Linux is losing momentum among medium sized enterprises, according to a survey by Canadian research firm Info-Tech Research Group. After years of increased interest in the open source operating system, IT managers from medium sized businesses have come to a conclusion that open source is not for them. The findings point to a rift between large enterprises that are increasingly embracing open source and smaller businesses that opt for a Microsoft-centric world.
The title of the article says that Linux fails. Look at this fragment :
Of the respondents only 27 per cent runs Linux inside their organisation. Of the group that doesn’t have Linux today, 48 percent said they weren’t interested in the open source operating system, and only 10 percent said they planned to look at it over the next three years.
So,my question is WHERE does it fails? 27% , are you kidding me? This is excellent for an OS nobody from the IT managers would even consider couple years ago.
On the other hand, if they choose Windows,better for me, at least I will still have a job tomorrow.
Doesn’t sound so bad does it; but small business owners aren’t interested in being technical; they’re interested in talking to salesmen it seems to me
.
48 percent said they weren’t interested in the open source operating system….
I guess wording it this way looks bad.. lets try this:
52 percent said they were interested in the open source operation system….
Hmmm..
Is it still April Fools?
That’s the first thing I noticed… the unspoken 52%.
The dominance of Microsoft in the midsize market is one of the reasons why Linux isn’t catching on there Koelsch said.
Not to mention that converting microsoft to Linux is largely the same as converting to Unix(Minor Cost differences Initial) Converting from Microsoft to Unix can be very complicated and expensive. most shops ops to have a mixed environment.
“The perception with business management is that Linux isn’t ready. Business management is very risk averse,” Koelsch said.
This is also the perception of Systems Administrators such as myself that have to work on these boxes also. Cool and trendy rarely makes a good business critical platform.
Even better… it’s 48% and 10% of those who don’t have Linux.
So you can read it like this:
27.00% are using it right now
7.20% are not using it but will be looking at Linux in the next years
35.04% are not interested
Not too shabby really, though we are not given to know what happened of the remaining 30.76%
Many MSMs have tried Linux in my neck of the woods. They stuck with windows because they didn’t see any advantage in relearning everything.
Might want to check out why Sun with Solaris is so hot on Windows interoperability ^_^
Business => make money. Techies => have fun. The two aren’t the same.
Rather than argue semantics & statistics, one should ask WHY this is happening. To me, the answer seems clear: large businesses can afford to have linux gurus on their IT staffs. Smaller businesses perhaps can’t afford both MS & linux staff. If a small business is able to afford just one IT person, which way do you think that they would go? I think the MS route, since they will most likely rely on MS Office and other MS-centric business solutions. So the statistics don’t really surprise me.
Rather than argue semantics & statistics, one should ask WHY this is happening. To me, the answer seems clear: large businesses can afford to have linux gurus on their IT staffs. Smaller businesses perhaps can’t afford both MS & linux staff. If a small business is able to afford just one IT person, which way do you think that they would go? I think the MS route, since they will most likely rely on MS Office and other MS-centric business solutions. So the statistics don’t really surprise me.
Speaking from personal experience I transitioned from a Senior Windows System Administrator with 5 subordinate NT SA’s to a Mid Level Unix SA(was never a Junior
) earned me a 20% pay increase that has been slowly increasing as i gain experience. I am not cheap but i am very good at what i do.
i really think that it’s a better solution to medium business to stick with ms and their benefits
but a large corporation that can afford a linux specialized staff sure feels the benefits from open source
i dont know if this is troll or another M$ sponsored FUD…
48 percent said they weren’t interested in the open source operating system
so 52% are interested in Linux and it is losing momentum… yeah
Small business is always behind the technology curve. When you don’t have a lot of revenue it’s difficult to overhaul what you have. Look at how long it took small business to start relying on computers, there’s still small shops that rely on paper only…imagine that.
