Dell's Numbers, were not there

If they are talking in percentages then that's easy to understand.

If Dell sells 5% of it's servers with Linux and 95% of their servers with Windows and next
year they are selling 7% Linux and 93% Windows then that's a 50% increase in Linux sales in
one year. 

That sounds cool. 

But it's less cool to say they sold 450,000 Windows servers and 24,000 Linux servers in one
year and then sold 470,000 Windows servers and 35,000 Linux servers the next year... Which is
probably pretty much what is happenning nowadays.

But Linux is probably loosing is pretty accurate. 

It's the desktop. That's the problem. 


I've heard people say "Well the desktop is dead and the future is web-based applications"..
which is fine and dandy.

But that's wrong thinking. Microsoft stills owns the platform on which your web apps are being
delivered. This gives them control and they are going to do everything they can to make sure
that it's their webapps, not yours, that are going to be used.
Hence (when combined with the better security you get from IIS over Apache) you get things
like this:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/10/11/october_2007...

Apache has fallen to less then 50% of the market. Sure sure Microsoft is playing games with
people who own massive numbers of domains and Google switched from reporting their servers as
apache to google's own platform and things of that nature so that needs to be taken into
considuration.. but with things like Microsoft spending millions of dollars to purchase and
control thigns like Facebook you know that they are doing their best to make sure that it's
THEIR webapps, not Linux's.

The vast majority of servers are being sold nowadays are in the desktop support role, I
figure. In this role Linux has little to no place. 

Why?

Because Microsoft controls the desktop. 

Take modern Microsoft oriented office environment:
Windows desktop for complex desktop applications.
Microsoft Office for office apps and simple desktop applications. 
Exchange server for email, calendering, and document management.
Sharepoint server for Intranets, CMS, personal/departmental websites, document versioning,
etc.
MS SQL runs the back ends for Microsoft office applications, sharepoint server, etc etc. 
Active Domain server for identity management, desktop application management, file management,
server management, etc etc.
Visual Studio for application development.


Microsoft has this shit _locked_down_. Web, desktop, email, security, etc. They even made sure
that Firefox can't work in this type of environment (without reduced functionality)

Sure Linux has better web server. Linux has better email, pretty good desktop, and passable
Office apps. It's domain stuff is still very difficult.. but the end result is usually better.
Linux uses less resources, can be customized much easier, and all sorts of things that make it
superior in each role.



But what is going to happen if you have a whole-hog Microsoft ecosystem like the one I
described above and you try to replace any portion of it with a Linux-based solution?

Pick anything you want.

Try to replace Exchange with Linux email.  It'll break the Office integration, Active
directory Integration, Windows desktop integration, etc etc. The end result is obviously
either a massive increase in cost (to make it 'work' in the existing system) or a large
decrease in functionality.

Try to replace the Sharepoint with a Linux CMS.. Plone for example. Plone is probably much
better then Sharepoint, but it'll break the desktop integration, active directory integration,
etc

So on and so forth.

The end result is that there is no place for Linux in a ecosystem like that. Microsoft is
clever on how they designed the integration. And every year it's going to just get tighter. 

How to compete? I figure you provide easy plug-n-play infrastructure based entirely around
Linux that smaller companies can convert easily to before they adopt the entire Microsoft
corporate environment. Better, cheaper, faster. I don't know beyond that.