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If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins
Julie188 writes "Microsoft blogger Mitchell Ashley, who has been using Windows 7 full-time, predicts that Windows 7 will fail to lure XP users away from their beloved, aging operating system — after all, Windows 7 is little more than what Vista should have been, when it shipped two years ago. But eventually old PCs must be replaced and then we'll see corporations, desperate to get out of the expense of managing Windows machines, get wise. Instead of buying new Windows 7 PCs, they could deliver virtualized XP desktops to a worker's own PC and/or mobile device. Ashley believes that Citrix's Project Independence has the right idea."
If all I need is a netbook running linux (cheaper), or a newer computer, again, with linux, in order to hit the citrix backend, isn't this a net win for linux?
Really, Citrix? If anyone ever asks me about it again I will go postal. Are you seriously saying you need 4 beefy servers to run 50 users' Outlook and Internet Explorer and then still have it go dog slow.
Citrix has some good ideas and technology. The implementation however is usually very bad. It's the Peoplesoft of virtualization.
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Leaving your snark aside, if your point was true then we'd see a mass migration to Vista. It isn't happening, and so the future of Windows 7 remains in doubt.
How is this a 'win' for Citrix? Every time I've used it it's been buggy (From OS X Client) and slow (over normal Cable). A local virtual machine beats this hands down. In 5 years I will be able to run XP just fine on my 64bit, 5Ghz octo-core, 16GB of ram and have VMWare make a nice 32bit, 3GB of ram, dual processor for XP.
Hell I'm still using Mandriva 7 on my laptop and I'm still perfectly happy with it. I am not upgrading it to the last one or tu Ubuntu (insert the latest stupid name here). My Mac is running Tiger. Don't need Leopard or some stupid shining Time machine, thank you very much.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I'm currently working with vdm and Sun's SunRay Server software...
It's very nice, and since the virtual desktop machines sit on the ESX cluster, hardware upgrades are too damned easy...
Install the new hardware, load esx, add to the cluster and migrate running VMs as needed (or watch them migrate automatically if any of the old cluster members are overloaded)...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Everyone really is terrified by the idea of the Linux desktop aren't they.
;-)
Linux is use is growing here for people home use, even among non-programmers. It's free and fast. That's winning people. I think Linux is going main stream, and the more it does the more it will. It's coming up from the notebooks and down from the servers. It really does seam like the whole of the GNU/Linux world is going critical mass. Sorry Windows guys, you worse fears are coming.
I'm just pontificating here but I think we might not see the vast sweeping in of some new wholly dominant OS but a fragmentation of various solutions that work. A company might run a uniform platform just for IT's sake but that doesn't mean the company next door is running the same flavor.
I really like OSX but I don't think Apple is trying to position it for the corporate desktop. The friendly Linuxes like Ubuntu remain incredibly strong.
People have been predicting the era of the thinclient for years. Their arguments were compelling but nothing happened. There's advantages to having thick clients and you're simply not going to be able to deliver graphically-intensive content over the pipe, not for at least another generation or three.
My prediction for what might make sense (not that it will 100% happen but at least is plausible) is for businesses to go with thick client closed box PC's. The phone system is the model here. There's nothing to tweak inside a PC anymore. There's not really any such thing as computer repair. At most you have a hard drive go bad, rarely a stick of ram dies. For the most part any problem is going to be software.
What we're going to see is all-in-one PC's on the typical desktop, built like the new iMac with the computer sitting in the back of the monitor. (Though there will also be the option of connecting a pure thinclient to the same network.) Easy to install, easy to replace. It will have a custom linux install on it and can run apps either locally or via citrix windows. These all-in-one PC's will also have multiple video ports so that additional monitors can be driven from the same machine. Legacy Windows apps will run in Wine, complicated legacy apps will be served via the citrix or whatever server, and new apps will probably be developed for Linux but served out for the legacy Windows boxes. That's the situation we're in now with web appps acting as the platform-agnostic way of serving data to PC, Mac, Linux, phones, etc.
I think for the typical 20 person office there will be one server in the back room running everything, maybe a failover box duplicating all of the resources. The major apps are housed locally so that they can keep working in case of a network problem but it will all phone back to the main office for synchronizaiton. Database-driven apps will work along the Google Gears model where offline copies of recent data are stored on the client or at the location's server so that failover from network problems is seamless. And because telephony is all going to IP, your phone guys and your computer guys will eventually become the same guy, it'll all fall under the aegis of "office electronic stuff."
I think we're going to see much longer product upgrade cycles since there isn't a compelling reason to upgrade every 2-3 years. We might see terminals lasting happily for 8-10 years, maybe longer. There will still be big-box PC's in the office for those who need something special but that will be the exception.
Now just because this all seems reasonable that's not to say it'll happen this way. But I just see a migration away from Windows, it seems like Microsoft simply cannot innovate fast enough these days. (maybe wishful thinking, maybe not.)
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If he is talking about existing PC's then I agree. My gut tells me that most regular people never upgrade their operating system anyway.
If he is talking about businesses making the move when they replace equipment then I suspect he is quite wrong. Most businesses have avoided Vista not because they love XP, but because Vista has issues and requires beefy hardware. Windows 7 has two things going for it in this regard.