Bottom line, big companies can afford to make big investments in the future. Linux is the future and we’re seeing a lot of big companies move in that direction. Small companies are more about here and now. When you’re not a big fish you can’t worry about savings over the next 10-15 years because well…you may not be in business that long. Windows works nobody said it didn’t. When we can convince people that linux “Just Works” then you’ll see the smaller deployments start.
of course, it’s just my 0.02€.
i second thjayo on considering small business would not benefit much from using linux. the few hundred euros needed for the typical Windows and Office licence don’t make that huge difference in their balance, but they get the software their employees are used with (never seen those secretaries _needing_ excel to make a table? even minor changes from good different systems are a serious obstacle for them, and it’s a rather big part of the cake).
in economical terms, they have more capital cost but very small maintenance and training cost. linux makes exactly the opposite.
that’s why i think that medium to large companies will benefit a lot in future from open OSs in genral, while learning new things about computing is not really the main interest of plumbers.
Then, why you see mail dedicated servers running mandrake instead of a good and clean openbsd is issue of hype and trend.
i want more of it.
btw, i have noticed that wordperfect lost “the battle” with msword too.
i like microsoft. she is producing unbalanced 3 wheeled cars and _everybody_ wants one (or more).
so far we have made our own solutions to replace that 4th wheel with a piece of wood. wasting fuel, and we all still love it.
this rant has been giving to you at no cost under the creative common license.
any complaints should be faxed in 5 fold or via telephone at just $500 per second.
Of the remaining so-called 52%, only 10% said they would look at Linux in 3 years. You guys are twisting the statistics just as much as any other spinmeister would. So since we’re throwing crap numbers around anyway, how about 98% of the remaing unknown 42% said there was a 75% chance they’d prefer to use OS X 88% of the time spent during 100% of their business day earning 4% gross profits. Makes perfect sense to me.
I would image that many small businesses are using their one licensed copy of Office on all their machines (which come with a ‘free’ copy of windows….
Your math is pretty bad,I post again the quote from article :
Of the respondents only 27 per cent runs Linux inside their organisation. Of the group that doesn’t have Linux today, 48 percent said they weren’t interested in the open source operating system, and only 10 percent said they planned to look at it over the next three years.
Why do you assume only 10% from the 52% ? And if it is so,even better for Linux 10% from the half is always better than 10% from the whole if you catch my drift.
this “independent group” gets some sort of funding directly or indirectly from MS?
A big factor is the lack of funding for pre-production test systems. I run a 3 man IT shop for a small operation. I have also worked in exremely large enterprises and have consulted for companies of all sizes. My current employer spends a greater portion of revenue (percentage wise) on IT than any large business that I am aware of. We do it because we want to gain every competitive advantage possible. There is one caveat though. We have to put everything into production. We do not have the luxury of having a mirrored setup for development and testing. Now that the 2.6.x tree is pretty much in a constant beta state, we have to take into consideration the unpredictability of the direction the devs might take. That makes Linux a less attractive solution for us. Windows and Solaris on the other hand, are relatively predictable. Not so with Linux in the last year or so. So now when we are evaluating Linux vs. whatever, we are evaluating 2.4.x rather than the latest and greatest. Though we do plan to deploy OS X in production later this year (WebObjects deployment) but we have many of the same concerns there as well. Apple, I’m sure, has a pretty clear roadmap but they will not share it with anyone. The fact that it is the best environment (by far) for our planned usage overrides the uncertainty…I.E. the proverbial “killer app.”
The irony is that we run our entire operation on VMWare ESX server.
Realy, a constant beta state?
I’m impressed, I didn’t know that. I’m no I.T. manager, but what little I do know is that if you go to the Linux Weekly News site ,and poke around a little, you’d find out that there are several linux kernels to choose from that are frozen/stable. They are also realy clear on where they are headed, too. They list all the things that they are currently working on, all the things they have fixed, ect.
Care to guess when Longhorn will come out, what’s in it, or what it will be compatible with? me niether.
Also, alot of the features are being backported to 2.4 branch , too. So I guess they are both beta.
Percentages of what numbers? Who was the population being measured? What was the means of measuring the data? Was the study public or private? Can the current numbers in the study be verified? Can the current study be repeated to validate the first study? How was the study funded and by whom?
I don’t take ‘journalistic’ or ‘private interest’ statistics seriously. I could make a statistic, from any population, that there is life, other than ours, in the galaxy or that UFOs exist. Then I could make it look like both do exist or not according to statistics.
It would be nice to see a true, non-biased academic study on the number of IT shops that have converted to open source software and the reasons involved.
