It depends what strata of business you are talking about. Let me divide
the business strata into 4 pieces
1) <50 desktops administered by the local 'computer person'. The one
who knows the most.
2) 50-200 desktops with maybe a local professional, otherwise using
hired gun or contract support
a) with heavy ties to the MS infrastructure (VB, asp, AD, vertical
apps, etc)
b) without heavy ties to the MS infrastructure
3) The large corporate desktop (200-50,000 users)
Type 1 is already starting to move. The availability of web interfaces
for many applications is helping here. The holdup is the number of
people (computer persons) who are familiar with Linux. With the aging
of our first generation of high school/casual users, this problem will
be 'grown out of'.
Type 2a will happen as companies begin to see the true cost of the MS
addiction. If you've ever tried to scale Active Directory or Exchange
across a geographically dispersed company you know what I mean. The
*nix alternative can be orders of magnitude cheaper with less security
implications. Some companies are beginning to see this. For instance,
if you deploy Active Directory today, you are facing 2 (at least)
major infrastructure upgrades in the next 2-3 years. One from the
current AD to the next version, then from that one to .Net/AD, which
will not be the same version at all. Not a good thing to do with your
authentication infrastructure.
Type 2b is already happening, too. There is a growing group of
professional support consultancies that can make the arguement for
moving your corporate desktop to Linux (Russ Herrold and Owlriver being
an example). For organizations who have little tie in to custom apps,
or who are looking to replace legacy or proprietary applications (ie,
dbase accounting, home grown infrastructures, etc) the financial and
support arguements are beginning to be very obvious. Microsoft is our
biggest ally here, since they are forcing people to throw away or upgrade
working systems (ie, 9x desktops). In some very important niche markets,
the EULA is going to bite them big time because of the Federal privacy
regs. (ie HIPPA in the medical space, GLBA in the financial space.) I
cannot agree to a EULA that allows my vendor to access my data when I am
responsible (meaning stripes and bars if I dont' do it) for maintaining
the privacy of data.
Type 3 is dependent on some of the same things, plus 'enterprise' level
support. Right now, only RedHat (and maybe IBM) provides 24x7x365 level
1,2,3 support contracts, and really only for servers at that. As the
early adopters in a vertical market (say Amazon) get publicity for how
much they are saving using open source tools, the other companies will
have to participate in the arms race. I think it will become
increasingly difficult to maintain the arguement of 'soft savings' from
using MS products (ie, they make my programmers more productive) in the
face of hard dollar savings (fewer, smaller servers with less downtime
and lower license/maintenance fees). Sun is already pushing this. Did
you catch the 2 ads in this week's eWeek about 'self maintaining'
computers? Full page. The tight economy and capitalistic market forces
will push this market, but it will be another year or two.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP jim@rossberry.com
http://www.rossberry.com
On 18 Nov 2002, David Meyer wrote:
> Good Morning All,
>
> I certainly don't wish to fan the flames, but this discussion has made
> me believe all over again that the one thing that will keep Linux from
> getting where it needs to be in the desktop market is the fighting back
> and forth about distributions, etc.
>
> Now I know that might not be totally accurate, but I am not the only one
> on this list who sees this as a problem as others have talked with me
> about this very thing.
>
> So, to that end, I am curious to know what some of you out there think
> about this. More specifically, what is it that is keeping Linux from
> STRONGLY coming out on the desktop market?
>
> We're 99% Microsoft free here (just converting some files now from one
> machine) throughout our house. One reason is this list. I have a
> replacement for virtually every MS program thanks to many of you.
> Surely if we can do it (wife and kids included) others can to. So my
> question is what can we do to help people make the change?
>
> Just a thought...
>
> Dave
>
>
>
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