LWN: Comments on "Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)"

Time travelling to fight wars lost in history

grouch — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 08:35:41 +0000

'Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D. There is nobody in the Linux world' that does that, he says.

Looks like Microsoft is barely "north" of what IBM was doing in 2001, when Sam Palmisano gave his keynote address at LinuxWorld Expo. From a FAQ that was spawned by that speech:

IBM spends $5 billion a year on R&D. And we're putting a billion dollars behind Linux. But even all that is nothing compared to what the Linux community will generate spontaneously.
-- Linux for IBM FAQ

Based on a rough guess at the growth of Linux in the interim period, I'd say the R&D budget of Microsoft is sufficient to win "the Linux Wars" of 2001. MCP should post the amounts for Microsoft's 'CEO Snowjobs' budget and 'Governmental Puppet Purchasing' budget. They've lost the software development battle.

What 6 billion could buy you

Zenith — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:59:43 +0000

Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.

Well, actually they *are* doing something about it:
http://news.com.com/Geeks+in+space/2100-1026_3-5399507.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_ALLEN_040620.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen

Single v Double click

Baylink — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:29:56 +0000

This one frustrates me.

There's a *very good* reason why icons require a double-click to utilise the "Open" shortcut: it's a *shortcut*.

Icons on desktops and in folders are *objects*. Things which you can click once to get a response are *buttons*. Buttons are *supposed* to look like buttons; you can blame Microsoft itself (and particularly the Toolbar team in the Office group) for screwing *that* bit of obviousness up by creating lots of buttons that don't look like buttons until you mouseover them.

Everyone likes to assume that *any* of these desktop environments ought to be "so simple anyone can learn them without training or reading", and folks, it's just not that way.

And it ought not to be that way.

What You See Is All You Get is bad enough... but everyone becomes a power user eventually, to one degree or another. And ghod help you if you make it *harder* for powerusers to get work down because you're trying to make intake training easier.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

tnoo — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:21:59 +0000

> Just dealing with the single-click vs double-click file selection menus can be a pain for me, to say nothing of a less experienced user.

Exactly this single-click vs. double-click behaviour makes the Windows UI so hard to use, especially for beginners. Why on earth do I have to click once in the status bar to launch a program, but twice on the desktop? And why is a very uncommon operation (renaming a file) triggered every time I click a little bit off the icon and on the text (this is especially true in the file manager).

At least KDE is fully consitant in this respect, and much more usable than Windows.

best, tnoo

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

daniel — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:41:01 +0000

"XP is the best they've done so far but if you read any books on human interface design you'll see that the whole bottom-up design of the Start menu is counter intuitive."

A logical fallacy called "appeal to authority". I personally do not see what is wrong with having the task bar at the bottom of the screen, I prefer it actually.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

Wol — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 08:28:40 +0000

Don't forget. David Wheeler estimated the value of the *current* kernel. Somewhere else you can find out how much work has been done on the kernels.

iirc about two thirds of the code of 2.6 is new since 2.4. So it's easy to do the maths and work out the "per year" value of the new code in linux if you have the figures and dates in front of you (I don't).

Cheers,
Wol

What 6 billion could buy you

mikec — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 03:44:31 +0000

As with most rants, the question was rhetorical ;-)

Though I should point out that those VC funded startups I mentioned are also subject to the laws of marketing.

Even MS seems to understand the lack of return on their R&D dollars these days - thus the monstrous dividend pacakge.

Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.

Oh well, I guess I will enjoy the nice warm weather here on Earth...

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

zblaxell — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 23:58:00 +0000

The usual cue for this boundary is that the unsupported product came on different physical media and had to be installed by the user after the rest of the machine was delivered.