I don’t know what you refer to when you mention linuxweeklynews ‘frozen/stable’ kernels. Perhaps you refer to the -mm and -ac trees etc. these are even more ‘bleeding edge beta’ than the ‘release’ kernel.
2.6 is in constant beta and has been for months now. In fact, the kernel developers policy explicitly states that 2.6 is not meant to be considered stable, and it is the distro vendors who are responsible for testing and certification of stable feature-sets from the 2.6 kernel.
This leaves users who want to compile their own kernels out in the woods – the kernel devs are happy to include broken features (not even marked experimental in kernel config) like the ‘ub’ usb driver, and it seems that their intention is that nobody should trust the kernels on kernel.org to behave themselves, and to expect breakage, crashes and hangs due to untested developments with new kernel versions.
And yes, with the backports, the kernels from kernel.org are ALL beta. You should not expect that these kernels will operate stably without doing your own testing, debugging and verification, or relying on a distro vendor to do this for you.
Now, the reality is that mostly, the kernels from kernel.org work fine, and as long as you track kernel development to some degree, you can operate with the latest kernel d/led from kernel.org without hitting serious issues – however, there are no guarantees, and don’t expect new features that show up in the kernel to work flawlessly – you are the beta tester for this stuff.
Ah, it’s an article that’s negative toward Linux! Only pro-Linux articles are truthful and unquestioned. Time for everyone to bust out with the denial and false accusations, covering their ears to avoid listening to the truth about Linux.
Hysterical.
If it was the truth, people would listen.
We might be seeing something like the original Macintoshs and PCs, every department needs one and it can be hidden in the budget.
Last company I worked at we were the tech support department. We were supposed to contact the web master whenever we wanted a change made to the support website. Instead we set up a linux box on a old Compaq we found lying around, and got the (lazy) webmaster to treat that as the main support server.
Soon this little box in the corner of a cube was outshining the main webserver. Every department in a company has a need for their own server, but the same minds that believed in one mainframe now believe that all servers should be centrally managed.
Not to sound too boisterous, but I have a very complete picture of the overall IT landscape, ranging from consumer (tech support for highly sophisticated types down to my grandmother), retail (help out small local retail establishments in exchange for wholesale prices on parts), financial services (security consultant for financial services companies), enterprise (used to work for cisco), mom and pop (my father runs his own wholesale mail order business), to education (I work with several groups at MIT).
That said, Linux is without question not ready for small business and especially not even close for the casual end user. Of course, “small business” is quite a huge range and what most people might consider a large business is actually quite small in the big scheme of things.
The reason why I say this is that it is still much, much too difficult for the average person to do the routine tasks that come with running an OS. The #1 task implied by this is installing and configuring software (including the GUI desktop), followed by a close 2nd which is configuring new hardware.
Once I setup a machine for people, ranging from OS install to installing commonly used applications, they are generally quite happy on their own. It is undoubtedly challenging for most people to do things such as configure their digital camera, but it is still *possible* using Windows and probably much easier using a Mac. On Linux, there is no chance. This means that people would need the services of someone like myself who can get almost anything to work as long as the hardware isn’t broken on any platform.
There are some applications (such as a POS system) that are too complicated for even sophisticated users to install, but I mean things such as Quicken, QuickBooks, Peachtree, Photoshop, FTP programs, Dreamweaver, etc. etc. I know there are similar applications that come as a part of a Linux distribution, but until I can tell someone over the phone what to do *without using a command line* in order to get their application installed, where once in the application *everything* is available as part of the GUI, Linux will go nowhere.
That’s the thing. I feel 99% of every option must be available from the GUI. Using Samba as an example, I still find it impossible to setup a proper samba configuration without having to edit smb.conf. Providing a GUI doesn’t just mean listing each configuratino option from the file in a graphical editable field list.
Then there’s the added problem of Gnome and KDE. They both fall significantly short. One example of a total show stopper for Gnome. You can’t change the default icon size on the desktop. Done. Game over. Default spatial browsing. Just unbelievable. There are about 500 other examples. KDE has its share too. Obnoxious sounds on by default everywhere that are hard to get rid of. Way too many cartoon characters, especially that stupid one when you’re loggin off. Sounds petty, but that’s just the way it is. Once people are used to a level of control as a USER, not developer, they will not accept anything less. Lastly, the defaults have to be perfect. You can’t have brown as a default color scheme. Sorry UBUNTU, you lose. Same with Solaris Java Desktop with its yellow and purple theme. Game over. Imagine APPLE making a desktop with brown as its default color. Or purple and yellow. Or imagine Apple having a puff the magic dragon character when you log off.
