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Novell Expects Vista to Spur Linux Adoption
It doesn't come easy writes "According to the Register, Novell expects the cost of upgrading to Vista will encourage many companies to turn to Linux instead. From the article: 'Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading. Obviously, if they're right Novell hopes that turn will be toward SUSE Linux.'" We touched on this issue late last month, as well.
The problem with this view is that with big deployments, the Microsoft "price per seat" is always negotiable, especially when you bring a possible Linux migration into the equation. In fact we have seen this: XYZ government or company makes noise about moving to Linux, and Microsoft simply negotiates a lower price. When migration cost is the key issue, Microsoft has the upper hand. However, when other issues such as "open standards" are the issues, Microsoft can't compete. The problem is not selling lower TOC, it'' selling the benefits of "open standards". It's too bad that many Linux "evangelists" frame Linux migration arguments in the context of ideology, because governments and companies are rarely interested in these things, they have budgets to meet and people to serve.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Hell's bells - trusted monitor - are you serious? I can't believe what people would put up with.
Oh well, what the hell...
This is the thing Open Source advocates often miss (not flaimbait, I advocate OSS and use Linux). When you are a large company delpoying Windows, the price of licenses for 50 000 machines isn't the problem. The problem is how much it costs to support it. These are companies with budgets of millions, billions, of dollars. An administrator doesn't have time to tinker with distributions, and create a system from scratch, there need to be packaged, reliable system from big name vendors which do this with ease. Try being a sysadmin for a week and you'll know what I mean. I want to deploy Linux, but doing requires more time than I, or anyone else, has.
The amount large companies spend on support contracts dwarf what they spend on actual licenses. When your running Windows you can get a contract which will guarantee a support time of under two hours.
The other part is how to manage it and deploy it. Things like ActiveDirectory, which are a pain in the ass, but they provide one complete, integrated location to go to for managing everything. I know you can setup the same thing in Linux but it takes ALOT longer, because you have to do everything manually.
Those two points are what keep companies from adopting Linux. Linux needs reliable support from big names, Novell is stepping up here, but they still aren't IBM. As for the management system, I have no idea, I have yet to find a system that will handle users, desktop lockdown, applications management/deployment/permissions, etc. from one, central, automated location. Even Apple has managed to create a system to do this (I manage an OS 9/OS X/Windows mixed environment).
(NOTE: By automated I mean, I change the desktop lockdown settings and every computer changes instantly. And adding more desktops is as simple as choosing a setting like "Managed by Server: lmanage.internal.company.org")