Posted on 01/29/2005 11:42:59 AM PST by Bush2000
IBM goes silent on Linux desktop effort Big Blue mum about progress of the company's move to open source clients
By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
January 25, 2005
More than a year after IBM's (Profile, Products, Articles) Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano challenged his company to move to the Linux desktop by the end of 2005, IBM has significantly toned down its rhetoric on the subject of open-source clients.
"We don't have anything we want to say that's definitive," said Nancy Kaplan, an IBM spokeswoman, as she declined to comment on specifics of the roll-out. "There are people using Linux and nobody is telling them to stop," she said.
IBM's Linux migration plans were made public in January 2004, just months after IBM Chief Information Officer Bob Greenberg formed an internal initiative called the Open Desktop project to facilitate the move.
"Our chairman has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM to move to a Linux based desktop by the end of 2005," Greenberg wrote in a November 2003 memo. "This means replacing productivity, Web access, and viewing tools with open standards based equivalents," he said.
IBM executives said at the time that they had approximately 15,000 Linux desktops within the company and predicted that they would have between 40,000 and 60,000 desktops in operation by the end of 2004.
IBM's Kaplan declined to say whether that goal had been met or not. "I don't know if there was ever a goal of 40,000 users; I don't know if there are 40,000 users," she said. "There's nothing mysterious about it; we're using Linux."
Whether IBM's Linux users are getting any help from IBM's internal support staff is another question, however.
According to one IBM employee, who asked not to be identified, the company has created a Linux version of its standard desktop client, called the Client for eBusiness. Based on the Red Hat (Profile, Products, Articles) Linux distribution, the Linux client includes the Open Office productivity suite, a Lotus Notes client running under the Wine Windows emulation software, and the Mozilla browser.
Though IBM volunteers have set up an internal IRC (Internet relay chat) channel where Linux problems are discussed online, users may experience problems running IBM's internal Web applications. Most of those applications are written for the Internet Explorer browser, which has not been ported to Linux. Internet Explorer is the only browser supported by IBM's internal support desk, according to another IBMer.
"If you don't use Internet Explorer, you might not get very far with them helping you with the problem," he said.
The majority of IBM's Linux users to date are technical users in the company's product development and research and development groups -- users who are technical enough to support themselves, the sources said.
IBM is using Wine to run Lotus Notes software on thousands of clients, according to sources, but ironically, the company's internal use of the open-source Windows operating system emulator did not translate into a ringing endorsement in a guide to migrating to Linux clients, published recently on IBM's Web site.
Wine is mentioned only in passing, in a section entitled "What to do if all else fails," and it is called a "temporary workaround" to get an application running on the Linux client. "This is not a solution for the long run," the guide states
Almost nobody in advertising and publishing uses PageMaker anymore. On the Adobe side (in opposition to Quark), it has been superseded by InDesign, relegating PageMaker to corporate use in opposition to Publisher, and for those people who just didn't want to switch. I say this as one long-time PageMaker user who migrated to InDesign.
But still your point remains, InDesign isn't made for Linux either.
For one, the UI doesn't promote good workflow. But some technical deficiencies are no Pantone, limited print output, poor color management, no 16 bit per channel color mode, no hexachrome, no spot colors, no duotones, and many more. The ones I listed aren't killers for everyone, but the lack of any one could kill Gimp for a job. Gimp can be good for lots of stuff, but it would suck to be going along fine with Gimp only to have someone tell you they need a CMYK print with a spot Pantone 802 uncoated in various tints with knockout -- whoops! That kind of request is fairly normal.
Thanks for the info..
I used to do this stuff a lot. Pantone must be licensed, so I can understand Gimp not having it. But it could be faked if Gimp at least had spot colors. Then you could get a spot approximate to your Pantone, knowing that in the end the correct color will be going on the press anyway.
This would be fine for in-house work where, for example, the company has a couple Pantones as their corporate identity colors. But you couldn't use it for outside clients because they'll want a proof, and that won't work unless you have a Pantone-capable application sending the colors to a Pantone-calibrated printer.
Actually, let me qualify that a bit. You can fake a lot of Pantones on a good CMYK printer, but you might lose a client when the Pantone they want is out of the CMYK gamut and the proof looks like crap. They don't like to hear "Trust me, it'll look right on the final print." I think avoiding that is worth Photoshop's price.
| What? No comment?
The comparable story would be if some reporter called up Bill Gates and asked him how his "trustworthy computing initiative" is coming. That was a 2002 announcement, right? It's 2005... has Microsoft fixed the vulnerabilities yet? Oops, I guess not. The most recent version of the MyDoom worm, dubbed MyDoom.ai, appeared only a week ago. |
" And unless its market share is 100% on the desktop in that industry than there is substitution."
