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"Get the Facts" Campaign Working
brontus3927 writes "According to a Reseller Advocate Magazine write-up, Microsoft seems to be winning its war against Linux. Info-Tech Research Group recently ran a survey that is now being used on Microsoft's Get The Facts campaign. In it were some surprising results. 'After polling 1,400 IT managers and CIOs in SMB corporations, his group found that 48% were not interested in Linux, 15% were not sure about Linux, and only 10% plan to evaluate Linux." Despite this, two-thirds of all webservers run Linux. The disparity in these numbers comes from the fact that most smaller companies' websites are hosted by service providers running Linux servers even if the company itself isn't."
Linux on the Desktop is dead. The Linux desktops have had nearly a decade to mature, and they are all still far, far behind the other major commercial offerings.
I mean, seriously -- I use Fedora for development at work, and it's a joke. The desktop is slow and unresponsive, and installation of new programs is a pain in the ass. I had to install the trial of Rational Rose Modeller the other day, and it was a sad experience. I had to manually create a shortcut to
I'm sure that in this hypothetical alternate universe where people only ever use three applications, Linux might be able to be at least bearable, but beyond that it's a fucking joke. I'm sure that this is, in part, due to the condesending attitude of both desktop camps that "Joe Users are Idiots and They Will Only Need to Browse the Web and Use A Shitty Office Suite". I'm sure that for the 5 people that fit that description, that the shitty office suite that Linux provides will do quite nicely.
Both XP and Tiger are light years beyond anything that Linux has ever been capable of providing. So it's no wonder that corporate uptake is slowing -- as people (wisely) farm out the non-core tasks such as hosting web pages to other companies, all that's left in the corporate environment is a series of networked desktop servers. There might be one or two file servers and database servers that would work a bit better on Linux than on Windows, but the overhead of having a Linux admin there for one or two servers which can work just as well on Windows can't easily be justified.
Seriously, this is not any huge surprise -- the amount of hardware in any given organization that can usefully be transitoned to Linux -- which emphatically includes NONE of the desktops, as "useful" is a criteria -- is so small that the cost of moving them to Linux probably IS more than keeping them on Windows.
Of course, admins love Windows. They hate Linux and Macs, because companies running these systems don't need as many admins.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.