This doesn't work as well for fully integrated distributions like Debian, Gentoo, their imitators and relatives, unless there's an easy way for third parties to label the applications they provide support for such that the installer can present them distinctly. The distributors don't really support any of the packages at all (at least not in a contractual-obligations sense), and third parties who you could buy support from are usually separate entities from the distributor.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

dreadnought — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 22:51:04 +0000

Pay me to admin Windows or pay me to admin Linux either way you are going to pay me. But if I had a choice on what to use I would pick the most expert friendly OS and chances are that aint Windows. Now enforcing policy on users it seems Windows has that down to a science.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

man_ls — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 22:17:12 +0000

There are endless aspects where Windows makes a better system than Linux, and viceversa. The point is that Windows is not, all in all, a very good product: poor usability, bad support, lousy security record... It is difficult to find a worse combination.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

oak — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:53:33 +0000

One thing in which Windows is better than Linux is that *all* the support
documentation (help files etc) is localized (translated). System which
you don't understand is not very usable.

Pro's on the Linux side are that Linux has partial translation to more
languages than Windows and one can easily fill the missing translations
even just be producing .po from the .mo file, translating what's missing
and then converting it back to .po (+testing+iteration). The problem is
that there should be more translators.

(At home I've had Linux for last 10+ years and at work for last 8+ years,
no Windows, but I have some relatives with Windows machines.)

What 6 billion could buy you

jonabbey — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:08:18 +0000

Microsoft has always included 'product and marketing development' in their 'research and development' budgeting, where 'product' means 'the customer and industry's perception of the bits in the box'.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

carcassonne — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:57:28 +0000

I build my own Linux systems (based on Linux from Scratch) that I use at home AND at work. So I'm pro-Linux and not at all pro-Windows. Still, there should be a way to present apps to the user and at the same time making the distinction between a base, supported system, and extra, other apps that may or may not work as is.

2 or 3 control centers are just confusing. But at the same time there should be choice. It's not by eliminating the other two that the consistency problem is solved.

For instance, with SuSE 9.3 I want to use MuSE which is found in the standard menu. Nice, I have an external Yamaha MIDI keyboard, so let's try to use this sequencer for fun. But no, there's a problem with Jack, and MuSE does nto run if Jack is sick (at least in this configuration). And where is Jack configuration mentioned in the SuSE handbook ? Nowhere. This is an unsupported application. But it is part of SuSE 'Linux' 9.3.

If I was a regular user I could easily say that 'Linux' is broken... unless it is made clear that MuSE is an addition, an extra application, which is not the case in SuSE 9.3 as MuSE is simply part of the KDE menu system. like Rosegarden, MainActor and everything else.

And so on so forth. Tried to start a newbie project with Blender recently ?

The apps have to be there. Do not take them out for simplicity's sake. But I think that there should be a clear, obvious, line for the user to cross to go into unsupported territory so that the user is warned that things might require more time to make work, be it configuration issues or simply learning, so the user's perception of 'Linux' is based on the apps that are supported and well-tested.

Estimating development costs

jukabazooka — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:53:15 +0000

If anyone is interested, some preliminary results for Debian 3.1 have been released as well at http://gsyc.escet.urjc.es/~jjamor/research/papers/up6-3Am... .

Some statistics:

Total physical SLOC (Source Lines of Code): 229,495,824
Estimated effort: 59,536.71 person-years
Estimated schedule: 8.82 years
Estimated cost to develop: 8,043,000,000 USD

Comparison of Source Lines of Code with other systems:

Windows XP (2002) - 40,000,000
Fedora Core 4 - 76,000,000
Debian 3.1 (June 2005) - 229,500,000

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

X-Nc — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:20:45 +0000

XP is the best they've done so far but if you read any books on human interface design you'll see that the whole bottom-up design of the Start menu is counter intuitive. There are a number of other things that aren't well done in the design (and I'm sad that GNOME & KDE had to continue the prevalence of them). The only reason it feels "normal" is because for almost two decades it has been the standard. Like the QWERTY keyboard, it's all anyone knows so it's the "easiest" to use. Doesn't matter that there are many layouts that are much better and faster.

