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Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner)
ComputerPartner
covers the Linux Desktop Summit, and draws conclusions about
Linux adoption by businesses.
"CIOs, for ease of management, generally prefer that employees all use the same operating system. The rule of thumb Enderle subscribes to is that support costs increase by the square of the number of platforms. So if a company runs two operating systems, support costs increase by 4 times. If a company runs Windows, Mac and Linux, support costs increase 9 times.
But whenever CIOs openly try to consolidate operating systems, they run into pockets of resistance from diehards who say "nasty things and threaten to quit." Faced with that, most CIOs will simply try to limit the growth of Mac and Linux desktop systems "to maintain some respect and decorum, as well as keep their own jobs.""
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Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 17:54 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link] Why should jounalists always interview this self proclaimed "analyst" Enderle? (A clown IMHO).I would appreciate LWN and others being a bit more critical in their source selection.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:48 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] Today, Rob Enderle said something stupidly pro-Microsoft.
In other news, Earth still has an atmosphere, and the sun continues to undergo nuclear fusion at its core.
Journalists, analysts, attribution Posted Apr 28, 2006 0:53 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] It's not whether or not Enderle is a clown. Enderle is a marketing consultant whose clients include some well-known proprietary software companies. As long as there are software companies and marketing consultants, there will be marketing consultants saying things publicly about software products.
The problem is lazy journalists who attribute a source as "an analyst" without disclosing the relevant business relationships. There's quite a bit of fudging that goes on around "non-commissioned" (written on spec) analyst reports from other analyst firms, too, so this is not just an Enderle problem.
Stock news sites got pretty good about "the author of this article owns this stock" disclaimers a few years ago. It's time for the IT media to clean up its act on disclosing who's working for who.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 18:17 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Hey, that rule of thumb would be really handy... if it corresponded to any semblance of reality. The fact is, just for one, quite a few people have found that Macs require far less money and personnel to support than Windows machines. (I know this is a Linux-focused site, but I just happened to remember those studies and experience off the top of my head, and if Enderle is that far off on just Macs, then with Linux...who knows?) But it's not like I'm surprised or anything...
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 18:47 UTC (Thu) by jdave23 (guest, #27160) [Link] There's an even better rule-of-thumb:
"All hail the monoculture!"
That way you save money on anti-virus and ghost-imaging vendors. You can use the same one, over and over and over and over again ...
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 19:54 UTC (Thu) by ringlord (subscriber, #6309) [Link] That's right, monoculture is bad.. Let's hope it never happens that everyone use Linux, but rather stick to a mix of Windows, Macs, and Linux.
While I do hope most people start using Linux, that comment of yours showed absolutely no insight at all.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:17 UTC (Thu) by jdave23 (guest, #27160) [Link] Perhaps you should consider reading the quote referenced by this item.
In the interest of being helpful, here's a sample:
"CIOs, for ease of management, generally prefer that employees all use the same operating system."
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 0:00 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] That way, when a virus hits the network, we can ensure a 100% infection rate.
Gah... I remember when the Melissa virus and Code Red and all those sent the first real wakeup calls through IT at work. I'd arrive at work and see a photocopied notice posted at the front entrance: "Do not open email attachments -- Virus outbreak."
And, I'd go back to my Linux workstation, and blithely ignore the warning as I sifted through my email w/ mutt.
Marking all the fileshares as read-only sucked also. No amount of "not using Windows" lets you get around that.
Whoever thought that "launching a file" should be the same as "launching a program" needs to be shot.
At my employer, we actually support about four platforms, two of which are Windows platforms. We have WinXP, Win2K, Linux and Solaris. (Ok, there's a fifth: For designers w/ no Windows box, there's the Citrix server.) Somehow, when you have saavy users, the burden just doesn't seem to grow quadratically. Go figure! Maybe it's because each user has access to the platforms (plural) they need for their job, and they use the right tools for each task?
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 14:36 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] > Whoever thought that "launching a file" should be the same as "launching a program" needs to be shot. Seconded!!! I remember a virus propagated by a pseudo sound file called something.wav.exe and with MIME type wave. Guess what Outlook did? Yes: exec something.wav.exe ???????? What are they thinking?
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 14:49 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] It's worse than that. If you feed a PE executable called foo.wav to mediaplayer, it executes it. Or at least it used to.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 20:18 UTC (Thu) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] Enderle is living in the past as usual. Linux on the desktop will or will not happen as a result of adoption or non-adoption in the corporate environment. Novell is the key to this IMHO. Once corporate users straighten out the rough edges of Linux desktop of which there are several from my experience, the home user will follow easily.Tip for Rob: Buy Novell shares.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 21:01 UTC (Thu) by chohman (guest, #5519) [Link] You know, most rules of thumb have some fairly obvious connection to reality. I'm trying real hard, and I can't think of any way to spend FOUR times the money to support ONE more OS.I'd also be fascinated to find out if Windows 98 and Windows XP are considered separate OSes (try supporting both and see what I mean) by "he with the clueless thumb".
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 21:49 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Actually it may not be reality.. but it is what is used by CIO's on figuring out support costs. And yes Windows 2000, XP, ME etc are all seperate costs in the matchup. The costs come in the number of people you have to be experts in a field and the equiptment/scripts/time needed to support them (from ghost to anti-virus, etc).
In the case of small companies (less than 500 people) I think that these values may not be reached.. but in the cases of 10,000-100,000 corps.. the costs are vast. I also hate to admit but the other Enderle quotes are all things I can agree with:
1) Microsoft sells Windows to large OEM's at a discount and with lots of co-marketing cash. Dell, HP, etc use the cash infusion like crack. Yes they have big proponents of Linux... but the cash speaks volumes at the end of each quarter.
