As the speakers at this week's fourth annual Linux Desktop Summit in San Diego looked out onto their audiences, they couldn't help but notice that the number of attendees sporting t-shirts, sandals and bushy facial hair -- the stereotypical Linux movement diehards -- was much reduced from previous conferences.
The message they offered the crowds echoed the longtime desire among Linux fans to see the open-source operating system loosen the stranglehold Windows enjoys on the desktop. But this time that message was leavened with criticism of the Quixotic strategies Linux proponents and vendors still often rely on.
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, principal analyst with San Jose, Calif.-based The Enderle Group. "The closest thing you have to a union in IT are Apple users and Linux users," he said. "Nobody else revolts like that."
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."
Nine million Linux PCs are expected to be shipped this year, according to IDC, growing to 17 million in 2008. While less than 4 percent of PCs expected to be sold in North and South America in 2008 will come with Linux, about 9 percent in the Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and African regions will be.
So why don't PC vendors love Linux more, especially, since Windows costs $200 to 300? That's inaccurate, according to Enderle, who said that OEMs not only buy Windows for a fraction of the retail price charged consumers, but they later get to recoup that cost in the price they charge customers.
Indeed, Enderle said, large PC vendors actually turn a profit installing Windows because of all the money they are awarded by Microsoft from its marketing slush fund. Enderle says that co-marketing dollars are a common practice in many industries, though chipmaker AMD Corp. -- in a lawsuit aimed at Intel Corp.'s use of them -- is challenging their legality. Still, Microsoft provides plenty of other soft incentives to hardware vendors, from sales support on large accounts, engineering assistance and essential support for making drivers for add-on peripherals work properly.
"It's like crack, they just can't get away from it," Enderle said. "Are Linux vendors going to pick up the slack?"
OEMs, especially smaller system builders, will occasionally install Linux if a customer demands it, Enderle said. 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.
"The PC guys live on churn, and Linux doesn't really change enough for them. That's theoretically good for IT managers, who would keep employees on the same hardware for nine years if they could, but bad for OEMs," Enderle said.
Another problem is the mistaken belief among Linux advocates that open-source software equivalents to popular commercial Windows software and games are adequate, according to Geoff Perlman, CEO of Austix, Texas-based REAL Software. "The mass majority of computer users are conservative. They want to use the software they're used to using," said Perlman, whose firm makes software to ease the rewriting of applications from one operating system to another.
Mainstream users just aren't going to voluntarily switch to Linux if it means they have to give up Photoshop, Quicken or even Microsoft Office, said Perlman, who calls the current dearth of commercial software a "drought."
Dave Rosenberg, principal analyst with the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), agreed. "Does OpenOffice meet my needs? Almost. Does GIMP (open-source photo editor) meet my needs? Same answer," said Rosenberg, who is also the CIO of San Francisco financial research firm, Glass, Lewis. "Drivers are still a real drag. My laptop running Ubuntu only lasts half an hour. But these are solveable problems. So we're getting there."
Experts agreed that Linux advocates need to re-examine recent tech history in order to avoid being doomed to repeat it. For instance, Perlman argued that Windows only gained wide acceptance after Microsoft's 1991 release of Visual Basic 1.0, its drag-and-drop software development tool that made coding Windows apps much easier. After that, "software titles for Windows began pouring down like rain," he said.
Enderle, a former IBM employee, pointed to IBM's experience with OS/2. Internal strife between IBM's hardware and software divisions, and a patronizing attitude towards customers caused top IBM executives to "cherrypick" the tactics they could agree upon rather than embracing the overall strategy they "knew they needed to do to win with OS/2" against Windows. Linux, with its open-source community and multiple vendors, has it even worse, said Enderle.
While OSDL's Rosenberg argued that the release of Windows Vista will cause many corporations to seriously look into switching to Linux on the desktop, Enderle disagreed. Linux's best prospects, he said, are not on PCs, but with cell phones or newfangled consumer electronic-type appliances, such as the Linux-based Tivo.
"You can't out-resource Microsoft or out-compete them," Enderle said. "You need to find out where the market is going. As Netscape [founder] Jim Barksdale says, 'Find a parade, and get in front of it.'"