Gartner Slams Linux

Porag_Spliffing sent us a choice quote from this well researched Gartner group piece which says "The lack of standards in the Linux community, coupled with a lack of key productivity applications and with Unix complexity, will continue to make Linux a poor choice for the mainstream business productivity user."

STUPID KNEE-JERK REACTIONS

I wish that people (INCLUDING the editor who put this story on slashdot) would *READ* the stories first. Your link isn't to a gartner group report. It is to an IDG article about the gartner group report. I will sum up the actual information from the gartner group report: paraphrased: Linux is not really ready for your standard end-user business user yet. There is a lack of standards, and some key productivity applications are missing. But, as linux continues to improve, its appeal will broaden. Okay. Someone PLEASE SHOW ME how the above is "slamming" linux now. What IDG said was THIS: "a damning report from gartner has all but put the kiss of death on linux". Those are *IDG's* words. NOT the gartner group. Next time people should read, and think, before speaking. I'm tired of all of these knee-jerk reactions to perfectly reasonable statements about Linux. It makes us all look like morons.

Uggh.

Ok, this is a rare thing for me, posting 2 sharp-tounged comments on Slashdot in ONE morning, but here goes:

The person who really, truly cares about what the Gartner Group says about X piece of technology is also the person who probably considers his grandest technological decision of the year the large order of CD-ROM labelling devices he made at PC EXPO ("I saved 50 cents a unit by buying 1,000! And they gave me this COOL T-Shirt and stuffed animal!") and steadfastly believes wrestling is real.

Memo to the ignorant: Money = Favourable Gartner Group blurb. Duh.

Linux is NOT competing with Unix!!!!

I'm sick of this arguement from MS, that "It hasn't effected sales of NT" and "Linux is competing with Unix" this is a bunch of BS.

When I set up a system, there are times I need Solaris, but to interact with it, I'm not going to buy NT! I'm going to use Linux, and maybe SCO and maybe BSD or a combination of them.

Linux doesn't have standards? Then why can I have my Slackware system running fine with another Redhat system, as well as a Solaris, and AIX! But problems always arrive when I hook up a NT to the equation.

Sorry, I'll come off my soap box now.

Later :)
Steven Rostedt

Hmm.

The Gartner Group doesn't seem to be doing the slamming. IDG has interpreted this as a "kiss of death" when what Gartner seems to have addressed is the "desktop productivity" side of Linux. Is that a surprise to anybody? Linux isn't quite there yet on the desktop.

I'm glad they were careful to ask Microsoft if Linux was making a dent in NT sales. Glad to see the Linux threat we heard about in the DOJ case has already been vanquished and it's business as usual for the red-blooded innovators of Redmond.

*snork*
------------
Michael Hall
[e-mail]

What a horrible article!

Wow, I'm not sure we should even reply to the author on this one, it's so bad. My favorite part is at the end where a 'spokesperson' (no name, of course) for HP says that Linux isn't 'robust' enough yet. If that truly is someone who works for HP, I guess they haven't been to their web page [hp.com] lately.

Don't disagree with what it didn't say

Incoming !

Expect hordes of knee-jerking Slashdot readers flaming this article without even reading it. The Sacred Penguin is insulted and so its acolytes must rush to its defence.

What the article actually says is that Linux is taking its market share from the nasty old dinosaurs like SCO and building new share in the home geek market. Desktop Windows in offices, where the vast majority of suit-and-tie wearing people work, isn't affected, nor will it be until Word runs under Linux (and Hell freezes over and and Puget Sound runs with molten lava).

People are running Linux on net-connected servers with little or no interactive desktop usage. So when was this ever a big NT stronghold ?

"Another well-researched", my fanny...

I'm growing more and more skeptical of analysis firms as time passes. It's easy to produce a piece of research stating whatever the analyst thinks anyways, by simply taking a few points of data and extrapolating it to the absurd extreme. Gartner and their ilk have produced reports that say Linux will, in fact dominate the marketplace, and reports that claim the opposite within short intervals of one another. My own choice is to believe none of the above.

Trend analysis doesn't generally account for some important factors, like goodwill (or lack thereof) towards vendors, or technical obstacles and breakthroughs that may happen in a development effort. They tend to assume that obstacles (like NT's code bloat or Linux's lack of high-quality SMP support) are insurmountable and that the technical status quo will remain indefinitely. This means that, by analysis standards, current trends will continue indefinitely. If some of the analysis I've read over recent years had worked out as anticipated, then:

1: Apple would be in Chapter 7 bankruptcy

2: Linux would either
a: be non-existent
b: have over a 50% market share

3: Novell would be out of business

4: Microsoft Windows NT would have nearly a 100% market share on servers and desktops, and

5: so would OS/2

6: Microsoft SQL Server would have killed off Oracle

7: We'd all have fully interactive TV sets now (shouting at your TV doesn't count - most of them don't answer).