The first is that it does seem to be quite an improvement over Vista. I've used it continuously for the past three weeks and I quite like it. I do not like Vista. The Vista shell pisses me off for many different reasons that I won't go into here. Windows 7 fixes all of my little pet peeves and I really like the new window manager.
The second is that what was beefy expensive hardware when Vista shipped is now standard kit and quite inexpensive. Businesses in the U.S. can depreciate computers over five years. Any businesses PC purchased before 2005 will have fully depreciated by the time Windows 7 is an option and companies will be upgrading to new machines. A high-end computer purchased in 2005 or earlier probably did a terrible job running Vista. Most entry-level computers purchased in 2007-2008 to replace PCs purchased in 2002-2003 will run Windows 7 just fine.
Windows 7 will see significant uptake in businesses compared to Vista.
No Machine so far has been a great alternative for VNC and the like to work with remote Linux desktops and even virtually. I've tried both their free NX server edition and the FreeNX server. FreeNX still needs some love/work in making it easier to get up and going, especially on Debian. The free NX server edition works better than FreeNX because I've been experiencing refresh/display corruption over time using FreeNX and not with the retail/free NX server using the same NX client (of which is always free, currently anyway) on Windows and Linux desktops.
:)
I especially liked how extremely well NX works with slow connections, not necessarily slow on the client side, but with extremely pitiful 128kbps upload speeds from the server such as my home DSL connection when I'm away. I use to prefer VNC until I found out about NX of which is just more enhancements to the X11 protocol over SSH as far as I can tell (I'm definitely no expert as to what all goes in behind the scene). It Just Works(TM).
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"from their beloved, aging operating system "
Software does not age. People's requirements change. And that is just the problem (for MS), XP still meets the majority of needs for people.
And in some cases, Wine has already become more usable. Take WineASIO, for instance. I get incredibly low latency using Wine/WineASIO and Windows VSTs under Linux that I never got under XP.
This article really assumes that the expense of managing Citrix server farms will be significantly less than the expense of managing the XP machines.
Not that I am saying it wont be but as someone with a decent amount of experience managing servers and even with Citrix servers I'm not sure you can just say that.
Even if it's true, old habits are hard to break.
I'm not so sure about that. I work for a high-tech aerospace/electronics company, there are 3,000 people here at corporate headquarters, and we have replaced hundreds of windows workstations with linux and mac workstations over the last 18 months. All the windows boxes are running XP. The world isn't ending, we're adapting, and there is nothing the linux and mac users can't do that they couldn't before on windows except run Outlook.
your wife or kid has someone at home who actually knows how to use Linux
This is not the case nearly as much as it used to be. I visited my parents over Christmas, 1100km away. I've been telling my mom for years to switch to linux. Not because I think that everybody should use linux, but because she has some long-standing issues with her computer that don't affect linux. She has so far refused, simply out of fear of having to learn computers all over again.
My dad, on the other had, needed a computer for his business (an automotive shop). I told him I could put one together for x dollars, and add $110 if he wants it to run Windows. "Why would I want it to run Windows?" he asked. Honest question, but I didn't have an answer, since I'd already verified that the applications he would be using were web-based. He's been running xubuntu since Christmas and I never hear about it.
Compare that with my sister and her five young kids, 1800km away. My brother Tyler wanted to put together a budget computer for them four years ago and asked my help. We partitioned the hard disk in half, put windows on one and ubuntu on the other (because I thought that everybody should use linux). He also gave them a cheap lexmark printer that didn't work in ubuntu, so they chose to run windows. Two years later I found out that the printer is long dead and they've all taken to booting into ubuntu because their internet music and videos work better that way.
Compare that with my two brothers Ray and Rick, 500 km away. I helped them both upgrade computers in the last six months. Ray reused his windows xp from the old computer. Rick didn't have an xp disk, so I put an unactivated copy of xp on one partition and ubuntu on the other. I showed him how to dual-boot and told him he could probably find an xp crack if he wanted. He never booted into Windows.
Ray and Rick both have XBOX 360s and both have spent the last month or two trying to get media to stream. Both have had limited success. To Rick, running ubuntu I sent some links to ubuntuforums.org discussing media server options. For Ray, running windows I had to instruct him to install vnc and open ports on his router so I could get in and eventually figure out that some necessary system services weren't running. I dug up a batch file off the internet requiring an ecclectic mix of programs. I spent hours installing these and duct-taping them all together on his system and things still don't work as they should.
Rick's brother-in-law had a laptop that pooped out its hard disk. It didn't come with a windows install disk, and he was too cheap to buy one, so Rick, on my advice, bought a replacement hard disk and installed ubuntu for him. He called once to ask about printer compatibility, but that is the sum total of support given to him for this computer in the past year.
And finally, compare these with my brother Tyler again, 1800 km away, who two years ago bought a mac because he is technologically challenged and wanted something point and click. This morning he emailed me to ask if I would recommend putting Ubuntu on his client's computer, currently running Windows Malware Edition(R). He is burning the xubuntu iso as I write this.
Yeah, none of these linux installs would have happened without my initial intervention, but that's a PR thing. None of these people are computer geeks, not even close. Technically speaking, I've done less support for my linux-using family than I have for my windows-using family. Your opinion is at best 2 years out of date.
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