I’m also afraid that the poor wireless card support under linux has probably set it back another 5 years from widespread desktop use.
It has certainly made strides and unquestionably has applications in certain areas. It’s just that it really needs management types who specifically aren’t developers to give input into the development process. As a developer, it’s just impossible to design everything without having outside people direct the development from the perspective of an end user and customer.
The closest analogy is how a writer needs a good editor. You can’t edit your own work. We have 1,000 eyes to make all bugs shallow, but we have ZERO eyes to make all usability and especially aesthetic issues shallow. As long as developers write code in a vacuum without being accountable or feeling responsible for how end users are deailing with the end product, the situation will not improve.
Make a clean, aesthetically pleasant, high performance GUI that is 99.99% configurable from the GUI itself (including hardware without having to recompile kernel!!!, which will especially serve as a model for how applications should be 100% gui-enabled), where a third party application provider can create a single installation program that will install on *any* Linux desktop, and Linux might start to make inroads on the desktop.
I don’t know diddly about 2.6 kernels, one way or the other.
Red Hat/SUSE provide a reasonable level of stability, enough that 3rd parties are supporting their software on them as well.
Now, is Red Hat as stable as Solaris? I don’t know. I think the distro and its kernels are, it’s more a matter of the applications you want to run on it.
Here something like Solaris gives a better perception of stability.
But, truth be told, when it comes to workstations and general office applications, Windows is not dramatically less expensive to small-medium businesses as they have the advantage of being The Devil They Know, and the vast abundance applications for the platform, many they can see at their local Staples store.
At that point, there’s just no reason to switch.
On the Enterprise landscape, where you have enough boxes and such that licenses and what not become a real issue, it can be a different scenario. Paying an XP license to host a web server is insane. But if I need to buy 10 desktops, and one or two servers for my small company, the incremental costs between a Red Hat solution and a Windows solution are barely within the margin of error.
And once I have those 10 and grow to 20 or 30 desktops, I’m certainly not throwing out my investment to hop on the Linux bandwagon.
This is why it is so desperataly important that software and solutions be made available to the small business, popularized and marketed so that they can see Linux as a viable alternative as a small business desktop and server solution. And these need to get into the channels at a level where Joe Businessman is going to see the solutions.
Red Hat needs a “Linux Lab” section in the computer stores, kind of like the “Apple Section”. And it’s pretty obvious that the “Apple Section” doesn’t work as well as Apple would like, thus we have Apple retail stores.
When a small businessman shows up at the computer store and asks “What about this Linux I keep hearing about”, they’ll find little to nothing. They’ll be lucky to find a magazine, and all of the Linux magazines focus on Linux itself rather than applications.
Remember, and never forget…Microsoft is an APPLICATIONS company with an OS division. It always has been. The OS is simply a vehicle for its solutions. There’s always more money in Apps than in Tools.
Most small businesses have used MS for years and don’t know anything else. Most can’t afford tech staffs and most (My side business is geared to showing small business other software besides M$)
I go to small businesses all the time and most of them are still using NT, Exchange 5.5 office 2000 etc. Also a lot of them borrow software and don’t even pay M$ for it. They bring their copies from home or like the company I worked with this week (Where I installed 2 Suse/Novell enterprise 9 servers on PC’s) the owner got their copies of Windows 2000 server from his wifes job.
The big problem here is that there are not many people out there pushing Linux to small companies. And those companies are more worried about running their companies then they are about changing from Windows NT or 2000 to something else.
But this is for sure a big market. Most companies don’t care what they are running on their servers as long as everything works and they are secure! I go to companies on a regular and push mail servers run on Linux and 99% of the time I get people to got for it.
All I can say is if you support Linux, Unix (Solaris). BSD etc, push it to people and small businesses.
Red Hat/SUSE provide a reasonable level of stability, enough that 3rd parties are supporting their software on them as well.