And as for trolls, I agree with you and the others. Disagreement does not a troll make.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

cott — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:43:59 +0000

Sorry, guys. I have to agree with CyberDog, here.

You'd think that with the command-line utilities, at least, Unix/Linux would be consistent, but it's not. Take the "-v" option on any command, for instance. Does it mean to do something verbosely, does it print the version number, or does it do something else, entirely?

The GUI stuff is significantly worse. When people (like myself) choose a desktop like Gnome or KDE, they choose a specific look and feel. The problem is not all the apps adhere to that look and feel. If I happen to run a Gnome app while I'm on the KDE desktop, it looks like Gnome. If I run an old X app, it looks like X. I know that seems like a nitpick, but I don't think it is. Just dealing with the single-click vs double-click file selection menus can be a pain for me, to say nothing of a less experienced user. It's incredibly unusual to have this problem with Windows.

Don't get me wrong. I love Linux, but it's not perfect.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

George123 — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:38:45 +0000

Microsoft had no chanse to win this war!
George george@balcanicsoft.com

MS-Windows UI Failures

tony.taylor — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:20:21 +0000

I've yet to see a Linux desktop environment that is more user friendly to the common public than the Windows interface (or Mac, also a corporate entity).

It's interesting you should mention the "user-friendly" nature of the MS-Windows UI. First and foremost, the UI on MS-Windows sucks. Consider the start button: how are programs organized? Not by function, but by vendor. This simple little detail belies the major problem with the MS-Windows platform-- it is vendor-oriented, not user-oriented.

That same misdesign philosophy can be seen in applications, from the document format incompatibilities of various MS-Office products to the difficulty in removing Outlook Express from an MS-Windows installation (it's not in the add/remove software control), to deep product branding for all MS-Windows software from any vendor.

The MS-Windows interface is user-friendly to those who already know the MS-Windows interface. My family has been using Linux for years. They despise using MS-Windows machines; as much as I get complaints about both the Mac and Linux interfaces, at least I don't deal regularly with the disgust they express when stuck with MS-Windows. The Mac interface is superior to most Linux desktops; but most Linux desktops beat MS-Windows for ease-of-use and user-friendliness.

Applications may be a different matter. Application consistency within the same platform varies dramatically, so a true study would be difficult, but as another post pointed out, MS-Windows applications are hardly consistent.

The administration of MS-Windows isn't even easier anymore. Once a Linux box is configured, there's nothing more to do, except the occassional update. With MS-Windows, there's the regular updates, as well as anti-spyware and anti-virus protection updates, and the occassional re-install when nothing else seems to fix the system.

Of course, that's just my experience with relatives' machines. Since they are just regular users and don't have all the rules and constraints of a typical business machine, I guess I could just blame them.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

erwbgy — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:18:33 +0000

In my experience, the person doing the teaching has a big impact on what new users find easier. I showed my mother and father how to you the KDE SuSE desktop and they were both happy users. My brother showed my sister how to use the Windows desktop and she was a happy user. All proclaim that their desktop is the easier, but I'm pretty sure that if my brother and I had swapped groups the "better desktop" verdit would have been swapped too.

You are correct that people find what they know easier. But, at the end of the day, most users don't really care what desktop you give them, as long as they are able to easily do what they want.

What 6 billion could buy you

mikec — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 16:15:27 +0000

I'll forgive that one point which has its issues - $6B only buys 2 Si plants these days...

However,
a. It is a good point - WTF do they do with $6B? Compared to the innovation from mere $100's of millions in VC funded startups they appear to be spinning their wheels pretty badly - Losing $100's per unit on a stripped down PC (XBox) hardly qualifies as innovation.

b. The reason that "hardware accelerated" OS chips have not appeared is that "Moore's Law" and DV make them obsolete before they could be finished... I don't know if you have noticed, but the clocks rates stopped going up! The barrier to doing hardware accelerated OSes these days is how to know that they actually work...

