[NCLUG] Why Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose

[Mike Loseke]

Thus spake jeffrey l koehn:
> 
> Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose. So
> sit back, have fun and watch it happen.

 Dude, you really should read the Advocacy HOWTO before doing something
like this...

 http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/mini/Advocacy.html

> Why?
> Because of The Big Picture:
> 1)Lower Cost ( The Linux Kernel doesn't cost anything)

 Aside from liability and cost of training IT staff, true. Time is money.

> 2)Open-source Kernel

 Duh? Redundant?

> 3)The "GPL, Linux, Open-Source Kernel"
> is the perfect technology model/foundation
> for Manufacturing and for the masses
> because people, businesses, universities,
> governments contribute to it.
> (Linux can never be owned by anybody
> or anything)

 You're not supporting your grand statement very well here.

> 4) Linux can scale up or down

 Sure. But not as far up as some other OS's can go currently.

> 5) Linux is hardware agnostic

 Only to a point. It can't run at the same level as many hardware specific
OS' on that hardware can. In the future, sure, but not currently. And who
cares if once Linux catches up on that weird hardware config - by that
time, the manufacture has turned over hardware support to 3rd parties and
doesn't support it directly.

> 6) "Linux, Open-Source" can and
> _ _ _will morph into future tecnologies
> _ _ _that will benefit all.

 So another way to say this would be that "Linux is in an eternal game of
catch-up and re-implementation of the software provided by other large
commercial entities"?

 The kernel is advanced and a very good piece of software, but it is a
small part of what you do on your desktop. Linux is not office software or
media players. Do not mix up your terms here.

>  Can you think of some more reasons why Linux will win
> and micro$oft will lose?

 I'm playing devil's advocate here, don't take any of this personal. I'm a
big linux/unix guy as anyone here can attest to. However, I work in the
real world of IT infrastructure costs/budgeting/hooha.

 Linux may be the favorite of people who enjoy tinkering with computers.
This is probably already the case among the majority of us. I won't refute
that. But the market you have to look at when you talk about Linux
"winning" the desktop, and beating Microsoft, is the business side.

 Business uses Linux for various things, but as a desktop OS they aren't
(as a general rule) because in reality it isn't cheap, and especially not
free. In big business there really isn't anything that's free or remains
free over a period of time.

 Consider: you have an IT organization that supports 6,000 desktop users in
9 different time zones and 8 different countries. Your front line of
desktop support is primarily folks right out of school looking to start up
the ladder. This is what is called a "high-turnover position". Linux does
not work well in this case because by the time you had your front line
support people trained in supporting linux, 90% of them will move on to
another job and you have to start over again. During all of this, your
customers (the desktop users) are getting sub-standard support and the
bottom line of the company is affected because they can't do the work
necessary to contribute in a positive way. Having this happen at all the
different physical locations in your geographically diverse company will
kill the company. But you have a cool machine on your desk...

 See what I'm saying? Yes, Microsoft is doing some mean things with pricing
at the moment, and will continue to do so in the future. Yes, they are a
marketing giant and are painted as evil by lots of people but evangelized
by others (human nature, that). However, because they deliver a solution to
business that does everything the business needs (and creates others)
business will refer to them as the baseline. The software being written to
run on linux (and I'm talking about the "free" stuff here which is what I'm
sure you really want to talk about) is in an endless game of catch-up.

 Money is also not the issue for big business - all large purchases are
spread out over 3 to 5 years and the contracts are handed over to the
legal weenies so that It can get down to the business of supporting the
tools that allow your business to live and breathe.

 Now, I've been saying for years, and it's never changed, that Linux has a
place in most business environments and a good strong place. For example,
we're looking at buying some Linux machines to add to our compute ranch to
allow some engineering jobs to run faster on cheaper hardware. This is only
now becoming possible because the tool vendors are just now releasing tools
that run on linux which they support. Of course we pay an arm and a leg for
some of the licenses for that software, but faster turnaround on some of
these designs is gained. Other similar tasks are well suited for Linux
(much of the corporate infrastructures use linux for DNS servers and
related tasks) but there are many many tasks which no linux setup can yet
match (Exchange sucks really bad, true, but it is the standard for
email/calendar in most business and no linux setup can touch it - but you
still see lots of linux used to route the mail to the exchange servers).


-- 
   Mike Loseke    | Sometimes insanity is the only alternative.
 mike at verinet.com |