I'm not trying to paint all analysis with the same brush, but I really don't see much good stuff from these companies.

- -Josh Turiel

Moving the paradigm

Surely the point is that alot of compute is
disappearing from the desktop and heading towards
either the laptop or the server with a LAN in between.


Linux fits ideally with the server, and as people
switch to more this sort of computing, the greater
linux's role is. It is the change in people's
computing attitudes that microsoft should
be worried about, not the OS.


(BTW - I use linux on both the server and the laptop, but I know people who can't leave windows
on their laptop, and that will remain for a while).

Disclaimer on the original Gartner Web Page

Take a look at the bottom of this page [gartner.com]. This is one of the original papers from the "Gartner" people.

The disclaimer at the bottom reads:

Microsoft Web Letter is published by Microsoft. Additional editorial material supplied by Gartner Group, Inc. © 1999. Editorial supplied by Microsoft is independent of GartnerGroup analysis and in no way should this information be construed as a GartnerGroup endorsement of Microsoft's products and services. Entire contents © 1999 by Gartner Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. GartnerGroup disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. GartnerGroup shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

So... in reality... this is bought and paid for FUD from M$.

No denying that...

Time to give up

Alright everyone. I think this quote from some guy has left us with only one option: give up on linux entirely. How can we possibly go on if there is a lack of standards in the Linux community? It's practically pointless to coninue using Linux when there is a lack of productivity applications. I think everyone should just abandon this sinking ship before it destroys us all.

What Linux needs

1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)

2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.

3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.

4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.

The upshot of this whole comment? Take lessons from Microsoft and from MacOS. They've got the (relatively) painless-to-use CLI and the universal GUI. Just because M$ and Apple are the big commercial doesn't necessarily make all their ideas evil; we should feel free to clone the parts of their interfaces that make computers easy to use.

-Ender

Re: Good debunking of Gartner, etc. reports

I have a great deal of skepticism with regard to reports produced by Gartner, Forrester, or other IT analysts, and most of the problems are exactly what you have written.

The problems that you describe are not only in the report-writing consulting world, but exist throughout the entire discipline of managment consulting. Recommendations are constantly made about where an industry or company should be going with NO knowledge of the underlying technical details of the industry or product. Analysts spend a few miniutes looking at Yahoo! Technology news and then make sweeping generalizations about an industry that sound eerily like the press release that was used to write the story. This has only gotten worse as the rise of the Interent and the web has increased the demand for "knowledgeable professionals" and misguided people have stepped in to fill a role that they are not qualified for.

The worst part of the Gartner, etc. knowledge deficit is that they ask the wrong people and accept their answers as true, because they don't have any idea how to check the truth in them. So they listen to some executive complain that he couln't get a video conference because of the firewall configuration and write a report that the firewall is dead and that we need a more "open" computing infrastructure and that firewalls are getting in the way of the flow of information (which they are, but probably for the right reasons).

The Economist had a great bit last week about consultants:

"HERE is a cautionary tale about a telephone giant and a management consultancy. In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices-the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant-and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later."

Finally, I would caution you about banging on a liberal-arts degree. A good liberal arts degree (mine is in history) should mean that the person has some critical thinking and reasoning skills and should be able to learn. Unfortunately, too many analysts have never spent any time on the business end of malfunctioning or poorly designed hardware or software to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then again, I'm probably unusual in that I'll admit when I don't know something and I'll go ask or figure it out before giving an answer.

Garner and their influence..

You feel angry, you want to fight Gartner about this report.. Don't even think about doing this! It's inmature, it's plain stupid and not a good thing to do. This report is already bad enough, but they also can throw out another (bad) report in days. Don't let that happen.

For those who aren't aware of the power of Gartner:

Garner is one of the 5 largest consultancy organisations around and alot of PHB's are in fact using their advise. Organisations rely on these reports for their IT planning. If Gartner says: "Novell Netware 5 is good" then Microsoft has really something to worry about.

IBM (big blue) felt the power of Gartner. IBM reorganised and drasticly changed their business plans because of a single Gartner report (IBM Mainframes will die was the outcome of that report). IBM was doing well but many jobs were lost.

The only right thing to do is to do nothing about this paper. Don't fight it, don't counter it. Just keep on using Linux and all will be well. Someday Gartner will see it's mistake.

It is really so bad?

