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I smiled when I read the title of this item in InterOp News, written by Jeff Gould.
There are a number of things I find wrong with this particular article, lets go through it, starting with the title:
Linux needs to try harder if it wants to catch Vista
Nice one! In one fell swoop the title alone makes some assertions:
1) That “Linux” is “behind” Vista.
The implication is that desktop use of Linux distros is behind Vista. How does he know this? Does he have concrete evidence to back this assertion up? Are there comparison figures which have definite Linux distro desktop use and the actual amount of desktops running Vista? I sure can’t find any definite numbers, therefore I am not prepared to make any assertions one way or the other. But I do suspect there is much greater use of Linux on desktop systems than is implied in that title.
2) The connotation in the title is that “Vista is superior to Linux”.
Perhaps I read too much into titles. Perhaps I’m paranoid. Perhaps I am merely suspicious when I see titles like that, but if you’re going to create a certain amount of doubt then your skill and use of language in your article title is important, and this one is very sly because of its wording. If the author meant to write it this way then that was quite clever. Perhaps I’m giving him more credit than he deserves.
Lastly, I was going to make this as point 3 - but it’s really just an amusing observation - well it amused me anyway. The title to me makes Vista look like some of disease to catch. I sure as heck don’t wish the Linux distro I use on my desktop to catch Vista! Sounds positively fatal!
Let’s get to the article itself;
There has been a meme going around in the Linux world that Vista is really a dog and that Microsoft is only managing to make its numbers by jamming the new OS down the throats of unwilling customers.
Indeed there is such a meme.
Now I admit I don’t use Vista and haven’t spent a lot of time benchmarking it against Ubuntu or Mac OS X or any of the other non-Microsoft alternatives.
So you don’t use Vista yet you’re writing this article? Interesting. Lets see what you’re basing your article on then.
But I don’t have to use Vista to know that it’s a lot more than a dog of an OS. Microsoft’s recently reported revenue and profit numbers for its September quarter amply prove that Vista doesn’t say “Woof! Woof!” when you boot it up. Consider:
Ah, okay, so you’re going to base your entire article on data from….. Microsoft itself. They won’t overcook their figures in a positive light to help them at all, won’t they.
And lets see what Microsoft are saying then…
Windows client OS revenue grew to $4.1 billion in the quarter, up a sizzling 25% year-over-year, driven mostly by rapid consumer uptake of Vista on the back of strong PC unit sales growth through the OEM channel.
The important part of that sentence is “through the OEM channel”. What this means is not direct sales of Vista by consumers, but installations of Vista included with a new PC or laptop.
Unit sales of Premium versions of Windows to consumers (i.e. the stuff people buy in stores) surged by a spectacular 150%.
Okay so is that Premium versions of XP? Vista? And note the mention of “150%”, without 1) revealing exact figures, and 2) revealing over what time frame. If I sell 10 copies of my (fictional) WunderOS Extreme Premium Lock-In SuperDRM Edition one week, and the next week I sell 15 copies, then sales have went up by a staggering 150% week-on-week! (10 * 150% = 15).
Billings from corporate volume agreements for Windows clients grew 27%, implying strong positive intent among business customers to upgrade from XP to Vista in the near future (otherwise they wouldn’t pay extra to put Windows clients under a multi-year contract with Microsoft).
Haha! “Windows clients” - what proportion of that billing is for XP and Vista? “implying strong positive intent among business customers to upgrade from XP to Vista in the near future” - that’s a real dead give-away that one. To me it actually means that this is an admission that the vast majority of businesses are sticking with XP, that they haven’t all jumped onto the Vista bandwagon. Another way you could phrase that sentence is “Yeah, we know they (the business users) WILL convert to Vista. They haven’t just yet, BUT THEY WILL! Honest! Mmmmhmmm!”.
But wait. Isn’t it true that Microsoft was forced to push back by five months the date when it plans to stop selling Windows XP? (If you’re interested, you can still pick up a retail or OEM copy until June 30, 2008, or as late as January 31, 2009 if you’re a Windows white box dealer.) And doesn’t that suggest, as the always intrepid Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argued in September, that Vista is in deep trouble? Indeed, mightn’t the trouble be so deep that Vista has become, as Steven colorfully puts it, a “zombie operating system” that stumbles around and looks from a distance like it’s alive but up close turns into “the walking dead”?
Now you’re starting to sound like me 
Well, yes and no. Yes, Microsoft customers pushed back on the artificially early cut-off date for XP, and Redmond decided to take the long view by giving up a little ground in the short term. But no, Vista isn’t a corpse, walking or otherwise, because Microsoft announced in its October conference call that 85 million copies of the new OS had been sold year-to-date compared to 45 million for XP. Making allowances for favorable spin – e.g. copies sold but not installed – it seems unlikely that a large publicly traded company could make a claim like that if, as Steven believes, the Vista story has really turned into a waking nightmare for its maker.
Here we see so much spin that you could power a small city. Microsoft started panicking that Vista take-up wasn’t happening as quickly as they were either liking or expecting, so rather than cut off a proven revenue stream for them (sales of XP) they backtracked and continue the availability of XP to consumers, in the hope that Vista sales will start to pick up. As for “Microsoft announced in its October conference call that 85 million copies of the new OS had been sold year-to-date compared to 45 million for XP“, again this is a weasel worded sentence. Which proportion of those Vista “sales” are number of OEM copies of Vista bundled with a new PC? The 45 Million sales of XP also says to me that they’re referring more to OEM copies than off-the-shelf copies. Again, we never get to see real life data on this from Microsoft - they never seem to tell us the proportions of OEM bundled copies compared to off-the-shelf sales.
