Linux Making Inroads, But Not At Windows' Expense 323
zaphod123 writes "According to this article, the stories about Amazon (and others) switching to Linux have been misrepresented. The Linux install has replaced a proprietary Unix system, not a Microsoft Windows product. This is still "A Good Thing" for Linux, but not the downfall of Microsoft that some have foreseen."
Maybe one particular case misrepresented, not all. (Score:2, Informative)
Regardless of what that article says, the costs are very real and companies are definitely considering it. Perhaps one or two cases may have been misinterpreted, but by and large the case for converting to Linux has not been mispresented.
--jordan
No surprise (Score:1, Informative)
Linux will never make serious inroads into the mainstream desktop market until some big entity, like IBM, puts a huge amount of money into a focused effort to remove those barriers. And there's no sign that IBM or anyone else has any economic incentive to spend that much money to convert customer desktops from one OS to another. In other words, we're approaching an equilibrium state in the vast majority of the OS market: Windows and Mac OS on the desktop, Linux and UNIX on the servers.
Re:Obviously there's truth to that. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obviously there's truth to that. (Score:2, Informative)
B. Screw application. What about the CODE?? If Amazon was written in ASP with heavy use of COM objects, you'd have to do a multi-million dollar re-write to make it into a CGI/C application. Administrators are by-and-large button pushers. It's the application that's expensive, not the administration.
Re:Try it on grandma. (Score:5, Informative)
It is true that the majority of Linux wins are at the expense of UNIX, which explains the support of Sun and IBM (if you can't beat them, join 'em). However, there is a little more to this that meets the eye.
Proprietary UNIX is great in some niche markets, but it does not compete cost-effectively with Linux or Windows. If the migration costs were the issue, why would people be moving both to Windows 2000 and Linux from UNIX, not just Linux? This trend is also evident when one looks at the Netcraft numbers (and actually reads their comments).
The real issue, though, is that adding Linux servers IN PLACE OF Windows 2000 servers for certain tasks may also be happening. If people are already switching from UNIX to NT-based OS's, then Linux's wins are definitely at Windows expense, in denied market share rather than in lost market share (Windows never had the market share to begin with). All of this is on the server.
Also, the data in the article was out of date (about 2 yerars old). Linux currently has about 2% desktop market share in the corporate environment accordign to the IDC as of last Feb. (I assume that most of these are technical workstations). But again, this may deny the 64-bit XP some market share as time goes on.
Now for the ease-of-use question:
in other words, after you get done with the hassles of Linux, and the hassles of Win2k, the hassles of Linux are a little bit more. time=money, so the cost of that extra hassle is the same as the cost of Windows & its apps.
On a corporate level, yes. On an individual level, not so sure. I have watched people who are not computer gurus struggle endlessly with the insanity of WIndows. So it is not really newbie friendly either. In fact the only newbie friendly OS is arguably Mac OS!
However, I have found that newbies that get started with Linux learn much more rapidly about their computer because it is more transparent. A good example of this is my parents, who went from being lost on Windows 95 to being lost on Red Hat 6.1. Funny thing, if I set up the desktop with their use in mind, they had fewer problems than they did with Windows 95. They started using their computer more, and now (even though they no longer use Windows) are able to help all their friends use Windows. So I think that Windows is "user friendly" because that is what people have struggled with and put a lot of effort into learning. Not that it is innately so. Expect Linux to take more of the desktop in the next few years...
Re:From the thank-you-capt-obvious department.... (Score:2, Informative)
I work in a Sun based datacenter. Just yesterday I got in a Ultra 10 that would not boot because they had the jumpers configured wrong on the HD's (two internal IDE's). A few months ago we purchased a E250 that arrived with a dead motherboard. We also have had a A5200 disk enclusure that the sun hardware reps had to totally tear down and replace every board in it to make it work, and it sill only works if you remove the A interface board (which means we don't have the redundent IO paths).
I could go on and on with the hardware failures that we've had at our small datacenter (we only have about 30 machines). Surfice it to say, Sun's hardware sucks these days.
This raises an important issue for OpenSourceLobby (Score:3, Informative)
So the question is this: how much effort should we devote to pushing Linux and BSD as alternatives to close-source OS's?
My answer to that question is "not much". We need to focus on our main adversary: Microsoft. John Q. Public and Buford T. Congressman are probably not going care much about which version of Un*x somebody ought to choose, but will care very much about whether to use Windows.
In short, "open source Un*x or close source Un*x?" is simply not on the political map, and doesn't need to be.
-Miko
Re:Try it on grandma. (Score:2, Informative)
On the other hand, a friend of mine recently decided to install Linux (Debian) on her PC. She lives 300 km away, so I had to support her by phone, and we spent countless hours on the phone walking through the install procedure and the config files to get her system up and decently running. Supporting a newbee on the phone is certainly the best way to discover how horrible Linux can be.
Conclusion ? Grandma certainly cannot use Windows without substantial help, but Linux is rather unuseable as well. Personally, I learned to use Unix before I ever saw Windows, so I find Windows pretty painful. I think neither Windows nor Linux is user-friendly - it just depends on what you are familiar with.