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posted by
janrinok
on Sunday April 06 2014, @08:46PM
from the but-not-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.
from the but-not-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.
A recent poll by The Inquirer asked, "Which operating system will you use after Windows XP support ends on 8 April?"
Among respondents, 33 percent said they will move to Windows 7, 17 percent will stick with XP, 13 percent will switch to Linux, 11 percent will get Windows 8, and 5 percent said OS X.
So most will switch to Windows 7, but many would rather stay with Win XP without support than switch to Linux.
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Poll: More Will Switch to Linux Than to Win8
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You will be married within a year.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by iamjacksusername on Sunday April 06 2014, @10:59PM
Case in point, I am completing a project where I am replacing the Windows 2003 backend at a small company with Linux servers. I went the route of licensing the Novell Open Workgroup Suite so you get a lot of the bits and pieces of things wrapped up into nice pre-configured installers with lots of documentation. It is taking over all of domain functions as well as the desktoop management, file and print services. That said, we are keeping Windows (Win 7) on the front end because that's what people are comfortable with; technically, we could have tried to do things with Wine but it is a ROI issue at the end of the day.
The other side is tablet / smartphone market. I have several non-technical friends who only use a PC at work and do everything else on their iPhone or tablet. They all had PCs at one point but they broke down or got infected; they know some things are a lot slower but they do not care because they do not want to be bothered with managing a PC. They have given up on laptops and desktops and have no plans to go back. They can do everything they want to adequately with the tools at hand. Those customers are never coming back. My parents, after having PCs (Mac and Windows) for years, now do all of their personal business on their tablets. The got the tablets in 2011 and the PC only gets turned on once a year when my father uses TurboTax. And this is someone who got his first computer at work in the early 80s and routinely designed his own batch reports because the mainframe ops were busy.
A lot of businesses are buying Chromebooks as cheap citrix receivers - compared to the cost of maintaining the equivalent Wyse (purchase + software maintenance), the $200 Chromebooks are a steal.
I think this is what will ultimately be the upgrade path. As things become more centralized, the desktop will become less relevant. Microsoft sees this (finally) which is why they fired Ballmer and are going full out on Azure now and being able to link that to your own hosted stuff. Ballmer,at his core, was a widget salesman. To his credit, he was a very good once. But fundamentally, if it was not a widget he could sell, he just did not understand it; he just wanted to keep selling his Windows and Office Suite widgets because, when he and Bill Gates started the company they were in the business of selling OS and then, a few years later, Office application widgets. Microsoft never sold services (well) - in fact, they relied on their service partners as a sales force. Compare Microsoft to any old line industrial manufacturer - the manufacturer makes and documents the product, then relies on 3rd party integrators, designers and resellers to specify and install the product.
Ballmer did not see the change to providing services, though he talked a good game. The Windows App store came about because he saw the iTunes app store and said "hey we can sell apps too but they will just be for Windows so then people will definitely have to buy our tablets!". It was not part of any strategic shift in their thinking; it was just another avenue to sell their Windows and Office widgets. Which is ok but that is not the future. I mean, the Office team actually said, when they did the initial release for Office on iOS that the Windows Phone version would have a richer experience. I mean, seriously? Total WTF moment.
I am a old Novell hand since the 3.12 days so I still have soft spot for them. I think they have found a great niche with their "private cloud" strategy. On the Suse side, they Suse Studio for manufacturing VMs for a company's internal customers. The Novell side has Filr which is basically a DropBox but one that you host and Vibe which is slowly getting better... It's sorta kinda Sharepoint like but not really. It does similar things but in a less insane and Rube Goldberg-ian way. And iPrint which is their print services which sounds kind of boring but... all of these things have apps for Android and iOS. They implemented all of the things to get working file sharing, document collaboration, transfer, team calendering, discussions and printing services for your company on your phone and tablet and did it so you can host it all internally without outside services. The only company that has come close to having all of those pieces is Citrix. That is the future.
The downfall for Microsoft in all of this is bottom line dollars out for their customers - if I am making a product to sell to a client, why would I use something that would require me to either 1) pay a big licensing fee so I can sell an appliance or, b) require my customer to get expensive licensing. I could just as easily build my product under CentOS or OpenSuse as an appliance and then offer my customers a version certified under RH or SLES if they want. Either way, me and my customer come out ahead. And that is what Microsoft should be afraid of - once the applications move away from the desktop, they now have to compete on a level playing field.
This turned into a bit of rant. Sorry. Just my $.02.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:08PM
They should be worried about the desktop too. My dev team all use Ubuntu at work, and several other teams are switching over to it as well. There have been no problems except with a poorly written Lotus Notes app (*shiver*) that trys to load a DLL. We can accomplish the functionality through a web interface instead though. There have been no problems using any of the Libre Office replacements for the MS Office functionality we need and maintenance is a breeze.
Yes, these people are mostly developers, but developers are frequently the leading edge of change. Many other people see how easy these desktops are to use (people use Gnome Shell, Unity, and KDE) and how much prettier it is than Windows. They *ask* to have it installed, which we can't do yet, but only for political/maintenance reasons.
Really, once you break free of the MS office stranglehold, the rest is pretty easy.
(Score: 1) by iamjacksusername on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:58PM
I think the challenge on the desktop side a bit more than MS Office. A large company can afford to have admins to put things in Wine environments or to specify "must be a Java app, work under SLED or Ubuntu or whatever". It's the small companies using vendor software. There are 10's of thousands of packages like that in every industry - tanning salons, retail, real estate, etc... The vendor says "needs windows pc" and the company says "ok" because they just spend $50k on new tanning beds (which is almost all of the company's profits for the year and so they had to get financing from the bank on a 5 year loan to afford it) so they don't care what widget makes the beds go. If I had to take a guess that segment will probably take another 20 years to transition.
Going forward, I do not see a tech company using Windows as their platform from day 1. I saw a stat once that any truly complicated piece of software - think kernel or ERM system - takes 10 years to mature. Well, I think the push for apps and the subsequent transition to Mac or Linux as a primary development platform has started. So, maybe in about 6 - 8 years we are going to see a real change.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday April 07 2014, @03:43AM
Actually, the first time I heard of Microsoft banging the services drum was at the Win2K promo event, which I attended in Los Angeles. The presenter went on and on about their vision of SAAS and cloud storage (tho it wasn't called that at the time), whereupon the audience of some 1000 professional IT types all developed identical angry frowns.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.