July 18th, 2007
Quality products are to blame for Linux/Mac popularity
There have been a few posts on ZDNet in the last couple days relating to Vista rollouts and available alternatives. In particular, Marc Wagner wrote “Is Vista to blame for Mac, Linux popularity?”. As he noted,
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.
While this should certainly be true, I think that an important point has been missed in some of these discussions. When Windows XP came onboard in 2001, Linux was for geeks only and Mac was still very much a niche player without their incredible popularity in the consumer device market. For business running Windows 2000 (or 98 or NT, even), what were the viable alternatives? Sure, they could switch to Macs, but OS X was still in beta and this represented very serious potential hardware, software, and training costs. So we upgraded to XP.
Fast-forward to 2007 and a huge variety of really outstanding alternatives exist. If organizations are looking to purchase new hardware anyway as part of regular lifecycle management, then OS X is remarkably mature. Particularly if end users have anything beyond basic productivity needs, OS X represents a much better Windows replacement than it used too. However, as Marc Wagner pointed out, the vast majority of our end users would be very well-served by really cheap, entry level machines, making Macs, which lack entry level hardware options, far less attractive.
This leaves Linux, which can now look and feel incredibly Windows-like if administrators choose a distribution that fits their users’ needs (and their needs require something Windows-like). There are significant barriers here, the cost, hardware requirements, and training needs of Windows Vista aside. First and foremost, for the majority of organizations out there, educational institutions included, it makes sense to buy lots of inexpensive hardware from a tier-one vendor with long-term support. Linux availability from these vendors is extremely limited for now, although this appears to be changing quickly.
One must also evaluate our users. Among my students, a transition to Linux (or Mac for that matter) would be easy. Not so among my teachers and staff who resist change about like George Bush resists reasonable climate change legislation. In fact, I have no intention of moving away from my current XP installs (the standard for staff computing in my school) for a while and will probably purchase new hardware with XP installed. If we look at the way in which Linux has matured and changed for the desktop user in the last 2 years, though, my next round of OS upgrades (slated for 1-2 years from now) may very well include Linux, since the interface becomes increasingly intuitive and accessible for the average (and below-average) user.
The point remains, though, that good alternatives for organizations previously invested in Windows exist, where there were virtually no viable alternatives when we all moved to Windows XP. At the time, XP was better than what we had and was a natural choice. That choice is no longer natural and the adoption of Vista, if you are already a Windows shop, is not the no-brainer it used to be. In K-12 in particular, but at the higher ed level as well, increasing savviness of students as well as the need to cut budgetary corners wherever possible makes non-Windows alternatives much more viable.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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| 07/20/07
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