July 17th, 2007
Is Vista to blame for Mac, Linux popularity?
A silly question, I know, but I just read Will Vista cause a switch to Macs, Linux? and I was dumbfounded. Here’s the premise:
The cost of upgrading to Windows Vista is forcing more organizations to evaluate alternatives including Apple Macs and Linux for the desktop.
According to the article, Capital & Regional CIO Richard Snooks apparently said in an interview with silicon.com that given the cost of being “railroaded” by Microsoft onto Vista, Macs are now “smarter money”. A more resonable statement came from Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, who said that open source is another serious alternative on the desktop:
“What I would also expect is that there will also be more people trying out Ubuntu Linux and the like. If fellow CIOs haven’t checked this out, they should do. Perhaps it’s obvious but the quality of open source desktop software has come on no-end since I last reviewed it.”
What is silly about all of this is the premise that Vista itself is somehow causing people to look at alternatives. Well, aside from the fact that …
- organizations pay the same licensing fees for Vista as they once paid for Windows XP,
- Windows XP users have until 2014 to find an alternative to Windows XP (no one is being railroaded) — of course Microsoft would prefer that Vista is that alternative,
- a Macintosh and a similarly-equipped Dell cost about the same — but 90% of an organization’s employees can do everything they need to do with an entry-level Dell (or maybe a thin-client) at half the cost of the Macintosh, and finally,
- enterprise interest in Linux solutions has been on the rise for a number of years for a variety of very good reasons,
… it is simply ridiculous to think that the transition from Windows XP to Vista will be any different than was the transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.
There was a similar period of transition from Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000. (NT 4 was the first truly robust and compatible Windows enterprise operating system.) There was far less “wailing and knashing of teeth” in those days — in large part because there were fewer places for people to go to express their frustration with what is always a difficult process.
Microsoft made a tactical error when they let their customers ride along for six years on the same operating system. Windows XP has been robust from the start but got progressively better throughout its lifecycle. During that six-year period, there were no incremental fees paid by Windows users. Instead they received free updates weekly and came to expect those free upgrades! During that same six-year period, Apple released four new versions of its MacOS X product. (Each costing the enterprise about what Windows XP cost them back in 2001.) Guess what? No one complained!
Oh, and more often than not, the Macintosh-dependent enterprise was forced to upgrade all their hardware to the latest version of MacOS X — or run multiple versions of MaxOS X because the latest hardware would not run the older version of the operating system. That’s simply not the case with other hardware vendors.
In the end, the conscientious IT department will view the transition from Windows XP to its replacement (be that Vista or MacOS X or some flavor of Linux — or even UNIX) to be no different than any other project on a three-to-five year life-cycle.
The needs of the end-user, and the organization as a whole, will drive the process. Not some misguided belief that Vista (or anything made by Microsoft) will lead you down the road to hell and must be avoided at all costs.
C. Marc Wagner is a Services Development Specialist at Indiana University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