The "do it in software" mantra is one of captiulation of the verification gods... It cannot be verified prior to shipping, so we leave room to fix it later...

That is not to say that one does not need "programmability", but neither does one need to be able to program that which has not changed in 25 years...

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

erwbgy — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:54:18 +0000

I disagree. I think that the WinXP desktop is pretty well designed and is usually a pleasure to use for most normal desktop tasks. Granted I don't have to use it all that often, since I use Kubuntu or SuSE most of the time, but when I do I am always pleasantly surprised. It is snappy, well-integrated and easy-to-use. I wouldn't like to support it, but I don't mind using it for simple tasks like reading mail, writing documents, listening to music or surfing the web.

Not directed specifically at the parent poster, but even if you don't agree, that doesn't make those who do trolls or minions of the evil empire. The way to react to this is to continually produce a better desktop, which is exactly what KDE, Gnome and friends are doing.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

sethg — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:37:35 +0000

My favorite pro-Microsoft argument from the article: "Whose economic best interest is it in to invest the extra $10 million or $50 million over some period of time to make sure that's a secure computing platform?"

It seems that MS has done pretty well for itself over the last decade by investing their millions in something other than Windows security. Why should they start now?

Estimating development costs

dwheeler — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:06:34 +0000

Thanks very much for the reference! The paper referenced above measured only the kernel. If you want to examine the whole OS, you could look at my paper More than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (June 2001). Here are a few interesting facts quoting from the paper (which measures Red Hat Linux 7.1):

It would cost over $1 billion (a Gigabuck) to develop this Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S. (in year 2000 U.S. dollars).
It includes over 30 million physical source lines of code (SLOC).
It would have required about 8,000 person-years of development time, as determined using the widely-used basic COCOMO model.
Red Hat Linux 7.1 represents over a 60% increase in size, effort, and traditional development costs over Red Hat Linux 6.2 (which was released about one year earlier).

Someone else, inspired by my paper, wrote the very interesting paper Counting Potatoes: The size of Debian 2.2; they found that Debian 2.2 includes more than 55 million physical SLOC, and would have cost nearly $1.9 billion USD using over 14,000 person-years to develop using traditional proprietary techniques.

Obviously Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Debian 2.2 are quite old. Red Hat 7.1, for example, didn't include massive packages like OpenOffice.org. So the actual development costs of current implementations would be even greater. And note that these only estimate replacement cost, not value. A lot of research has gone into developing competing approaches and new ideas, and if only the "winner" went in, the effort that went into the alternatives isn't counted (and it really should be, because those alternatives cost time and caused a better result).

What 6 billion could buy you

Los__D — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 13:03:12 +0000

"One year's investment would be enough to build several chip plants from the ground up. The next year's investment would be enough to design a chip with the actual logic of Vista on it, allowing computers to run Windows without using any CPU cycles - massively accelerating Windows, but also making all other OS' look slow because they'd still be running in software."

You really don't know much about microprocessors, do you?

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

man_ls — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 10:43:37 +0000

I'm far from a Microsoft fanboy, I just don't like to see people taking biased shots at Microsoft for what I consider a very good end-user product.

"Very good product"? Talking about Microsoft Windows? No, you are not far from a Microsoft fanboy, sorry.

What 6 billion could buy you

jd — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:16:03 +0000

Microsoft could hire enough mathematicians to produce a complete Z specification of Windows Vista (with all the bits they're missing out of the initial release), formally prove that specification, and then hire enough extra programmers to re-implement the specification from scratch, within a 2-3 year timeframe. This would not only improve stability, but would also eliminate 99.9% of all existing bugs, known or otherwise.
They could invest all of it in the US educational system, on the grounds that most really good innovators are recent graduates and the existing school system is incapable of producing a high caliber of software engineer. Within 4-5 years, their innovation rate should skyrocket and they'd have gained considerable additional loyalty.
One year's investment would be enough to build several chip plants from the ground up. The next year's investment would be enough to design a chip with the actual logic of Vista on it, allowing computers to run Windows without using any CPU cycles - massively accelerating Windows, but also making all other OS' look slow because they'd still be running in software.

