Porsche's are anything but lean. They do perfoem well, but then,
depending on your criteria, so does VMS. OS/2 was a lame attempt
to mimic Microsoft. It had as much chance of success as Linux
does today.
Oh contrare.
Linux will win the desktop, no two ways about it. One of the regional
managers for an off-shore firm I chatted with laughed like hell when I
told him that 6 months ago. He said there was no way MS Office would
ever get replaced anywhere. I told him most government bodies, and a
lot of corporations have already started the migration to Open
Document Format. I got a call from him a couple of weeks ago. His
company had just completed MS Access, Outlook, and Office from their
entire company. They now had projects to do it for other companies.
They hadn't taken Windows off the desktop yet, but it was only the
first phase of the project both internally and externally. Everybody
was being moved to OpenOffice, Mozilla or Opera, and either GMail or
Evolution. In short, the first phase of the project was to save their
clients money by removing the bulk of the MS support cost. Once the
end users had gotten comfortable with all of the OpenSource products,
they were going to come in one day and find their desktop now had
either SuSE or Ubuntu on it.
Linux will never win the back end. It is a pathetic hunk of sh*t for
reliable database work, as is _every_ form of Unix. That grid stuff
is not fault tolerant...Oracle has sufficiently proven that to the
industry with their RAC product that cannot survive even the tiniest
of faults.
Inside of two years MS will be little more than gaming systems
vendor. While OpenOffice has its quirks, it is more than adequate for
98% of the business uses. Evolution is quite close to being a
complete Outlook replacement right now. If you add in the fact there
virtually no evolution specific viruses, then it is way ahead.
We are in a global recession. MS is trying to sell Worsta...errr...I
mean Vista and force a bunch of hardware upgrades. Both SuSE and
Ubuntu have corporate stable desktop versions where updating and user
installations can be turned off. Each desktop can also be remotely
managed for upgrades, etc. Each OS will run on the hardware the
corporation already has. The millions paid for license compliances/
maintenance/support to MS is an easy "cut costs" MBA sell.
Yes, there will be a token few companies which are stupid enough to
pay for marketing sold by Gartner Group as "Industry Analysis" who
staunchly refuse to abandon ship, but as time goes by and MS is unable
to pay huge quantities of marketing dollars to Gartner, even those
companies will follow.
I don't know about the situation for your company or clients, but I
have one client in particular that spends well over $1mill/yr in
desktop license/upgrade/compliance direct costs and an untold amount
in outages cause by MS product failure/virus infection.
One very cool thing with a Linux desktop is you don't need to spend
hundreds of dollars on VT terminal emulation to access your OpenVMS
machine. If you need full access you can use xterm. If you install
the KDE front end, Konsole is almost perfect for VT100. There's a bug
with the NumLock key remapping right now, but should be fixed soon.
The "/" would map correctly if the entry program could save it. They
have to add some special quoting so it doesn't get swallowed up by the
parser which uses the "/" for some escape stuff.