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. You can use a Mac for accounting but I wouldn't. When I hire an employee, I have no problem finding someone who knows Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Peachtree, Quickbooks, Illustrator, AutoCad or Corel Draw. Every day an employee doesn't have to spend learning new software is a couple of hundred dollars I don't have to spend. Two days of training cost more than the software. In some cases, it saves thousands.
YOu disagree that if a measurable amount of companies in an industry succeed using a product other than one you list as a must have there is some substitutabiliy... DO you disagree water is wet?
"YOu disagree that if a measurable amount of companies in an industry succeed using a product other than one you list as a must have there is some substitutabiliy... DO you disagree water is wet?"
Huh? I think Linux is a lousy desktop solution because of training costs. I think Linux desktop software isn't as good as Windows desktop software. I think history has shown us that choosing obscure software because it runs on Linux is dumb.
I think choosing software because you save a few bucks is penny wise and pound foolish.
I think choosing an operating system out of blind hatred for Microsoft is really, really stupid.
I think many Linux proponents are like Moonies.
I use Linux. It's not ready for prime time as a desktop operating system. IBM's experience is a good indicator of that.
You don't know what IBM's experience is. That IBM "going silent" on the subject indicates failure is spin, generated by our resident Microsoft shills.
IBM is still under a consent decree dating from the 1970's that prohibits them from discussing unannounced products except in the most vague and general terms. Quite often, when IBM goes silent on something, it means they have an identifiable plan for a product moving through the maze, and the lawyers have told them it's time to shut up.
It could also mean failure. There's no way to know. That won't stop Microsoft's fluff girls from telling us that they know, but they don't. Their job is to throw spears at linux in Internet forums, and that's what they do. In the absence of new products, throwing spears is all that Microsoft has. I don't think their spear-throwing affects very much; these decisions are mostly being driven by dollars-and-cents in corporations. When linux makes sense, they will use it. Widespread use of linux on home computers will happen when there is widespread use of linux on corporate desktops. I don't see that happening in the next several years, so I wonder why they bother throwing spears at it.
"Widespread use of linux on home computers will happen when there is widespread use of linux on corporate desktops. I don't see that happening in the next several years,"
My point, exactly. Unfortunately, every time I make it, I get flamed by Linux Moonies who think Linux business software is just as good as Windows stuff. I think they are nuts.
The trick in all this is that, except for Microsoft's Office, there is very little software that is truly "Windows" software or "linux" software. These kinds of platform shifts are extremely tricky, and the boneyard is full of companies and products that failed to navigate them. WordStar, Word Pefect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase... all those things were once "industry standards" that everybody had. Lotus ignored the Mac as a "niche product" and allowed Microsoft to perfect Word and Excel on that platform, and Lotus compounded that mistake by treating Windows itself as a niche market until it was too late. That cost them the spreadsheet franchise.
We can be sure that there is some product manager at Adobe whose job is to tell them when it's time to spend money on linux versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. My guess is that the impetus for that will not come in the U.S., but from some place like China. Adobe can't afford to let some guy rack up 25 million seats of a Photoshop competitor that can then be turned around, ported to Windows, and brought here to cause them grief. If Adobe sees linux taking off someplace, they'll jump on it. And having done that, they might as well offer it here. That's how it's going to happen, app by app, over a decade or more.
The other thing I expect to see happen is for some large corp, or perhaps the federal government, to decide that Open Office -- even on Windows -- is "adequate" for 90% of the people who use Office. So they will save millions of dollars by making that switch, and the world will watch to see if they survive. If they do, there will be a lot more of it. Once that happens, the exit of Windows awaits only the next demand from Microsoft for an upgrade to Longhorn.
Huge numbers of seats in a place like GM or DOD could easily get by -- even today -- with linux, Open Office, and Mozilla. It's just that nobody wants to be the pioneer and get the arrows in his back. But it will happen; there's always one.
I've worked in an office where the "admin types" all had Windows and the engineers all ran linux. We all used the same printers, we sent each other emails and documents. It was no big deal. I think these kinds of heterogenous environments will become more common, mostly because Office is overkill for 90% of the desks it is on. I think that a switch to Open Office on Windows is a much nearer threat to Microsoft than having the operating system change.
The specialty apps will follow at their own pace. I'd look for a least a couple of well-known names to get dethroned because they waited too long to have a linux version. ESRI comes to mind as a company that is either positioning itself to be bought by Microsoft, or is driving into a ditch.
