Comment Linux Will Win, Because Vendors & Users Save Money (Score 1) 331
"If Microsoft is not recording monopoly profits, who is? In its latest quarter, the software giant recorded $2.0 billion in net income on $4.9 billion in revenue. That's a return of 40.2 cents on every dollar of sales. After expenses. After taxes. By way of comparison, the average return on revenue for all the companies in the 1998 Fortune 500 was 4.9 cents on the dollar. If software were really all that competitive, Microsoft would not reap profits 8 times that of the rest of industry." -- Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, Editor-in-Chief of Interactive Week, 2/1/99
I love Hiawatha Bray's writings (http://www.monitortan.com/) and have read his columns for years, but what he fails to realize in regards to Linux is how many companies have a fundamental economic interest to ditch Windows in favor of Linux. Billions of dollars flow from PC manufacturers alone to Microsoft (Compaq paid Microsoft close to a billion dollars last year). That gives all the hardware manufacturers a powerful reason to want an alternative -- look at the vendors who invested in Red Hat when it was still private. Eliminating the "Windows tax", as Bob Frankenberg (then the head of HP's PC division) once called it, will make them all more profitable.
And of course its not just vendors who pay. Major corporations spend huge amounts of money with Microsoft for their users, and spend even more money maintaining Microsoft applications, and in the year 2000 you will see creative IT departments convince a few Fortune 1000 companies to standardize on Linux on the desktop. It will be less expensive to deploy and less expensive to maintain. By 2005, it will snowball into Linux on the business desktop, coexisting with Windows on dual-boot machines for a while, until Windows is superfluous.
Since there is no comparable economic motive for businesses to embrace Java, I think that Bray's analogy between the two technologies is fundamentally flawed. Linux *will* dominate the world, because it will save vendors and users money in the short term and the long term.
I love Hiawatha Bray's writings (http://www.monitortan.com/) and have read his columns for years, but what he fails to realize in regards to Linux is how many companies have a fundamental economic interest to ditch Windows in favor of Linux. Billions of dollars flow from PC manufacturers alone to Microsoft (Compaq paid Microsoft close to a billion dollars last year). That gives all the hardware manufacturers a powerful reason to want an alternative -- look at the vendors who invested in Red Hat when it was still private. Eliminating the "Windows tax", as Bob Frankenberg (then the head of HP's PC division) once called it, will make them all more profitable.
And of course its not just vendors who pay. Major corporations spend huge amounts of money with Microsoft for their users, and spend even more money maintaining Microsoft applications, and in the year 2000 you will see creative IT departments convince a few Fortune 1000 companies to standardize on Linux on the desktop. It will be less expensive to deploy and less expensive to maintain. By 2005, it will snowball into Linux on the business desktop, coexisting with Windows on dual-boot machines for a while, until Windows is superfluous.
Since there is no comparable economic motive for businesses to embrace Java, I think that Bray's analogy between the two technologies is fundamentally flawed. Linux *will* dominate the world, because it will save vendors and users money in the short term and the long term.
