Perspective: Ushering in a new era of angst at Microsoft

Few would disagree that Microsoft dominates the markets for desktop operating systems and office suites. But it wasn't always this way.

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.

I have every expectation that Vista will be a much better OS than XP, but do users really need it?

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.

More Perspectives

[CentrOS]

With XP running on Macs so fast, you really think Linux will be considered?

Why switch to Linux when you can have genuine UNIX and Windows
running in virtualization. Look at this video of XP booting in 10
seconds on a Mac portable. <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://godsipod.com/xponmac/" target="_newWindow">http://godsipod.com/xponmac/</a> Do
you seriously believe people will switch to Linux instead of OS X?
When it's now so simple, I don't think so.

[duerra]

Not Quite...

It's not about "people", it's about businesses. And businesses aren't going to buy Apple hardware in mass quantities, unless the choice is critical to their business objectives. Apple costs big $$$$.

[Blito]

Viruses

Still Linux really has no viruses or like in Firefox are dealt with quickly (Linux has barley any downtime unlike Windows and Mac is starting to get attacked just as much now, mac in the enterprise? No. Isn't downtime allot of cost?). Microsft seems to be trying to do everything themselves where Firefox has partnered with Google to fight spam and Phishing.

[bfleming98]

Agreed....

I Agree. I don't see Linux as a threat in the desktop market. Server Market, yes. Desktop, no way. Ok, maybe the $100 laptops down the road. I'll give them that.

- Bryan
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.BryanCFleming.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.BryanCFleming.com</a>

[rorywohl]

Not being able to "support a zillion consumer add-ons" is a good thing

In a corporate environment not being able to "run applications like iTunes (yet) or support a zillion consumer add-ons" is a good thing. People have a tendency to "personalize" their PCs (I know, the "P" stands for Personal) which causes all kinds of porblems with unlicensed software, compatibility issues, spyware, etc. The fact that desktop Linux doesn't support a lot of this stuff means that you have an inherently more stable corporate desktop.

[quirK]

Good at first sight, perhaps, and only for shortsighted bosses

Heard of the idiom 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'?

Most people's productivity will plummet if they have to face a boring Linux desktop with absolutely no chance to enjoy some entertainment during breaks while working on some deadline.

[fred dunn]

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah...It's finally been here for years...

But somehow doesn't seem to catch on. You indicate in your story that it should be good enough for business users. You don't mention the time, resources, and disruptions that will occur during a transition. All I keep hearing is that "it's good enough". Well if that's all it is then maybe we should wait it until it is "so much better" that it is a compelling upgrade, one that will create a good business case to retrain users, recreate images, retrain support personnel. Until then "it's good enough" is just not good enough.

Fred

Same old tired mantra "retrainings to expensive"

Same old mantra "to expensive to retrain people", crap! I'm a consultant, I've seen how dozens of fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Office. Most Word documents I see use about 3 paragraph formats (default, Text Body, Text Body Indent) and then customize those to create their documents. Most excel documents are nothing but glorified tables. From a user point of view there isn't really that much retraining that needs to be done.

I run Linux on my desktop at work, most corporate users who've seem by desktop can't tell the difference. Most are surprise when I tell them I'm not running XP since I can do most anything they can (with the exception of Visio documents) and faster.

I and my family (wife and 4 kids) have been using Linux for 5 years. OpenOffice has been a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office for years.

[unoengborg]

Very true

You are right. Good enough is not a reason to upgrade. That is one reason to why Linux havn't caught on. It is also the reason why Vista most likely will fail. Companies that have win2k or later and MS Office 97 installed allready have whats needed. Changeing that only adds up to more costs.

Some studies show that productivity actually dropped when installing XP, and from what I can see from the information leaked about the new Vista, the same thing probably will apply to that as well.

Another reason is that the good enough state of Linux is of quite recent date. As late as three years ago leading Linux companies like Red Hat claimed that there never would be a Linux desktop.
Today Novell, Ubuntu and some others market Linux as a desktop. That makes a big difference to the users, and not to forget to software houses that have to decide on wheater to support Linux or not.

The best time to upgrade for current windows users would probably be 2011 when XP is end of lifed.
By then, Linux is most likely the much more mature than the good enough version of today. I would also expect that some Linux programs have been ported to windows and some more windows programs have been ported to Linux making the barrier to switch much less than it is today. AJAX and web based applications will also play a role in diminishing the importance of the desktop OS.

In the mean time Linux will be a good alternative for new companies that doesn't have an old windows system to upgrade or employees to retrain.

[davidc_cnet]

linux is years behind in usability

linux is great for technologists, and for computer terminals dedicated to a single app, but for general-purpose use by average consumers, it hasn't improved much in the past 10 years.

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.

[unoengborg]

linux WAS years behind

Today it is not. I'm currently running Fedora FC5 and I would rate it far more usable than win XP, and in some areas even better than Mac OS-X.

The interface is very clean, and as opposed to earlier verions it is very snappy. Things like the deskbar applet gives immediate access to all my files, applications, e-mails, recently visited web pages. I just type a few letters and beagle make a lightning fast search. For the first time in many years it feels like I have my information ready at my fingertips.

As for not bundling a mpeg player, I can forgive them for that, as it is very easy to install one.
Besides, if you compare to windows most Linuxes are far better equipped. E.g. Why doesn't Microsoft bundle MS-Office, MS-Exchange, MS-SQLServer with windows even though you pay a lot more for it than you do for a free download of e.g. Fedora. By the way, I would guess that if you ask your boss what sofware you should use at work, a mpeg player would not come very high on the list

As if all this wasn't bad enough news for Microsoft, there will be yet another release of the Gnome GUI before Vista is out that most likely will polish the today very good user experience even further. The new OpenGL related stuff that most likely will be available in at least some Linux releases before vista ships looks extremely cool, and will almost certainly give a lot of windows people that "must have" feeling.

