IBM's new Ubuntu-based desktop offering

Read the announcement again. The announced bundle is the opposite of what Virtual Bridges has been doing up till now. Up till now, they've been letting you virtualize windows desktops running on linux/solaris iron so you could get access to windows applications from linux/mac/windows clients. Really no different than the citrix ica model, except I think citrix lets you download the proprietary clients gratis.

But this new announcement is the opposite. IBM is leveraging Ubuntu to offer their proprietary Lotus software gratis as part of the bundle in an effort to get people to use Lotus instead of MS Office. Lotus is available for Windows already. Business could choose to pay for Lotus software for Windows clients. So why the bundle? IBM is offering a predatory price cut on the Lotus bundled in this offer compared to its Windows variant. The expectation is businesses buy the bundles, setup a central linux server which hosts the virtualized Ubuntu desktop instances with gratis Lotus available. Client computers... macs/linux/windows.. run the proprietary Virtual Bridges client software and access those virtual desktops to make use of of the gratis install of the proprietary Lotus software.

The cost benefit here is that IBM is willing to give Lotus away in these bundles, whereas they are not willing to do that for the Windows version of Lotus.

Canonical is apparently getting a $10 support contract cut per user. Which is great news for Canonical as its a dedicated revenue vector out of the desktop bundle. Do we know if Canonical gets a guaranteed support contract cut from its Dell installs? This might actually be a more solid support revenue stream for Canonical than the Dell arrangement.

ref:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=vi...