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IDC: NT usage is mostly hype
zealot writes "This CNN story reports that International Data Corp. has done research on OS use in businesses and has determined that the amount of NT usage is mostly hype and marketing. It is typically only used for departmental infrastructure, and hardly ever for mission critical stuff. UNIX is still alive and kicking. "
The guy who is quoted in the story, Dan Kusnetzky, also did the Linux report that came up with the 212% growth figure, but he also told me that IDC only expects Linux to grow by 25% per year for the next five years. That doesn't make sense, does it? He was also very sceptical of the figures for Linux installs, and admitted that IDC's methodology was not "efficient", and they only had two years-worth of statistically significant data to work from.
Other comments of his were more FUDdy, though - he believes Linux is "like Unix was in the early 70's" and could suffer from fragmentation.
Oh, and he can talk the hind legs off a donkey ;). He once talked to me on his mobile, in his car, all the way from his hotel to the conference he was attending in San Francisco - about an hour at least. And he did all the talking.
--
Barry de la Rosa,
Reporter, PC Week (UK)
Work: barry_delarosa[at]vnu.co.uk,
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Barry de la Rosa,
public[at]bpdlr.org
My
I'm reminded of a joke I heard back before NT 3:
Q: What machine runs NT best?
A: A slide projecter.
Yeah, I know, you've heard it before.
A coworker who is very experienced with NT says he can configure a department mail/file/web server so that it doesn't need rebooting more than every 3 months. I believe the guy knows what he's talking about. He knows what services to turn off that make NT slow/unstable; he also goes into the registry to tweak things.
After talking with this fellow, I believe that NT 4.0 has at its core a stable, reasonably good operating system well-suited for small to medium-sized department-level servers. But you have to be an expert to get that -- it doesn't seem to come "out of the box". So the results of this survey don't surprise me much: if you take NT beyond its capabilities, or aren't an expert at tuning it, you're going to struggle.
Let's face it, though: NT is popular. That is, it sells well. If many of these customers are finding that NT isn't all it's supposed to be, well, you live and learn.
The lesson from Microsoft, again, would be that marketing excellence is better than technical excellence.
(BTW, my NT coworker is also a longtime linux/unix user.)
--JT
A lot of media hype surrounding Linux doesn't make sense because nobody really understands it. Linux was almost completely unknown this time last year, even though companies like Oracle were already working on porting their software to it. Suddenly, it's become this huge bandwagon, which noone really understands, because there's been nothing like it before, and the media end up listening to so-called experts like Matrin Butler, who really know damn-all about Linux and it's capabilities.
b uted-database stuff, and it's all very cool. The reduced reliability of Linux on PC hardware is offset by it's lower cost.
:)
There's been so much hype thrown about by the media, presenting it as the Microsoft-killer and so on. For example, Linux is now being touted as a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop.
Bollocks, I say. Linux is nowhere near the point where it can compete with Windows on the desktop. It can compete with Windows NT in the server market, yes - As someone else pointed out above, Linux+Samba kicks NT's ass into a sling. In fact, Linux+netatalk also kicks Apple appleshare servers into touch. But, bring Linux to the desktop in the same way as Microsoft managed to do with Windows, will be a long, long haul.
The fact is, that, on the ground, people are going ahead, implementing Linux as a server for a variety of purposes, and ignoring all the hype. I've installed Linux machines as file, print, mail, web, and database servers. They require a fraction of the administration required by NT and are more stable and more powerful.
However, would I reccomend a Linux installation for the desktop or for a high-performance mission-critical server? No. I'd reccomend Windows NT workstation (or MacOS) on the desktop and a Sun Enterprise server for the mission-critical stuff.
In the future, this might change. Linux definitely has a future. At the moment, I'm doing some R&D into Linux/Beowulf/Clustering/High-Availability/distri
Anyway, the point is that there's no point in trying to predict what's going to happen with Linux. To forecast where something's going to go, you must know from whence it came, and Linux came out of nowhere, so the statisticians don't have any historical data. Add to that the fact that it's a completely new phenomenon - a free operating system hasn't never attained this position in the past, so the statisticians don't even have anything similar that they can use to make a model.
Everybody's getting all worked up, but it doesn't matter what anyone says - Linux is going where it's going and noone can really influence what happens to it, because noone controls it.
In fact, it's all rather cool.
Jack
In my experience (I administer both NT and UNIX server) NT is fine as long as you don't throw high loads at it. We havea 4-CPU NT server (2 GB RAM) which still has to be rebooted from time to time because really random things break if we really bang on the server for a while.
... although after being used to Linux, I find the default software Sun ships (no compilers, etc.) on the anemic side ... I don't think a comercial UNIX can match the quiality and the amount of tools your typical Linux install comes with ...
...
Linux on the other hands, has been running in our office on an old crappy P90 laptop for 5 Months straight now handling web serving, web surfing and the occasional compiling of Gtk+/Gnome stuff.
Or Solaris machine which runs about 10 reasonably big Oracle databases, has been running without a hitch for something like a year now
Of course NT beams you straight into GUI land from Hell which positiveley blows chunks once you're comfotable with the UNIX command line