Ahh, but there’s the rub. If you are forced to choose a specific distro just to get stability/predictability then you’ve just eliminated the 2 most compelling reasons to move to Linux in the first place. Cost savings and vendor independence. Cost savings goes out the window with Red Hat in particular, since I now am on the hook for a yearly subscription if I want a simple means of retrieving/installing security fixes. If Red Hat would simply offer a free limited RHN subscription for that only offered security fixes for the service life of the product, it would eliminate this problem entirely, but they seem more intent on milking every last cent out of their customers.
Is that none of the ‘*NIX’ companies – RedHat, Novell, Sun – have had *any* experience giving users a comfortable working environment – they are happy to take a ‘slap it together so it works’ approach rather than a ‘don’t stop till its perfect’ approach.
Most commercial application vendors (e.g. Adobe), Apple, and to a large extent Microsoft are much, much better at implementing the latter strategy w/regard to user-acceptance then any of the *NIX vendors are.
This doesnt necessarily apply to building an easy-to-configure, secure and reliable server setup, but i would posit that it sure helps a lot.
I mean, if I am going to pay good money for a commercial OS, I expect something better than the frankly shoddy GNOME as provided by the OSS GNOME devs and a mish-mash of half-assed, inconsistent config panels. Linux, Solaris and the BSDs are absolute rubbish compared to Windows and OS X in terms of user friendliness and discoverability, and thats why people arent singing their praises from the rooftops.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy to download, use and develop on and for Linux – I think its a great OS for a programmer, and if I gave that much of a crap i’d start my own effort to fix it – and I think progress has been exceptional , but if I was someone who didn’t enjoy tinkering and wanted something non-arcane, then no, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole either.
SME’s are mostly not buying an OS just for the fun of it. They buy solutions. If you offer them a solution for their problem and the solution runs on Linux, they don’t care.
Either we here in europe are from a nother galaxy or america is completely differend then europe. Over here they buy solutions from ISV’s and if the solution happens runs on Linux the customer does not really care (except, that the same solution on Windows is much more expensive).
Anyway… I start to become resistent against this flood of the “independend study” stuff. Who are they trying to make blind with all that stuff? Is anyone really lissening or reading that?
“Small business is always behind the technology curve. When you don’t have a lot of revenue it’s difficult to overhaul what you have. Look at how long it took small business to start relying on computers, there’s still small shops that rely on paper only…imagine that.”
Imagine, and have seen. Thing people need to keep in mind. For some computers are solutions, seeking a problem. Not the solution to a problem.
[Anonymous (IP: —.catalyst.net.nz)]
“Is that none of the ‘*NIX’ companies – RedHat, Novell, Sun – have had *any* experience giving users a comfortable working environment – they are happy to take a ‘slap it together so it works’ approach rather than a ‘don’t stop till its perfect’ approach. ”
I think Novell does a better job than most giving a comfortable environment. The only downside to such an environment is that you can’t wander too far without breaking the experience.
I don’t know what your problem is, but I just updated my Fedora Core 3 system for free. Let’s see…
yum update
Hmm, that’s easy! I think this perception problem is caused by ignorance, which is very common among Linux newbies.
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#up2date
Oh, but this isn’t good enough, is it? You probably want RHEL for free including unlimited RHN subscription and phone support. Well then, the world’s smallest fiddle is playing just for you. If you want something for free you might have to read the manual. Sorry.
You might want to look up who is behind the “Info-Tech Research Group” and who the author, Tom Sanders, worked for: good old Microsoft… Don’t anyone call this type of sleazy propaganda an independent study!
small businesses don’t run huge server farms. they tend to use fileservers, some groupware and desktop clients. and these are too expensve to support in terms of cost and expertise in OSS.
they want to run LAMP but its easier for them to buy a book on MSIE and frontpage.
Umm, guy, I hate to tell you this, but your math AND reading skills are bad.
Of the respondents 27% run Linux. This leaves 73%.
Of the group that DOESN’T have Linux today is the 73%. Of THIS GROUP 48% said they had no interest. This leaves 52% which I’m almost certain you understand is not 52% of the whole surveyed audience… it’s less. And only 10% said they planned to look in 3 years. This is 10% from the remaining 52%, not only because that’s what the statement says, but logic dictates that if you’re already running Linux, then you’d have no need to check it out in 3 years. Think before you post.