Do we really care if "[Linux] will continue to make Linux a poor choice for the mainstream business productivity user"?

I don't. I'm having plenty of fun with Linux even if I do have to engorge BillG's wallet some more when I'm at work. (And sometimes at home...)

Why should we care or want to be "mainstream"? Linux need only be useful (which it is) to those that like that sort of thing. Why care about those that don't!

Hatred, even directed at those worthy of it (MS), is a poor choice of motivation.

Gartner amazes me with correctness, for once

It was a shock to me when I had to agree with the Gartner Group's analysis of anything. They have been so steadily wrong for so long that I had to double-check outside for any horsemen of the apocalypse. :-) Regardless of whether this month seems to be Microsoft's to launch attacks on Linux (see this article [slashdot.org]) -- it would be a logical conclusion that this is another Microsoft-paid opinion piece from the Gartner Group -- there are very good points here, and I think clarifications should be made.

Gartner's piece states that Linux is to be avoided for business-productivity applications. Let's not forget what a "business-productivity" application is. It's Word, it's Excel, it's Access, it's PowerPoint. All of these are targeted at single-user applications. (Some might try to say that Access can be used for multiuser applications; let me tell you from experience that you can only get up to about five people before it really starts bombing out. Where I used to work, an Access-based application was totally corrupted by someone leaving their computer on overnight. I don't consider that a multiuser application.)

The problem is that there is really a pretty sad offering along the lines of single-user applications in Linux-based, and indeed other open source systems. I have a Linux workstation here and love it to death, but I'm an administrator and a developer. I have StarOffice for firing off memos, of course -- but there is simply no way I could effectively get the rest of the office to use Linux, even if I had the authority to send out a mandate from on high that Microsoft was to be abolished. (Now, perhaps I could get Macs in here...) :-)

Where Linux as well as other UNIX clones and derivatives do excel is in multiuser applications. I don't care if you have figures showing that IIS performs better; I can do more and I can do it more effectively, and I can do it on an OS that was designed from the ground up to be shared among multiple users. To turn around a key point from that previous Microsoft piece (paraphrased: "Linux was not designed with a GUI in the core"), Windows NT was not designed with multiple users in mind. Its design is based on an OS that still really only can be effectively used by one person at a time. (Want proof? Go into \WINNT sometime and look at all the .INI files -- one person's settings easily override everyone's.)

Let's not also forget the key benefit of free or open source software. I can change it if I need to. I've done so on quite a few incidents, to fit my needs when the stock configurations didn't. My NT system on the other corner of my desk goes largely unused for several applications because I can't change its applications to do what I need them to.

What would it take to bring Linux to the desktop, or as Gartner puts it, the "business-productivity" market? Quite a bit. The latest round of GUI stuff is getting there but there are still so many key points to sweat out. Printing a memo off is still not a no-brainer on your typical Linux system unless it's been set up by someone with a clue. But in the meantime, Linux and other UNIX derivatives are what I and other administrators and engineers swear by for our desktops. We just can't get away from the power. :-)

Re:Linux IS competing with Unix!!!!

EVERY OS competes with every other OS

Yes and I wish MS would acknowledge this!

Again, Linux may be "competing" with Unix, but I see it helping Unix against NT. So, can you compete and help the opposition at the same time? If so, then Yes it does compete. If not then no it doesn't.

I didn't expect you to read my mind, but I was stating that Linux works well with Unix, and NT doesn't. NT may seem to work with Unix, but once MS gets a strong hold on the server market, you will see that stop.

RedHat competes with Caldera, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, etc. and each competes with each other. But I see this as good and healthy competition. Under GPL each one seems to improve the other, all trying to stay on top. But the way Microsoft competes, it is to hurt the opponent and noone (but MS) benefits.

The note about installation "make/configure" and so on was just to say there is generally a way things will work. It's not the best way. RPMs and other utilities are probably better, but are still young. I'm hoping that some "install wizard" should come out and be the end all of installation tools. But I have yet to have any app run on one distribution and not another. I do need to download and install libraries sometimes, but once I do than everything seems ok.

Steven Rostedt

IMPORTANT: MAY HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY MICROSOFT

Look at the disclaimer on the bottom of the page. This article appears to have been written by Microsoft. They evidently have an area on the Gartner Group's web site.

If this is correct, then this represents a new low in astroturfing. They must have known this would look like a Gartner Group analysis.

Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from

Re:Just my 2 cents

I reckon powerpoint is the big missing X. I *still* use MS powerpoint. Everything else linux.

Oh, close, very close. The missing app is the ... Dancing Paper Clip. Linux will never make it into the mainstream with that important piece of functionality missing.