What does Microsoft do with 6 billion? They seem to file an awful lot of patents, many of which don't seem very useful. If this is something Linux distributors can't do, then how exactly is this a bad thing?

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

Wol — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:10:51 +0000

"I've yet to see a Linux desktop environment that is more user friendly to the common public than the Windows interface"

Then you've never watched a COMPUTER newbie try out both Windows and Linux.

EVERY report I've ever seen says that if you take someone who has never used Windows, and asked them which is easier, Windows or Linux, they go for linux every time. (And IME that's true - when we gave my mum a computer she found linux easier.)

But because Windows is "good enough", when you take someone used to Windows and plonk them in front of linux, they find it hard because it's "different".

Cheers,
Wol

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

Wol — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:07:24 +0000

Actually, CERT *shouldn't* be slapped, because they *didn't* say that. That was MS's take on what CERT said.

CERT listed a bunch of vulnerabilities by OS. And by 'OS' they mean things such as 'Debian' or 'Red Hat' or 'SuSE'. MS merely added up all the linux ones and compared them to Windows, so committing the two heinous statistical crimes of adding duplicate lists, and ignoring half the information.

Cheers,
Wol

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

trochej — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 07:38:15 +0000

> I'm far from a Microsoft fanboy, I just don't like to see people taking
> biased shots at Microsoft for what I consider a very good end-user
> product.

A good end-user product wouldn't change it's interface constantly, to the point of no recognition by it's users (w2k -> wxp). Oh, and good end-user product would be free of bugs, like the one that won't allow non-administrative user connect with remote server via Citrix Program Neighborhood. And so on...

Me too.

hppnq — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 06:54:48 +0000

I think the OP tried to make a simple point: there are loads of "hidden" investments in Linux and Linux distributions. One does not need a highly scientific method to conclude that this amount of money probably exceeds the amount most companies are ever able or willing to invest in their products.

No zealotry here, just common sense with an edge of enthusiasm.

You do have a case in general against the kneejerk type of response to any Redmond publication, but next time you might want to spend some time thinking up arguments that do make sense: your desktop comparison has been an admission ticket to the troll cave for some years now.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

gdt — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:41:51 +0000

Folks, when dissing a competing product you play to the customer's fears. This article doesn't mention the relative quality of the user experience at all. So it's pretty safe to assume that this doesn't keep corporate decision makers awake at night.

The article does have some wonderful FUD techniques. (1) Talk to the CEO, not the decision makers. (2) Talk financials last: this allows you to talk up the value of intangibles. (3) Leverage external information which supports your point of view[1]. And so on.

Once you know the major technique outlined in the subtext of the article -- prey on the customer's fears -- then it's easy to use it in reverse.

Customers are afraid of lack of support -- well tell a tale about a customer with a critical flaw in Windows that was effecting their business and that Microsoft just wouldn't listen (and heh didn't we just have one of those with WMF). And with Linux all is rosy -- if Red Hat won't listen to you, then you can pay a small consultancy that will.
Access to trained staff? Linux has real certification, based on knowledge. Do you really believe that all those shops displaying "MSCE" banners offer quality training? And you'll need that training, since you'll need to pay new staff to learn to administer Windows -- computer science faculties mainly use Linux now.
Linux has no secret roadmaps. If a feature is running late you will know. Compare that to the new Window's filesystem that was meant to be in NT, then Xp and then Vista. Microsoft claimed it was "on schedule" and then suddenly it was held over to the next operating system. Do you want your business depending upon that sort of behaviour?
Linux has no sales force. Microsoft will promise a multiuser MS-DOS if that will get them a sale. You've no idea if Engineering will deliver on Sale's promises (in the case of multiuser MS-DOS v5 they didn't). You can ask Linux developers directly and get a real person giving a real answer.