Think about it – most small businesses are run by people who are [generally], not computer literate. The only thing that they know about computers is “Windows”. And since Dell sells so many machines to this particular market, and they only ship with Microsoft Windows, what do you expect will happen?
Furthermore, these small places generally install and run their own systems (and usually botch that up pretty badly), or they employ the help of a son/daughter/friend who’s “savvy” with computers – in most instances said person(s) will have little or no experience with Linux and of course would not touch it.
Add to this the lack of ‘professional quality’ applications, and most home/office users won’t touch Linux. The mentality of open source doesn’t register in their tiny and feeble minds. They think that expensive proprietary software *must* be oh so much better than open source designed software.
Add to this the proprietary lock in of MS Office, the lack of accounting software that has been ported to Linux (Quicken, Quickbooks, MYOB) and you really don’t see a lot of it happening.
Small to medium businesses cannot afford to hire a Linux/Unix guru to look after their networks/systems etc. They usually hire someone on a contract – on a call by call basis, rather than a full time staff member to look after IT related issues. Most small to medium businesses are cash strapped, struggling to make ends meet – they have to be tight with their funds.
When you add it all up, a lot of things need to change before Linux will make ANY in roads into small business etc.
Dave
I don’t know what your problem is, but I just updated my Fedora Core 3 system for free. Let’s see…
yum update
Hmm, that’s easy! I think this perception problem is caused by ignorance, which is very common among Linux newbies.
I’ll go out on a limb and state that I feel pretty confident that I’ve been using Linux longer than you…probably a LOT longer, but that’s neither here nor there so I’ll address your point as best I can.
We’re talking about business here…not your basement tinkerbox. If you equate Fedora with stability, then you clearly do not have a clue about how business IT operates.
…ignorance…
…tiny and feeble minds…
Gee, I wonder why nobody is interested in using the Linux community for support…
Quote: “You can’t change the default icon size on the desktop.” you can, it’s just VERY unintuitive. I do agree with you on this point though – it should be much more intuitive.
Quote: “Obnoxious sounds on by default everywhere that are hard to get rid of.”
And Windows doesn’t have obnoxious sounds? It sure does. And you can easily turn them off in the KDE control panel. Takes very little time.
Quote: “Way too many cartoon characters, especially that stupid one when you’re loggin off.”
Again, that can be easily turned off.
Quote: “Once people are used to a level of control as a USER, not developer, they will not accept anything less.”
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here – do you mean having a Windows like user with total administrative rights who can do anything at all to their system? If so, it’s stupidity, and is a very bad security process. The average person doesn’t realise how potentially dangerous and damaging such a method of operation is. Just because people are used to it, doesn’t mean it’s the right design.
Quote: “Imagine APPLE making a desktop with brown as its default color. Or purple and yellow. Or imagine Apple having a puff the magic dragon character when you log off. ”
The brown that you’re referring to is to the ‘earthy’ feel of Ubuntu I believe. It’s a theme. You change it. Apple has a very nice desktop environment, that’s widely acknowledged by many users, even some diehard Linux users. There’s no need to go picking an argument 😉
Quote: “I’m also afraid that the poor wireless card support under linux has probably set it back another 5 years from widespread desktop use. ”
Don’t you dare blame Linux. Blame the lame ass fucked up big corporates who are too damn lazy to get off their fat rich asses and port the drivers to Linux/BSD. Ask Theo from OpenBSD how much “support” he’s garnered from said large manufacturers – fuck all. This type of shit really riles me big time.
Quote: “As long as developers write code in a vacuum without being accountable or feeling responsible for how end users are deailing with the end product, the situation will not improve.”
This is partially true and has merit for some serious consideration.
Quote: “where a third party application provider can create a single installation program that will install on *any* Linux desktop, and Linux might start to make inroads on the desktop.”
This also has merit. For Linux to succeed it will need to do several things:
1. A common ABI
2. A common, singular desktop environment
3. A common packaging system.
4. Better hardware support via drivers from hardware vendors
5. More portage of 3rd party proprietary applications to Linux
Until the above happens, it will not really penetrate the market as well as it could, or should.