-Brent
--

URL's

The URL's for the stories:

http://www.gartne r.com/webletter/microsoft/article3/article3.html [gartner.com]
http://www.gartne r.com/webletter/microsoft/article5/article5.html [gartner.com]
http://www.gartne r.com/webletter/microsoft/article6/article6.html [gartner.com]

Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from

Some predictions for Linux

According to the article Linux has 3.5% of the server market and is doubling every few months. This roughly agrees with my own research.

So in another 2 doublings or so, say about nine months, Linux will have 10% of the NT Server market. This is a psychologically important figure. At that point lots of press stories will be printed pointing out that Linux has now started making significant inroads into M$ revenues.

The thing that keeps M$ on top now is its reputation for invulnerability. Its certainly not its reputation for quality or value. But this is a very brittle thing. Once it cracks it will crumble and collapse.

So I predict that Linux will reach 10% market share next July or so, and that this will be seen as a major event. Once you hit 10%, 80% is only three more doublings away. So Linux should achieve market dominance some time around mid-2001, and Bill Gates will no longer be the richest man on Earth. Microsoft will probably be taken over some time in 2002.

Paul.

Complexity is like a liquid...incompressible

The Gartner group is missing a key thing that I painfully rediscover any time I install a Linux or Windows system... That complexity will always result in pain (see second law of thermodynamics).

They indicate that the complexity of Linux is a liability. Well, it is, but it is just as much a liability under Windows, but without the tools and controls to address it that are available under Linux.

It used to be that Unix was (relatively) hard, and DOS was (relatively) simple. This was mainly because Unix did so much more then DOS (i.e. networking, multi user support, multi tasking support, etc).

Now DOS (windows) and Unix are much closer in terms of overall capability. And complexity.

Gartner misses two points. First... Microsoft (and most other sources of support) will only really support a very small subset of available hardware (hardware "certified" to work with windows). If you try to get vendors to help you with other products, good luck.

If I were to create an equally small subset of "supported" hardware, I could make Linux darned easy to support and configure as well.

Secondly, the average desktop user NO LONGER DOES their own support. I know, because I (and the rest of you out there like me) do it. I probably solve 200-300 windows problems a year for friends and family, and some can be darn difficult.

I find I spend about the same amount of time setting up both Linux and Windows systems. The difference is that when a Linux system gets working, it stays working. I can count on some random catastrophe on my windows box about once every three months.

The other difference is that when I fix a Linux problem, I generally feel pretty satisfied, as it turns out I was doing something wrong and I now understand what it was and how to do it right. When I fix a windows problem, I am typically just pissed off, because it "magically" went away after performing some random activity (like reinstalling the same driver a third time, or reinstalling window's itself). No explanation, no permanant fix, and I have to leave wondering how long it will be before they call me back to fix it again.

Really, all this article says is that current operating systems contain a large degree of complexity (inevitable in our age of networks and bloated office applications), and that Microsoft has successfully captured the productivity market (read: Microsoft Office).

Both statements are true, and neither "spells the death of Linux".

Ironically, I think the increasing complexity that is inevitable in our computing culture will be an additional driving force to promote Unix...

Unix has been complicated since it's birth, and we have spent 30 YEARS now giving you tools to manage it. You get your unix system, and you get thousands of tools to use on it.

Windows is just now getting complicated. When you get your windows system, it comes with only one tool... a stick of dynamite. The solution to many failure modes it to blow up what you have and start over.

I think Linux needs a better infrastructure to encapsulate error detection and recovery, system configuration and administration, and a better high level encapsulation of the human interface. The foundation is in place however, and tools like gnome, kde, and linuxconf are quickly moving the right direction.

I think Windows needs a better foundation and architecture... it is designed to be flawed at it's core. The user interface is fine (due largely to the fact that they stole it from the mac), but everything under the covers is a mess, and getting worse with every release.

I think Windows is a fantastic consumer wrapping around a terrible design and architecture. It is a credit to a lot of people at microsoft that such a haphazard mess runs as well as it does.

I think Linux is a practical industrial grade wrapping around a great design and architecture. It was designed for smart people to use to do hard jobs well.

I, for one, would much rather be faced with the problem of replacing the industrial grey boilerplate around a state of the art factory with some nice pretty stucco, then have to pull the pretty paper of a great big ball of snot and have to unravel it and keep it working.

Bill Kilgallon

Brilliant!