I mostly agree. Windows owns the next 3-5 years. That, of course, assumes that Microsoft will make the same mistakes that others like Ashton-Tate and Word Perfect Corp. made.
The software market is much more mature than it was 10-15 years ago. Hardware has outpaced the needs of most business desktops. During the 80's, we were trying to figure out how to do what we wanted with the storage, speed and memory we had. Now we're trying to figure out what new bells and whistles we can add to already functional software to get people to buy the next generation.
Home users are the ones using more of the capabilities of current computers. Video, audio and gaming are driving advances in hardware, software and operating systems. The machines and software that win the home entertainment market, may win the next decade.
I think home computers will have a very strong effect on work computers. Now that most workers have computers at home and many people do work at home, home/work compatibility will drive the hardware and software purchases at work.
In any case, if I was training students for the business job market, Office and Windows would be first on my list.
Morons. Port your OWN software to the OS you want everyone to run. Sheesh!
We looked at Ximian for e-mail. Our customers would have fired us all except for a few to kick in the nuts every day.
How soon we forget how teeth-jarringly stupid end users are. I say this as a user of both Windows and Linux. Linux suffers from a poverty of riches on the desktop. There are just TOO MANY things end-lusers will do to screw it up.
So long as exchange is running OWA, I see no difference between it and Ximian..
IBM outsources tech support for Linux clients
Here's another gem from today. ~50% of IBM's customers could dump them over the recent sellouts to the Chicoms. Lucky for IBM the government is holding it up over national security concerns, how ironic is that.
Merrill Lynch: CIOs wary of IBM-Lenovo deal
Can you imagine these guys if Microsoft was being probed by Congress for national security concerns? Yet they act like this deal should actually go through! And according to this, it's not even what their customers wanted. It all adds up to some serious questions, indeed.
Exactly what happens, but only because of your ignorant givaways of free linix to the chinese mob. Instead of selling them US owned software, you're letting them make perfect copies of software that according to the linix crowd themselves has over 300 likely patent violations in it, and claim it all legal.
In the end, you've given the chicoms a free software addiction, as a gift, and now expect our US software companies to compete with it. They can't, look at the results: Apple now in the walkman business, Sun giving away their code and patents for free, and Bill Gates going from being anti-communist to saying China has "a new form of capitalism". All dominos falling one after another after IBM's sellouts of free software to China, and now even trying to give them a $10 billion dollar a year business to them for basically nothing, which yes, according to reports that just came out, WAS profitable in 2004. Yet what is your usual response? Garniple sarponist, or similar nonsense.
For years I've been meeting with IBM, suggesting that they donate OS/2 to open source to achieve precisely what they now want to do with Linux...sans the $1+ Billion that they've pissed away on Linux development, lawsuits, and browser support.
In 1999, OS/2 Warp 4 and Warp 4 Server were light years ahead of Linux...and IBM owned all but a tiny fraction of OS/2 code (5% owned by MicroSoft).
It floors me that IBM put OS/2 on the shelf, refusing to release it to Open Source, yet then "justified" pouring a Billion Dollars (actually, more) into Linux.
It's now 2005. Six years later and IBM still isn't on Open Source Linux corporate-wide...when they were already there in 1999 had they but donated OS/2 to the public.
People, this is why pursuing *fads* at the CEO level makes for bad business policy. Linux grew white hot, and IBM jumped on that anti-MS bandwagon. Six years later it's gotten them nowhere (And that's being kind).
There were two realistic options for IBM in the past few years: embrace MicroSoft or donate OS/2 to Open Source; they chose neither.
Now don't get me wrong, Linux has its place. My little firm has a new Linux product coming out this Summer, in fact. But there are reasons why IBM hasn't been able to make the full switch.
| your ignorant givaways of free linix to the chinese mob
That was a cute trick, don't you think? By naming them, they put the patent owners on notice that there might be a violation there. So far, not a single lawsuit, and it's been almost a year. If they wait much longer, they'll have waived their right to sue about it. Maybe there aren't any violations. How about that? Then you'll have to get a new spear to throw.
What I do to the Chinese is my business. Your job is to throw spears at linux in Internet forums. You do your job; I'll worry about mine. I have no control over what IBM does. I don't even work there, let alone run the place. I guess they don't want to be in a low-end, commodity hardware business. I don't blame them. Maybe the Chinese are the only ones who want the damned thing. |
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Yeah, I have a comment. The usual Microsoft shills are having a FUD-fest over some article they found. Big deal. FUD is all Microsoft has now. Their next product is still years away. Gotta keep that "net advocacy" humming until Longhorn is finished.