The 'other' side of the coin...

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CIO jury: Is the Linux desktop dead?

--- ZDNet

Hey, I'm not saying it's right, but there's 2 sides to every story. Enjoy the short read!

 

Thanks for that fortch. Clearly there is a desktop battle going on and Microsoft are winning that fight by a mile. It's the server side of the market where Linux is a real contender.

The future is hard to predict, anything could happen but I doubt SaaS will take off, at least I hope not

 

The question is where is Linux stealing market share from?

Windows for the first time took the lead this year in server sales, overtaking Unix for the first time since 1996 when IDC started recording the sales, however linux was up by $1bn as well, but if Windows is taking more share, and Linux is, Linux is unlikely to be eating into the Windows share, more likely people are replacing expensive Unix farms with lower cost linux ones

Article from earlier this year
http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html

 

This iarticle ignores the very fact that most Linux installs aren't coming pre-installed on new hardware. Debian has the second largest percentage of the Linux server marketshare, next to RedHat, is the fastest growing distro in overall server marketshare, and only one server manufacturer offers Debian as a pre-installed choice, HP. This means most Linux installs are not being registered by the way this report counts marketshare.

The second reason this report is going to say that Unix and MS sales are larger than Linux sales is because based on overall dollar volume of new servers, and in that respect of MS and Unix will win, even if they have a total number of installs that is smaller than Linux, because those two OS's are more expensive to purchase, and they are pre-installed far more often....

The third reason this report will be skewed towards MS and Unix is that the majority of long term Linux shops will buy their hardware with no OS and install a free distro because they already know how to support the OS they will be using. Why would they buy a service contract they don't need?