2) Companies find that costs go up more than linearly with the more operating systems. The costs come in things like trying to get the internal corporate apps working for everyone. [There was an issue I saw where the application did not display or work correctly on Firefox depending if you were on Windows, Linux or Mac. Working out that issue was a lot longer than a linear exercise. If the company had gone with just a windows only solution it would have been almost free due to MS discounts on getting the crack in the door.]
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 1:41 UTC (Fri) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link] There was an issue I saw where the application did not display or work correctly on Firefox depending if you were on Windows, Linux or Mac. Considering Firefox renders HTML using the same engine on all platforms, I'd say you must be using proprietary APIs or toolkits, such as MSXML or ActiveX. These lock you in to a particular underlying platform, which is why MS keeps developing them: it's embrace and extend all over again. If you use non-standard web technologies, you kind of deserve what you get. Trust in MS is almost always misplaced.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 30, 2006 0:48 UTC (Sun) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] > Considering Firefox renders HTML using the same engine on all platforms, I'd say you must be using proprietary APIs or toolkits, such as MSXML or ActiveX.
I take it you don't do much software development. Firefox, like all software, is full of platform-specific bugs, features, and different compiler options in the default binaries. It is not at all surprising that something works on one platform and not another.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 30, 2006 23:19 UTC (Sun) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link] I take it you don't understand the concept of web standards. If I write standards-compliant code, I expect it to work on browsers with completely different code-bases, let alone compiler flags.
And yes, I am a software engineer. I don't specifically hack on Firefox, but I am involved in the production of an HTML documentation project that contains almost 10,000 files. One thing I do know. If you don't /test/ your HTML on various browsers, it probably won't work on various browsers. There are too many surprises, small incompatibilities etc. But you shouldn't /expect/ it to work. Testing is all part of a healthy development process, not an additional cost that should be written out of the budget because you've decided to target a specific browser.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted May 4, 2006 11:41 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] One small flaw in this particular rule of thumb is that it can really only be related to proprietary OSes. And with Windows systems, I can imagine that it is true, since that is what you opted for. ;-)
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 2:16 UTC (Fri) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] I have no earthly clue where he came up with that 'newsbite'.I don't care for Rob, and I don't think much of him as a pundit.
That said,
My shop of 70+ folks is a pretty even split Mac OS-X,
If we cut the Macs out, 70 percent of our troubles go
I don't dislike the Macs, I like'em, a lot in fact.
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 15:39 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] There are lots of disconnections from reality there. Start with that fallacious rule of thumb, apply some simple rules of illogic, and come up with the conclusion that MacOS and Linux are the enemies of respect and decorum...
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 27, 2006 22:43 UTC (Thu) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] "" One of the biggest obstacles to acceptance of desktop Linux by corporate IT is the perception that proponents of the OS are, well, troublemakers, according to Rob Enderle... ""
I happen to have a couple of emails exchanged with this personality from a few years ago, and since then, i couldnt came across no one more biased towards Microsoft than him. Talk about verbose Linux activists?... this guy beats them all put togheter hands down!... FUD, more FUD, and more hoggwash M$ social engineering crap!
The biggest obstacle its cultural!... IMO.
"" CIOs, for ease of management, generally prefer that employees all use the same operating system. The rule of thumb Enderle subscribes to is that support costs increase by the square of the number of platforms ""
FUD... it increases by the square of the number of incidents. Linux should be prefered here. It really is unethical, but CxOs dont care because there is plenty of FUD allover helping to wide the Windows(r) crap under the rug and blame other platforms for the trouble. Its like hiding a "criminal" in the basement. The problem here is that you have to have the majority of systems with other environments but Windows(r) to really expose the uncooperating party. But *yet* not that many shops are prepared to do a big jump.
"" But whenever CIOs openly try to consolidate operating systems, they run into pockets of resistance from diehards who say "nasty things and threaten to quit."""
More FUD... i had two curious personal episodes about diehards, one of a chief system and network manager, running Linux from his desk without the CxO really knowing, and than being able to prevent him, just because it got his job done better and quickly. Another from a diehard *home* user who said it would never use Linux, much less instead of MS, but he was already running Linux in his Motorola smartphone bought cheaper from a turist visit to shouteast Asia... go figure!
"" "It's like crack, they just can't get away from it," ""
No its more like an irrational hypnotic state, because most of them have never tryed anything else, are closed to real honest experimentation, and end up hating those that promote other points of view. Crack addicteds, i belive, would at least try anything that puts them "high".
"" But OEMs fundamentally dislike Linux because it doesn't sport a track record of encouraging users to upgrade their PCs in reliable three-year cycles the way Windows does, Enderle said ""
For once i agree plenty. But users are not that stupid. And having been witnessing to the "White Box" explosion and desmiss, i cant blame the PC market had gone so sore, for seeing so many of those smaller OEMs gone belly up.
"" The PC guys live on churn, and Linux doesn't really change enough for them ""
Its the hardware support issue Rob. When Linux support logo start to appear on most of the hardware pieces, it will make a big difference... trust me!
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner) Posted Apr 28, 2006 7:25 UTC (Fri) by amando (guest, #36597) [Link] I am surprised by the "rule of thumb" for the support costs of different operating systems. First, when are two systems different? More important, when central services are chosen to be system independent, the additional cost of support cannot be that high. A square root sound more logical to me. Only when platform specific solutions are chosen, and all these systems need to be coupled, the list of problem becomes endless.
Experts: A group that does not include Enderle Posted Apr 28, 2006 15:18 UTC (Fri) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link] WTF is the great pretender being quoted here? Enderle is a vending machine; you drop in coins, select the message, and out it spews.
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