The other interesting subtext of the article is that the Windows MCPs quoted put Windows first, not the customer who is paying them. There's no need for consultancy firms to have a Windows versus Linux attitude -- it's your dime so they should have a "whatever works best for you" attitude. And so the article forms a list of firms that customers would do well not to employ.

[1] For example, take US CERT's list of software vulnerabilities on its face and say "The US government's prime computer security agency says Windows has ten times less security issues than Linux". The CERT should be slapped for releasing that data without a commentary noting the shortcoming of the raw data for use in analysis.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

X-Nc — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:04:19 +0000

> I've yet to see a Linux desktop environment that is more user
> friendly to the common public than the Windows interface

This is a very big and very common misconception. The UI for every version of MS Windows is far from being user friendly. The only reason that people believe it is is because it's the only UI they've ever seen. From a design standpoint, the Win2k and WinXP UI's are pretty bad.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

X-Nc — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:00:32 +0000

The per anum The per annum value of work being done on Linux in the open source world is greater than $6B. The R&D aspect is on par with any of the great powerhouses (like MIT or IBM).

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

mepr — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 03:13:49 +0000

While I agree that the linux platform (where by linux I'm referring to the whole operating environment found in redhat or suse or ubuntu.. gnu utilities, mit X11, gnome/kde/blackbox etc., mozilla, openoffice, etc., etc.) is most certainly worth more than $6bn, don't forget the claim is $6bn per /year/.

Me too.

CyberDog — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 03:03:58 +0000

First of all, not everyone who posts an argument with a different point of view to your own is a "troll". Believe it or not, you're not always right.

Second of all, I believe your initial comment to this article (to which I replied), was the most biased comment of any made here. But thank you anyway for assuming I'm some huge fan of Windows just because I disagreed with the blind zealotry your initial statement.

Me too.

Baylink — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 02:58:10 +0000

Either a troll, or someone who's just unreasonably enamored of Windows.

I'm not the cheerleader saying that Linux's desktop interfaces are *so* much better integrated than Windows is... though I don't really think they're all *that* bad. But holding even Windows XP up as a shining example of that is just as unreasonable.

Anyone who has to *support* this stuff (as I have for over 10 years) knows that *Microsoft* apps for Windows are the ones voted most likely to *violate* whatever user interface guidelines actually exist in the first place.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

njhurst — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 02:07:12 +0000

This sounds mightly like a troll to me.

Considering the completely different interfaces on Word, Nero and Media Player; compared to that of AbiWord, CD-creator and Totem, or kword, k3b, kaboodle I find your 'Windows has a more consistent interface' argument weak, old and unjustified.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

CyberDog — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 01:45:19 +0000

Why yes I have, and while I agree you could train any given person to use just about anything, I'm not particularly impressed. I think the problem is somewhat inherent in the modular nature of a Linux/Unix environment. When every last application is designed by unrelated sources, they result in a somewhat incongruous feel. For example, most Linux desktops I've seen have at least two or three different "Control Panel" type applets in the kicker (one for KDE/Gnome, one for the OS, one for ___). It just doesn't feel right sometimes. Sure it works, but it lacks that polished, fully integrated feel you get when the same source designs the Core/UI/supporting apps.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

bk — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:30:16 +0000

...or Ubuntu/GNOME2, to be fair.

Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)

Ross — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 22:13:10 +0000

I've seen very few Macintosh computers in corporate environments. Their use is mostly limited to graphic designers' desktops. That datapoint doesn't support your idea that ease of use was really the most important thing for corporate desktops. My personal opinion is that the industry has "standardized" on MS Office, Windows, etc. and that is one of the major reasons people don't want to leave. Windows may not be intuitive, but the majority of the work force is trained and familiar with it.

I think this can and will change, but it will not be an overnight transition.