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April 11, 2006 4:00 AM PDT
Perspective: Ushering in a new era of angst at Microsoft
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Until the late 1980s, OS/2 was judged technically superior to Windows, the Mac featured a better user interface, and applications like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 offered more features than comparable Microsoft offerings.
Undeterred, Microsoft eventually dusted the competition by offering good enough technology, superior pricing and attractive bundling. Once it got a foothold on the desktop, Microsoft enhanced its software over time. Ironically, this same strategy is about to lead to a whole lot of angst in Redmond.
At its recent Brainshare conference, Novell demonstrated a beta version of its latest Linux release, Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Until recently, Linux desktops were the domain of hobbyists and geeks, but improvements in Linux releases like Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop will likely broaden the appeal and make Linux a viable choice for a whole lot of business desktops.
This new Linux rips a page out of Microsoft's good-enough playbook.
First, Novell's Linux desktop comes bundled with Open Office 2.1, which supports your basic word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. I'm sure some of the bells and whistles Microsoft bakes in are missing, but there aren't any obvious functionality gaps. In other words, it's good enough for the majority of employees whose jobs depend on doing basic stuff.
Novell's Linux desktop has also greatly improved in terms of installation and driver support. Intuitive wizards guide users through the OS installation process, while devices like printers and USB flash drives are recognized just like Windows plug and play.
Finally, the Linux desktop and Open Office have improved Windows interoperability. You can open a Microsoft Word document using Open Office without losing formatting properties, then save the document in a native format. Linux can also be configured to emulate Windows to support legacy fat-client applications.
Now here's the kicker. Linux/OpenOffice desktop costs about $50 per year, while a loaded Windows desktop comes in at around $500. Volume discounts would apply for both alternatives.
Of course, acquisition costs are only part of that famous analyst moniker "total cost of ownership," or TCO. It would certainly cost some dough to convert documents, test applications, train employees and roll out a desktop migration. Nevertheless, this would be a one-time cost, and organizations would have 90 cents of each desktop dollar to dedicate to these migration costs. At this rate, if you could simply break even in year one, you'd save oodles of cash ever-after. Remember too, that your $50 per year gives you the latest and greatest Linux desktop, while Microsoft will be back in three years (or so) asking you to upgrade everything.
Novell isn't capable of leading the Linux desktop charge on its own, but there are plenty of others in the industry more than willing to help. IBM could certainly move the market if it evangelized Linux and offered hand-holding migration services in the process. (Author's note: It would be somewhat Shakespearian to think that a combination of IBM, Lotus and Novell would lead a successful Linux desktop assault.) There's no love lost between Microsoft and Oracle, so I'm sure Larry Ellison could be persuaded to support this effort. Intel and AMD want to sell boxes, so Linux desktops are just fine.
Once there is sufficient market demand, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Gateway, Lenovo and the rest of the PC hardware crowd will certainly offer Linux desktop alternatives as well.
Linux desktops can't run applications like iTunes (yet) or support a zillion consumer add-ons, but if your users need basic productivity tools and a browser to be productive, who cares? This is especially true in the developing world, where low cost rules and there is no Microsoft legacy.
There is one last ironic twist in play here. Later this year, Microsoft will throw a $500 million PR and advertising party aimed at convincing users to upgrade their PCs to Vista. This provides a perfect opportunity for the Linux crowd to persuade CIOs to evaluate Linux and compare pricing. In this way, Microsoft will likely open the door to some unintended Linux desktop momentum.
I have every expectation that Vista will be a much better OS than XP, but do users really need it? Perhaps. Then again, many CIOs may conclude that the more prudent choice would be a Linux desktop and Open Office migration offering good enough functionality, at 10 percent of Microsoft's price.
Biography
Jon Oltsik is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
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running in virtualization. Look at this video of XP booting in 10
seconds on a Mac portable. http://godsipod.com/xponmac/ Do
you seriously believe people will switch to Linux instead of OS X?
When it's now so simple, I don't think so.
Fred
the main distributions don't even ship with a mpeg player, half of the internet still works only in IE, and most software that doesn't ship with your chosen distro requires you to compile it from source!
linux is an adequate server OS, but it's light-years behind Windows or Mac OS in average-consumer usability, so desktop linux is years away from a tipping point.
I've been playing with a CTP of Vista and I agree. It will ultimately be better than Windows XP (although that is more indicative of my hatred for XP than anything). But the real question is: will it be better than Windows 2000? I had no use for XP and still don't, and I don't foresee upgrading or replacing my home desktop until the electronics fail. I built it myself almost three years ago out of high quality parts and it still has more than enough horsepower to do anything I could ever be interested in doing on a personal computer. Win2K's interface is unobtrusive, like an OS interface *should* be, and the Win32 API will have to be dead and buried before I have need to change my OS, and even then the web has an astounding ability to keep things alive past their creator's intended obsolecense date. All of this goes double for MS Office too, by the way. Who needs collaboration features at home, anyway? I don't.
I think Microsoft's desktop OS peaked about six years ago with the release of Win2K Pro. XP's Fisher Price, Tonka toy-looking interface absolutely drives me up the wall, and I don't need all of the extra mystery services running in the background doing who knows what. I can also do without system tray balloon spam, crippled search with dog crap all over it, the OS crippling itself after hardware upgrades and requiring reactivation (a supreme, customer unfriendly, PITA if I ever saw one), and a rather lame one-way firewall that still isn't user friendly enough. About the only thing I've seen in XP worth having that 2000 doesn't have is built-in wireless support, but even that was inadequately implemented.
There is only one reason to release new versions of Windows: security. New Windows releases should heave large sections of legacy code over the side and feature rewritten modules for everything else where security holes and bugs have been relentlessly hunted down and squashed. If Microsoft does that and quits throwing useless eye candy at the interface, I will upgrade my OS.
And no, Linux is not the answer. Despite my complaints about recent Windows versions the Linux "community" and its keystone cops approach to distributions is a convoluted mess. No thanks. I wish to use my computer to pursue other interests, not make my computer the focus.
But with Vista consuming so many PC resources just to stay backwards compatible, I'd say Linux desktop performance will easily be on par with Vista (OS X's clean break from the past will probably emerge as the desktop performance leader).
If I had to deploy 1,000's of PCs to workers in a mid-market manufacturing company, this option would be a no-brainer. They just need email, calendaring, web browsing, and the ability to work with DOC/XLS/PPT files.
- XP's good enough
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by bfleming98
April 17, 2006 10:46 AM PDT
- The real case is that most companies will just keep XP. Vista will come about when they upgrade the computer. The problem is that XP itself is good enough. Most applications are leaving the desktop anyways and heading off to the web.
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See all 35 Comments >>Vista will only grow through new computer purchases, not upgrades.
- Bryan
http://www.BryanCFleming.com