Dave
Quote: “You can’t change the default icon size on the desktop.” you can, it’s just VERY unintuitive. I do agree with you on this point though – it should be much more intuitive.
On GNOME desktop environment, you can resize the icon by accessing right-click menu.
Quote: “Way too many cartoon characters, especially that stupid one when you’re loggin off.”
What distro do you use? Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu have cartoon characters. Like Pastern pointed out, you can change theme.
2. A common, singular desktop environment
That is a matter of preference. Some people like GNOME, other like KDE, IceWMN, XFCE, etc.
3. A common packaging system.
A matter of preference too. Some like Apt-get/Synaptic, yum, Smart Package Managers.
4. Better hardware support via drivers from hardware vendors
That depends hardware vendors.
In my experience a lot of small businesses use Microsoft because of the availability of software for small business like POS cash register systems, barcoding software, etc.
Also small business owners tend not to be the most computer literate people and if you ask them what Linux is they will tell you its some kind of penguin and that Microsoft bought Apple a long time ago.
Its not that Linux would not work for small business its just that the Microsoft apps, cheap X86 hardware and lots of small business specific software gets them up and running as fast as possible and Linux has not advantage in this arena.
I go to small businesses all the time and most of them are still using NT, Exchange 5.5 office 2000 etc. Also a lot of them borrow software and don’t even pay M$ for it. They bring their copies from home or like the company I worked with this week (Where I installed 2 Suse/Novell enterprise 9 servers on PC’s) the owner got their copies of Windows 2000 server from his wifes job.
This problem will probably be solved, when Microsoft denies service packs to non registered users.
I must admit that I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of all of these “studies” that are being released. When you have as much of a stranglehold on the market as Microsoft does you have everything to lose. So I don’t put much stock in them.
One also must remember that part of the reason that Microsoft is in the market position that they are in is because in a number of jurisdictions they’ve been found guilty of monopolistic practices. They have deep pockets, can drag cases through the courts for years while in the meantime extending their monopoly, fund “studies” and then release them as “news”(big pharma has been doing that for years…nothing new), plaster tech sites with their “TCO” ads etc.
For anyone to go up against that kind of market domination is going to be tough.
That being said, I’m quite surprised to see that this study reported Linux usage being as “high” as 27%. I think that’s pretty good given the obstacles…or make that obstacle!
I’ve grown to love Linux, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have problems of its own.
As others have pointed out there still aren’t readily available “off the shelf” small business/small organization accounting packages available. Software installations are still way too complicated for most DIY-types. And while device driver support has vastly improved in the last couple of years it still isn’t what it could be.
These things still need some serious work.
On the other hand Linux has much to offer in terms of security, stability and reliability. For a bit more “upfront” setup work, small organizations have a system that stays up.
In the home environment, I think the folks at Xandros for example have come pretty close to developing what I would call “your grandmother’s Linux”.
While some have complained that most folks “only know Windows”, I don’t think all of the blame for that can’t be placed at the feet of the end users.
Quite frankly, open source vendors and open source advocates have not done a good job of getting the message out to the general public. When was the last time you saw a shopping mall display with computers loaded with Linux? I’ve never seen one! How about a TV, newspaper or radio ad? Never seen one of those either! How about a poster on a lampost? Haven’t seen one of those either!
People don’t even know about Open Office versions that can be run on folks existing Windows machines. So its no surprise that small businesses may not have plans to move over to Linux. They don’t know it exists or don’t know much about it.
The only mass open source advertising campaign that I’ve ever seen has been around the Firefox browser. And guess what? It was successful! I’m finding “non computer geeks” who’ve made the switch over to Firefox.
So if Linux and open source usage is to grow, some serious issues have to be addressed and not simply shrugged off.
But what does this sort of negitive Point of View do…
Makes people who are interested in anything non-M$ look harder at what they can do to make their OS / Applications / Systems Better….
I think linux needs to create something new.. something that creates pure vaule for the platform whichs sets it out…. dare to go where no-one else has gone….. sounds like something from star trek but break new ground and you open peoples minds….
what really hurts most open source solutions, is the lack of good tutorials and documentations on how to integrate the many tools available. Most small business owners have to support themselves, or need prepackaged software that can be setup without need of a guru. My cousin (not a trained programmer) was able to program a few webpages with ASP.net generating graphics on the fly using Office web components for her company website on her own. she tried initialy to use open source tools, but it was impossible to figure out where to even start looking, the tools needed etc. Will she change her windows server for a linux one now that she has the solution she wanted? I dont think so.
