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Comment by rm-rf | Hacker News Reader

One factor likely at play here is the low cost of licensing MS products under the enterprise/volume licensing agreements. Where I'm at it's costing well under $100/person/year to license Windows, Office, Exchange, SharePoint and a few other odds & ends. IIRC, for just under $50/person/year, we get Windows & the basic Office suite, add another $10/person/year to get client access licenses for Exchange & SharePoint; add another $10 for Visio, Project...

It's hard to carry the FOSS banner at that price.

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I've never had a good sense of why people are so desperate for Linux to take Windows' desktop market share. Linux already clobbered Windows on the server, and probably will in perpetuity because of its momentum, price, and developer support. It's a good place for Linux. No one can legitimately call open source unviable at this point.

I can understand it from an ideological perspective, but many of the people I see talking about it aren't ideologues.

Mainly because as Sys admins/Users we don't want to be forced into using Windows. It's selfish but seriously for those who know Linux, they are generally much more productive on it. But this often is not the case for people in more administrative type jobs. So the question becomes should it be easier to administrate and use for us (sys admins and power users) or for the average user in the office.

I'm lucky to work in a place where windows doesn't exist except for one of our project managers who like windows. No one complains about it and she is capable of supporting herself. (As a research lab, our tech support team is really small, desktop users usually have to be self sufficient.)

There's no question. Your comfort after the comfort of your users.

> I've never had a good sense of why people are so desperate for Linux to take Windows' desktop market share.

Why?

Linux is a platform, and therefore depends on network effects: The more people use it as a desktop, the more software (apps, games) will be available. The more software is available, the more people will use Linux as a desktop.

Thus, market share seems to matter -- especially for those who aren't ideologues.

Unfortunately, the theory only holds if there's money to be made by developing desktop applications and games. This is still more complicated than it should be.

I'm not "desperate" for Linux to win on the desktop, but if it did, I expect people would no longer hassle me to put files in MS Word format.

I"m less concerned about Linux taking Windows market share, but I do not want Windows to be considered the only viable option, as so many IT departments do consider it.

Even just a 10% drop in market share, with Macs and Linux splitting the gains, would be awfully nice.

I actually don't think Linux is clobbering Windows on the server. Here's a year old story, but I doubt things have changed much in a year: http://blogs.computerworld.com/15675/idc_windows_dominates_l...

With that said, I do think Linux is clobbering Windows on mobile devices.

I call bullshit on IDC's figures. If you take public-facing websites -- something that can be checked -- MS has a 20% market share[1]. Some of these are multiple sites on one server, and some are multiple servers on one site, which probably cancel each other out so c.286M sites is roughly the same number of servers.

By contrast, IDC's figures are for a total of less than 2M servers sold per quarter. If each server lasts for 5 years, that means there are a total of 40M in use worldwide, which is way too low.

1. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/02/15/february-2011-w...

I don't see Linux share on that? I ask because we use Apache on WS08. I'm sure we're not the common case, but it would be useful to know if Apache==99% Linux or 75% Linux.

I don't have figures either. I would guess that Linux' share of apache deployments is >75% but less than 99%.

Taking a double digit percentage of a proprietary juggernaut's market with something free is what I'd count as clobbering.

That report also seems to cover shipments, as in prefab servers with the OS already installed. Don't most larger operations use homemade distributions and configurations? That's on top of any number of spawned instances of Linux in a virtualized environment. I wonder how many Linux instances are running on EC2 at any given time.

I don't see anything in the IDC report about overall OS share. Just shipments. A computerworld blog referencing a zdnet blog (which also cites the IDC report) for marketshare numbers seems fishy, as though they were fudging facts to support a headline.

Most organizations don't buy servers with any OS preinstalled. At least in my experience they don't.

80%? That seems hard to believe given that *nux clearly dominates the web server market:

http://news.netcraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/wpid-ove...

> Linux already clobbered Windows on the server

It did? What do you base this conclusion on?

Don't get me wrong, I'd pick Ubuntu server any day, but I was under the perception that Windows clobbered Linux in the server wars.

Most of the highest traffic sites on the web use linux/unix with the exception of MS owned sites and a scattering of other sites. Smaller sites tend to gravitate toward linux as a matter of course due to lower operating costs and wider availability of hosting.

Oh, there was no mention of this statement being just web servers.

I'd think that across the server market as a whole that Windows had won that one.

Every organization I come across seems to have a small percentage of Linux servers, but Windows dominates. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the facts had it the other way around.

There are a lot more web servers than exchange servers in this world...

There are a lot more servers than there are web or Exchange servers, so what's your point? Nobody said anything about Exchange either.

Well, once consideration mentioned by Linux adherents in the 1990s was that if Windows is all the people who make decisions about enterprise computing know, they will tend to block the use of Linux when Linux is appropriate.

> It's hard to carry the FOSS banner at that price.

Are they also counting the extra downtime, anti-malware packages and so on?

Because a Linux desktop usually just works.

And, BTW, in order to Sharepoint be as cost-effective as the worst open-source alternative (as in "groupware for masochists") Microsoft would have to pay you a truckload of money.

"Are they also counting the extra downtime"

With Windows 7, there should be no more (or less) downtime than any other operating system.

"anti-malware packages and so on?"

Anti-virus for a large enterprise can be as cheap as $1/desktop/year.

Automated enterprise patch management is expensive, but when added to MS licensing, you still should be under $100/person/year.

Keep in mind that if you put an OS X or Linux desktop on my enterprise network, I will make you install some form of enterprise grade automated patch management on your desktop. I.E - not only do I need you to have automated patch management, I need to know that you are patched, when you last patched, what you patched, etc; which implies an enterprise class solution.

"in order to Sharepoint be as cost-effective"

I'm curious, do you have any reasonably objective data to back up that statement?

I ran enterprise class document management and collaboration with FOSS tools. At $10/person/year, SharePoint is a steal.

> At $10/person/year, SharePoint is a steal.

Are your users satisfied?

Why is that the people that can afford it (the enterprise) gets more for less cost than the people who can't (everyday consumers)?

Mainly because the enterprise is guaranteed to buy at least a few hundred copies.

Also this is pretty common in other areas too, the rich and celebrities always seem to get more for less.

So here's a question. Suppose a 1000 consumers get together, and petition MSFT to buy a copy of the Windows du jour. Will MSFT give them the same price as a 1000-user company?

Consumers already do, if like 99% of people they get the license with a new computer. MS only soaks the people who buy retail.

"Mainly because the enterprise is guaranteed to buy at least a few hundred copies."

Or a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand.

It's called a bulk discount.

And note that this story is about government. If they're being suckered into cut rate deals that disadvantage small businesses, education and consumers with discounts then there's a failure somewhere.

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