[Steven N]

Have you even touched a linux box lately

Try your hands at OpenSuse 10.0 (or wait a little bit longer till 10.1 is out)
I can assure you, it rocks. It is snappy, responsive, it blows life into your slow PC.

If you want DVD playback, query google.

Sure it needs some getting used to. If you don't want to learn, if you want Linux to behave just like Windows, then stick with Windows. But if you are willing to take the plunge, and are willing to spend some time on it, a whole new world will be open for you.

I am pretty conviced about the useability of it. I provided my mother a old laptop (PIII 750/ 256 MB of ram) some months ago with suse 9.3 (should have been 10.0 i realise now), and she is surfing the web, handling emails, managing her digital photo's, with lots of enthousiasm.

And the plus for me? I don't have to worry about malware, patches, viruses, you name it on that box.

[Steven N]

Have you even touched a linux box lately

Try your hands at OpenSuse 10.0 (or wait a little bit longer till 10.1 is out)
I can assure you, it rocks. It is snappy, responsive, it blows life into your slow PC.

If you want DVD playback, query google.

Sure it needs some getting used to. If you don't want to learn, if you want Linux to behave just like Windows, then stick with Windows. But if you are willing to take the plunge, and are willing to spend some time on it, a whole new world will be open for you.

I am pretty conviced about the useability of it. I provided my mother a old laptop (PIII 750/ 256 MB of ram) some months ago with suse 9.3 (should have been 10.0 i realise now), and she is surfing the web, handling emails, managing her digital photo's, with lots of enthousiasm.

And the plus for me? I don't have to worry about malware, patches, viruses, you name it on that box.

[Steven N]

Have you even touched a Linux box lately?

Try your hands at OpenSuse 10.0 (or wait a little bit longer till 10.1 is out)
I can assure you, it rocks. It is snappy, responsive, it blows life into your slow PC.

If you want DVD playback, query google.

Sure it needs some getting used to. If you don't want to learn, if you want Linux to behave just like Windows, then stick with Windows. But if you are willing to take the plunge, and are willing to spend some time on it, a whole new world will be open for you.

I am pretty conviced about the useability of it. I provided my mother an old laptop (PIII 750/ 256 MB of ram) some months ago with suse 9.3 (should have been 10.0 I realise now), and she is surfing the web, handling emails, managing her digital photo's, with lots of enthousiasm, and zero problems.

And the plus for me? I don't have to worry about malware, patches, viruses, you name it on that box.

[dragonbite]

years? more like weeks...

"most software that doesn't ship with your chosen distro requires you to compile it from source! "

Boy, you haven't even LOOKED at Linux lately have you?

I have been able to make my Linux desktop work fine with only going into the command line once (could use optional gui program) to install the win32codec and stuff (for MP3s, .wmv, .avi, dvd's, etc) and everything else is simple, striaght forward and easily understandable and maintainable!

Note this is a free distro (didn't even have to pay to have them ship me the CDs!). If I were to purchase an enterprise-level system I believe a number of them include handling these proprietary formats.

Plus, unlike XP or Mac where you can move the Start Bar or Dock to the left, right or bottom, you have many more choices on the Linux side such as

+ light (or no) desktop environments for retrofitting older hardware,
+ well-fitted and professional enough to take on OSX and XP in look and feel
+ locked down kiosks
+ very customizable (which may be prefered for say creative types)

Plus Firefox's popularity is making a good case for turning sites away from the IE-centric development model for a more inclusive.

If you want something that looks like Windows, acts like Windows and runs like Windows then use Windows and shut up.

[Bill Dautrive]

MPEG

I will ignore the rest of your ignorant comments as they have been addressed already.

There is MPEG support, but it doesn't play commercial DVD's. There is a very good reason for this: legal.

The shprtsighted and illegal laws that congress has past over the past few years, have literally made it illegal to play commercial dvd's on linux. There is software easily available, but the distro companies sidestep that minefield.

Linux has more hardware support out of the box then XP, is infinately more configurable and most distros come with everything you need, other then some mpeg support. With XP that will cost you thousand extra.

[mansfield3]

Vista better than XP? I'm sure it will be...

"I have every expectation that Vista will be a much better OS than XP"

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.

[Bill Dautrive]

Better then XP?

With the little effort put in XP,m it doesn't take much to beat it.

[pdxtech]

Linux Desktop vs. Vista

My largest complaint about Linux desktop apps have always been poor performance (slow load, occassional file corruption) due to Java dependency.

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.

[mansfield3]

Re: Linux Desktop vs. Vista

"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."

Not necessarily. They may also need an ERP and/or CRM app, and these are often the critical apps that bind a company together. Unfortunately, many of the the enterprise class options on the market were developed for Windows and no Linux version exists. This is more an issue for companies with existing Windows deployments though. I'm sure if you were starting with a clean slate you would have all kinds of options available to you that you otherwise wouldn't.

[Bill Dautrive]

Holy crap

More ignorance. The linux desktop was written in C and C++ you idiot.

[Bill Dautrive]

Holy crap

More ignorance. The linux desktop was written in C and C++ you idiot. As is most every linux app.

[Bill Dautrive]

Amarok

Is far better then itunes on a windows machine. It has everything iTunes has, including a sleek interface and a lot more.

[bfleming98]

XP's good enough

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.

Vista will only grow through new computer purchases, not upgrades.

- Bryan
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.BryanCFleming.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.BryanCFleming.com</a>