TCO and ease of use come from. If anyone is willing to help with this please feel free to contact me.
The documentation via Microsoft is often incorrect or not detailed. In most cases the behavior exhibited isn't what the documentation is really for and/or there are completely missing chunks of steps via documentation. An example of this would be smartcards. In Unix land, these problems are mitigated by having the source. Also, man pages usually are exacting, so my questions are answered. This isn't available via windows.
I switched over a heavily trafficed site to Windows based on contract purposes and it crashed, repeatedly. Why? I'm still amiss as to why. There was simply no way to fix this. Microsoft said they would look into this and I'm not sure if they ever did. My caring well ran dry way before that. I took the same site and put it on a Solaris box, that was in 2001. I haven't touched it since. It's still running from the time I powered it on, this is about 3 years and 9 months later.
So my experience with Microsoft has been the complete opposite. I'm not sure they've made a positive difference in the computing industry. Even with the low cost of hardware which can be traced back to hardware manufacturers and competition. Microsoft hasn't provided software that changes people lives or allows for general productivity in the work place. Computers are to be aids, tools to real life work. Has Microsoft changed my life or allowed me to be productive? To date, no, they've allowed me to be less productive. To get less work done. I spend more time fiddling with windows machines than trying to work on new interesting things. It annoys me.
In comparison, if I put a unix box up to do something. I walk away, and usually I don't come back. I go on to other things.
Unix/Linux/Open Source allows me to learn to enable productivity. It allows me to get my job done and go home and enjoy other things.
Other than SCO and Darl McBride, I think DiDio is probably held in the lowest possible esteem over on Groklaw. They quote her a lot, and she seems to get it wrong nearly every time. The opinions that I have read by her are consistently pro-SCO, pro-Microsoft, and anti-open source, to the point that I don't think she can be considered an even remotely reliable source.
So it's particularly interesting that "TCO is equal" is the best she could come up with. If that's the best they can manage, it's a huge win for Open Source. When TCO is equal, why on earth would you pick the software that costs more up front?
The claim must be that Linux costs more to run, since it's free to install. That was the exact method that Microsoft used for ages to get ahead in the market... it was cheaper up front but cost more to run. That can actually be a very smart business decision, since presumably you'll have more money later than you do now, particuarly if your business is just getting off the ground. (That's part of why leases do so well.)
Of course, we all know that Linux is probably cheaper to maintain once you have the skills to do so, possibly by an order of magnitude, due to the absolute control you have over the system and the enormous power of the built-in scripting languages.
But even if you grant that it's more expensive to run, this study shows that Linux is a good choice for many businesses, particularly small ones, or companies growing very quickly without a lot of capital to do it.
The joke is on Thompson, he reinvented VMS badly.
For many years now Microsoft has been patching NT, a single-user system only really suitable for small local networks, into a multi-user system that can cope with many large networks.
Windows NT has always been at core a multi-user operating system. The kernel architecture is derived from VMS which is itself heavily influenced by Multics and ITS. This is not really a surprise since there are not all than many people who have designed O/S and pretty much everything has its roots ultimately in Multics and project MAC.
The problem that faces both UNIX and Windows NT when it comes to networking is that multi-user security and network security are two absolutely different things. The features you need for one do not help much with the other.
Most production Apache servers run on a system that has at most three active accounts. Root, apache and maintenance. To all intents and purposes the separation of apache and root does little more than help prevent the system partion being corrupted, it does not really do much for security since all the data assets of the machine are going to be accessible from the apache account.
If you wanted to actually use the O/S security mechanisms to bear in a meaningful way you would have to configure the Web server to respond to data access requests by spawning off a new process and locking it down with the appropriate system privs each time a privileged access was performed. This is technically possible in both Unix and Windows but it will grind the machine down if you try it with any appreciable load.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Price isn't the only aspect of the idea of licensing software. I think many people don't realize how easy it is to get hardware, and how fluid the hardware situation can be.
Say you have some people doing a data entry job. Say that for whatever reason, you have a sudden excess of data that needs to be entered. With a Linux set up, you could take an old computer, put together a terminal, and have someone enter data for a day, and then you can throw that computer back in a closet. With Windows, you would need to buy a seperate license for that computer, even if you were using it for a day. Similiar situations exist all over, from small jobs like this, to someone who might have a temporary spike in web traffic for a week, and needs another server to cover it. Dealing with the technicalities of getting a license for these things would be somewhere between a nuisance, and a threat (if you do it wrong).
Many people, especially in management, wouldn't realize this is a problem, because they grew up in an era when your computer hardware was too heavy and rare to move. Now, when you could get a P-266 off of a pile, or at a garage sale, and turn it into a backup webserver in one hour, the entire idea of licensing specific computers makes less sense.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.