In a clear admission that Linux poses a significant threat to Microsoft’s operating systems, a new anti-Linux campaign (which, confusingly, is titled “Get the Facts on Windows and Linux”) will do its best to extol the virtues of Microsoft software at the expense of the many free alternatives.
The three major issues on which the campaign focuses are HR costs, operation costs, and speed of development:
- Lower Windows Staffing Costs Provide a TCO Advantage over Linux
- WinTel Server 10 Times Less Expensive to Operate Then Linux Mainframe
- Microsoft .NET Development Platform Delivers 25% Lower Development and Support Costs Then J2EE/Linux
The claims bear that usual pungency of marketing and false precision. Most impressive is the addition of actual percentage figures:
The cost advantage of Windows was:
- 28.2% less for large enterprises.
- 25.0% less for medium organizations.
Cost savings may very well be true in some cases. Windows is often cheaper than an alternative system purely because it’s already implemented. Staff are comfortable with the user interface, (competent) network administrators have ironed out the bugs and come to grips with relevant idiosyncrasies, and the network infrastructure is already there.
However, if the costs of establishing a system architecture tabula rasa were examined, then not even the costs of retraining and transition could cancel out the enormous savings in licensing fees that switching to open source software would yield.
At any rate, the very characteristic of open source software that poses the greatest competitive threat (its distributed and contributory nature) also limits its ability to respond to marketing of this kind. Groups like the Free Software Foundation lack both resources and any recognisable leadership structure. In the long term, this will limit the extent to which Linux is able to be marketed as a comparable IT solution to big business, at least without implementation intermediaries.
Something else that is ignored in the eternal Operating System War is that Windows and Linux are not necessary mutually exclusive, often serving different purposes. For example, Linux/Unix is a robust platform on which to run a web server, but one would not always want to force end users to grapple with its technicalities. Windows, on the other hand, is normally less suited for content serving applications, but is a computing environment in which people can be productive because they feel comfortable.
In this sense, both Microsoft fud and Linux zealot propaganda miss the point somewhat. Choosing an operating system isn’t always about cost; productivity is also an important factor, and to this end, both Windows and *nix have a part to play.