Yes, there is a serious problem with Gartner group (and other) reports. Unless you are in the trenches with the techies, you really don't know what you're talking about. The Gartner people are smart, but many of them are seriously uninformed. Their senior analysts, who usually do have a track record in the industry they cover, generally haven't developed software in years (the Bob Metcalfe syndrome).

jht makes an important point: even if you ARE technically proficient, it is very tempting to make predictions that fall flat. I love #1 -- who didn't read about 100 different smarty-pants analysts, including Gartner, who predicted the end of Apple? OK, in fairness to Gartner, they tried to temporize their Apple predictions with "probabilities of decreased market share" and "recommendations against" for businesses, but it amounted to same thing.

CEO's (and other executives) really do have a serious problem. They must make technical decisions for their companies, and they have nowhere to turn but to the Gartners of the world. When the CEO is called in front of the board of directors, s/he's got to 'splain him/herself. Years ago, the question from the board was always "Why not IBM? Why did you buy this other crap?" So they bought IBM, defensively. Now they buy Microsoft, defensively. The so-called "Linux hype" has broken up this cozy little defensive arrangement, and the Gartners of the world must scramble to provide their clients with new justifications to provide to their bosses.

Slashdot readers should also understand that there are lots of dirty secrets surrounding these "reports." For example, if your company PAYS for industry coverage by Gartner, generally speaking your company gets an opportunity to present ITS side of the argument in a way that it normally would not, just because of its ACCESS to the analyst(s) writing the report. Gartner will deny this to their last breath, but it's true.

Another dirty little Gartner secret is the quality of the "analysts." I happen to know a Gartner analyst personally, who has been quoted many times in the mainstream press making pronouncements about Micros~1 and others. This person's background? Liberal arts. Has absolutely no clue -- and I should know, I've had to answer a lot of this person's stupid questions over the years.

So the bottom line for Gartner is that they need to rotate out the fuddy-duddies from the 70's, whose last remembrance of Unix is v6 in college on a PDP-11/70. Then they need to ask some important questions about why the majority of competent technoids is so damn excited about Linux and the Open Source movement. Simultaneously, they need to recruit (and pay!) technical people who actually know that they're talking about. For starters, how about people who have hands-on Linux experience and who can explain why we can accomplish

- about 100x more,
- about 100x faster,
- with greater stability,
- in certain problem domains,

with Linux than with Microsoft.

As long as Gartner fails to understand WHY there is a nerd revolution, and WHY Linux is so exciting to the people like us who, increasingly, actually control the technical infrastructure of the world, they will totally miss the point. Their liberal-arts analysts can only see the world through their Microsoft laptops (which constitute, in many cases, the only computer they've ever actually used).

Tho it's fair to disagree with what it DOES say

"Death Knell to Linux" - uhhh, but Linux has been growing, and the rate of growth is, itself, increasing. If that's a "death knell", we need more of them.

Desktop Windows acutally -is- being affected. If it weren't, you wouldn't be seeing sales of Applixware or Star Office. For that matter, Sun wouldn't have -bought- Star Office. They didn't do that out of the kindness of their heart, they did it because there's gold in dem dere hills! (KOffice is vastly superior to MS Office, anyway.) Besides, if you want to get technical, Word DOES run under Linux, if you have Wine installed.

Actually, most of the Linux installations I've seen are desktop, or combined desktop/server. I've seen VERY few dedicated Linux servers. Not because that's not a good configuration, but because Linux can handle both tasks extremely well.

Productivity software - methinks Oracle, Informix, IBM DB/2, Code Warrior, Star Office, Applixware, KOffice, Klyx, BMRT, PoV-Ray, The GIMP, URT, Emacs (!), the complete KDE suite, Enlightenment, the complete GNOME suite, GNU Plotutils, the various Linux PIM suites and FlightGear prove that all the bases that Microsoft claims for NT are covered by Linux. (FlightGear beats the socks off Excel's FS, any day!)

W2K/NT5: don't assume doubling will continue

Disclaimer: I'm not a Microsoft advocate, I'm just an old timer who has been here before.

Why is Linux gaining market share? Much of it has to do with NT4.0 being 4 or 5 years old now. However NT5/W2K will almost certainly ship in the next 6 months.

I hate to say it, but I've seen this before. Before NT 3 shipped, Novel & co were taking the oportunity to erode MS's market share. Where are they today?

My opinion is that W2K will ship, and while it wil be OK, it will probably continue the quality slide started in NT3 -> NT4 caused by being large, complex and closed. The adoption of W2K may be slowed until service packs come out if the problems are bad.

The Linux vs. Win2K market share fight is the interesting one, not his Linux vs. Nt4 thing. Right now Linux has a head start (it's out of Beta), but don't automatically assume that your doubling will continue through next year and the next. MS will change the ground rules.