So what’s my point? Simple. The Linux world isn’t providing the leadership needed to stop the Microsoft juggernaut, at least not on the client side. It’s not enough to say that Ubuntu has somewhere between 6 and 12 million users, as Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth did last summer. It’s not enough to argue that Debian and Fedora and SLED and MEPIS have millions more.
Actually, I fully agree with you on those points. I wrote an article some time ago which addressed similar points, about Linux market share, and how we could get better figures on that. But let’s see where you’re headed now…
In order to be a credible long-term alternative to Microsoft client operating systems – whether they are called XP or Vista makes no difference – you also have to start making some real money from all those millions of users.
Bingo! Here we go… it’s all about the money.
All the client versions of Linux put together probably generate no more than a fraction of 1% of Microsoft’s client OS revenue, which is certainly going to surpass $20 billion next year. There’s no way a financial disparity that vast and disproportionate can fail to have a baleful impact on the future of Linux.
Money money money!
No, I’m not arguing that client Linux is any danger of disappearing. With tens of millions of users and thousands of active kernel-level developers, it’s guaranteed to be around forever. Not even Steve Ballmer can argue that one.
Actually, I can argue that one. Linux is not going to be around forever. Neither is Windows, Solaris, or any of the current Operating Systems which run on today’s architecture. Presuming that the human race is going to keep on going through the next 100 years at least, through the upcoming oil/energy crises (and that IS inevitable unless we come up with a good alternative source of energy), computing technology is more than likely to progress so far away from current technology and architecures that neither WIndows, Linux, or anything else will fit the bill as an interface between computers and humans. But I’m nitpicking, really, so lets continue…
But the way things are going, as an OS whose mind share far exceeds its market share, client Linux is never going to be more than a niche product for the fashion-conscious elite or the truly impoverished.
That’s a very vague assertion. Which way are things going and with what? What do you mean by that statement exactly? Niche product? I think not. Fashion-conscious elite? Are you serious? Truly impoverished? Do you mean third world countries perhaps? People with not very much money?
I’m going to skip the next paragraphs dealing with car analogies because 1) I find it pretty dull, 2) “let’s compare these apples with these oranges”, and 3) it’s pretty inconsequential bickering between him and someone else, for him to try to further justify his article.
Linux and open source have got to transform themselves from purely cultural insurgents into profitable exploiters of market leading innovations. On the server side this transition took place several years ago, with distributions like RHEL and SLES and the emerging generation of commercially viable open source apps like MySQL, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Zimbra, JasperSoft, Compiere, and so forth. Even Ubuntu is getting into the game on the server side, as its recent pre-installation deal with Dell shows.
Here we go again with the “money money money” meme…
But on the client side the most visible attempts to make Linux into a revenue-driving growth machine by adding innovative features and consumer friendly packaging – Linspire and Xandros come to mind – have flopped.
In my opinion they flopped because they tried to market themselves as a Windows look-and-feel-alike alternatives, bowing to some uninformed opinion that in order to get people to use their Linux distributions, then they create distributions which look as if they behave like Windows. Note that Xandros has also been party to Microsoft’s “we won’t sue you over our patents” deals whereby Microsoft is trying to spread FUD about Linux by saying that “Linux” infringes on loads and loads of Microsoft’s patents - they aren’t telling anyone precisely what those patents are either because that would remove a lot of the FUD. As for Linspire, well that’s had it’s own problems for a variety of reasons.
Now Shuttleworth is having another go at it with Ubuntu. But so far it looks like Ubuntu’s roaring success is inseparable from the fact that it’s free as in beer. Client-side Linux is never going to give Microsoft a run for its money – or even Apple – unless it can get critical mass as a normal, profit-driven business. Right now I’d say the odds of that ever happening look pretty long.
So let’s get this straight. In order for Linux to be roaringly successful, people have to BUY it? It’s more likely to be “successful” If people have to pay for it rather than getting it for free?
Of course, every time someone suggests that Linux should be a business like any other, angry geeks with pitchforks appear at the edge of the forest and start shouting (or writing in their blogs) “It’s not about money, it’s about freedom!”. Well, sure. But if you neglect money too much, my fine open-source-is-freedom friends, you risk shouting yourselves all the way to oblivion.
“It’s all about the money, folks!”. You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t consider myself as an angry geek. I don’t run up to the ramparts with pitchfork in one hand and burning torch in another. What I like to do is see the Big Picture, and dismantle FUD as and when I come across it. And I must say your article was at first sight pretty tough to dismantle - mostly because it included little bits of truth here and there - I even agree with some of the points you made above.
But consider the headlines about Vista sales;
McAfee: Businesses ‘leery’ of Vista
Vista uptake is unlikely to increase dramatically during 2008, according to security vendor McAfee, who said that businesses are “leery” of upgrading from current Microsoft operating systems.
Vista uptake is barely more than Windows 98 share
WINDOWS VISTA’S market share in businesses logs barely more users than Windows 98, reports Softpedia.
More Evidence That XP is Vista’s Main Competitor
“Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is ‘considerably faster’ than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn’t scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista.”
To name but a few. These tell a completely different story to what we’re hearing from Microsoft - of course it would be - you wouldn’t ever see Microsoft admitting any of this, it’s only natural for them to keep spinning news in as good as light as possible for them.
But, Jeff Gould, I argue that your entire premise for your article - that Linux’s “success” is to be measured purely on financial grounds - is a very shallow premise indeed. I repeat - You Just Don’t Get It.
Stumble it!