Everytime an article is critical of Linux people go on the defensive. Its getting boring. A parody site from 5 years – http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/
The exact same is applicable now.
Commandment no 1 :
Thou shalt not criticise our OS.
The shouts of FUD are loud. But it the article is pro linux and says something good its never criticised
Commandment no 2 :
Thou shalt not criticise or analyse an article that is pro Linux.
Now someone points out that X doesn’t work.
Commandment no 3 :
Thou shalt not point out flaws in the OS
Giving us the it is not our fault answer. The big evil money grabbing corporation X is lame and won’t opensource their drivers.
Now lather, rinse and repeat like a slashdot sheep.
That is a fairly startling statistic.. good for them.
Competition is always a good thing.
We’ve got issues of inertia working here. There aren’t (percentage wise or numerically) as many skilled Linux engineers as there are UNIX and Windows engineers (though more and more are available all the time). Linux isn’t all that familiar to the average small or medium sized business owner, in spite of the fact that it’s VERY familiar to many of us. Linux is getting some headlines, though, and increasingly Linux is being successfully used in hospitals, financial institutions, schools, and large corporations. The more Linux is used in education, the more graduates we will have that can gradually bring Linux technology wherever they go. To have 27% of the population in this space already looking at Linux isn’t a bad number at all. That’s over 1/4 of teh population.
A few years ago, Linux had less than 5% of the overall market. I don’t know the latest numbers, but at least in a few sectors, Linux is doing MUCH better than that. To even be CONSIDERED in 27% of a business sector is an excellent showing, in my opinion!
I look for Linux to carry 1/4 of the market in SEVERAL sectors within the next few years, and I believe it may have already crossed that value in a few isolated places already, especially Internet centric activities. The desktop and embedded systems are two areas for HUGE growth potential that have not really matured — YET.
THis kind of mirrors a web app survey from awhile ago that founds that large enterprises overwhelmingly go with Java for their Web applications, whereas smaller ones tend to favor .NET
That said, Linux is without question not ready for small business and especially not even close for the casual end user.
So you do know? For the latter part, I alone have converted almost half-a-dozen people to using GNU/Linux. All of them “casual end users”. So far, without bigger problems. But I have to support people with Windows trouble on a regular basis. So my own judgement would be that GNU/Linux is better suited, even for the end user.
For the first part, you narrow your focus to the “desktop” role. But the desktop is not the only computer application. And I suppose that GNU/Linux can serve webpages well for small businesses (cf. the Netcraft survey), or acting as an internet-gateway for example (see the many router appliances which use GNU/Linux).
That said, I do not want to discount GNU/Linux as a viable alternative on the business desktop.
“And I suppose that GNU/Linux can serve webpages well for small businesses (cf. the Netcraft survey), or acting as an internet-gateway for example (see the many router appliances which use GNU/Linux).”
Well, basically, here is the reality. The small businesses are afraid of the word UNIX since they don’t think they will be able to maintain it without calling in outside support all the time. The truth is they are probably right. Their IT staff probably consists of one person who might also have other jobs. He or she doesn’t have time to learn another platform, and since he or she already knows Windows, that’s what they are going to go with it.
Now, you mentioned that you didn’t have to support Linux very often. THat’s not because the the small businesses understand how to use it. It is because Linux is so damn reliable that they never have to worry about. The Linux server will sit in its corner, happily serving web pages, or doing gateway stuff. And it will do it for months at a time without having any problems. So basically, once it is installed, it just works, and the small businesses don’t have to worry about it. However, if something DID go wrong with it, I would be willing to bet they wouldn’t even know where to begin to try to fix it.
If you equate Fedora with stability, then you clearly do not have a clue about how business IT operates.
Yep, no clue. I’ve only been a Sr. UNIX Admin for 7+ years. Absolutely no clue whatsoever.
And stability? I equate Linux with stability. It doesn’t matter if its Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, whatever. Its more stable than Windows.
Perhaps you meant usability?