So Much for the Linux Threat

I've reported in Windows IT Pro UPDATE several times over the years about Linux and its potential to unseat Windows Server as the most used enterprise OS. As a general rule, each January seems to bring a collection of "This Will Be the Year of Linux" stories, typically from analysts who've been bowled over by the Linux hype. To be fair, I've always assumed that Linux and Windows would some day run neck-and-neck in the server world, with Linux's perceived security, cost, and reliability advantages as the major reasons. Also, the past few years have been tough on Microsoft, as the company has suffered through a mind-boggling series of security snafus.

The Linux hype has just one little problem. Despite steady improvements over the past several years and the support of major IT companies such as IBM, Novell, and even Sun Microsystems, Linux seems stuck in a perpetual holding pattern, unable to eat away at Microsoft's server market share. And as the PC industry comes out of an economic recession and enterprises resume technology spending, it's interesting to note that Microsoft solutions, not open-source solutions such as Linux, are making the biggest gains.

Case in point: In its most recent quarterly earnings announcement last week, Microsoft once again beat forecasts and set an earnings record. Record earnings happen so regularly at Microsoft now that it's almost not worth mentioning. But key to the company's success, interestingly, is its Server and Tools division, which is responsible for such products as Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The Server and Tools division made revenues of $2.8 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2004, the same amount of money as the Information Worker division, which sells the Microsoft Office cash cow, made. Indeed, Server and Tools almost edged out Microsoft's other cash cow, the Windows Client division, which earned $3.2 billion.

Those results are amazing. Server and Tools grew more than 18 percent year-over-year, compared with flat or single-digit growth for Windows Client and Information Worker. SQL Server growth topped 25 percent. And Exchange 2003 is off to the fastest start of any Microsoft server product. These figures indicate two things: First, the IT industry is spending money again. Second, Microsoft's server products are kicking butt, and they're doing so at a point in time in which all the core products--Windows Server, Exchange, and SQL Server--are fairly mature. And because both Windows Server and SQL Server will see major updates this year--Windows 2003 Release 2 (R2) and SQL Server 2005, respectively--we might expect the upgrade treadmill to keep revenues rolling for quite a while.

"Our server business has a track record like the [New England] Patriots in the NFL playoffs," Microsoft chief financial officer (CFO) John Connors said, according to a report by Todd Bishop of the "Seattle Post Intelligencer." The comparison was carefully selected, I think. The Patriots, which have advanced to the Super Bowl in three of the last four years, are seen as a modern sports dynasty and widely respected for their leadership and team-oriented attitude. Microsoft would like to see its server products as well-respected as the Patriots are and would like to foster the notion that, although each individual server has certain strengths, they work together in such a way that the whole is more valuable to customers than the individual parts.

Some key challenges will still bedevil Microsoft as it attempts to fight back against the Linux threat, although recent history suggests the company might have finally latched onto a winning strategy. First, Microsoft must counter the perception that Linux is more secure than Windows. We're just starting to see some people come around to the notion that a largely untested solution such as Linux can be as insecure or more insecure than Windows, given improper configuration.

Second, Microsoft must prevent an upswing in support for Linux and other open-source solutions in world, regional, and local governments. In some cases, Microsoft has won government contracts by sweetening deals financially. But more often than not, fear of moving to an unknown and unproven system has kept many governments firmly in the Windows camp. And widely publicized Linux conversions--such as the one in Munich, Germany--have predictably run into problems. More important, they still represent a small portion of the overall worldwide government IT market.

Third, Microsoft should continue pushing its integration approach, which is truly a huge competitive advantage. Turnkey products such as Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 and the awesome services industry built around it are unparalleled in the open-source world and will likely continue to be so for some time. Although it's interesting to make product-to-product comparisons--such as Windows 2003 versus Red Hat Enterprise Linux--few customers think in such fine-grained ways. Enterprises want solutions. And I think this is an area in which Microsoft comes out on top.

Fourth, I think Microsoft has finally won the battle over cost. Depending on whom you talk to, Linux solutions are cheaper or as expensive as Windows-based solutions. That comparison doesn't resonate very loudly with IT administrators who are already familiar with Windows and would dearly miss functionality and compatibility if they left the platform. Even if some Windows solutions are a bit more expensive than Linux-based alternatives, the benefits of Windows often outweigh what is essentially a small price differential, spread out over time.

So what do you think? Is Linux the next big thing, or will it simply snag a few key niche markets like most of Microsoft's past competitors have?

" Again, why are they worried about what's going on at the server? "

Again? What again? I told you, “manipulate data files, manage processes, synchronize or backup data and interact with the OS”. The world is bigger than your experience.

One experience I had was training a couple of administrators on a distributed system that included an SCO box running a Centenium predictive dialer for a bank of collection agents. We were combining collections for hospital and physician, something never before done, at Stanford. Backup and occasional processes needed to be run on the server by the lead collection agent turned business analyst for the new system. It was very political so they agreed to hire her for that spot.

She needed to understand many things like how to identify the latest daily physician and hospital billing data files on SMS and Informix, FTP them from mainframes over to her PC and to troubleshoot problems in them. She would process them into a single “merged” call file, FTP it over and process that in the Centenium system. Occasionally she needed to traverse across the SCO file system to trouble shoot there. She failed, and then she sued, having something to do with her race.

Another girl with a little more technical experience came in and did a great job, but it took time to get her comfortable with the command line on a new OS in addition to all else.

If you grew up on all that, or if you’re used to mature systems built to isolate all that from the user, you might not relate.

DNS servers in the Linux world are common, even for large (HUGE) ISPs

Yup. Most of the TLD name servers are Linux, and more and more TLDs use PostgreSQL as the RDBMS for managing them. The Internet infrastructure used to run on Solaris, with some BSD thrown in for good measure (nothing could touch FreeBSD for network performance for the longest time). These days it is almost end-to-end Linux. Cheap, well-supported, secure, and at least as reliable as any other plausible choice.

While I do not use Windows myself for a desktop OS, I can at least understand the reason why people do use it.

The user interface for desktop Linux is dreadful. The Windows GUI is slightly better, but not enough to justify the additional expense in many cases - expecially with all of Microsoft's security and reliability problems.

"Bloody hell, it sounds like they were very badly managed if it was only three servers."

Actaully it was the fault of the previous Linux Admin. He configured each Linux Server his way and documented nothing. As we are a 24/7 environment and can afford less than zero downtime it wasn't as easy as just rebuilding the boxes, they had to be fixed in place.

I agree that it took a long time but with no coherent standards (something Windows does have) and the Linux zealots penchant for tinkering the boxes were a nightmare.

When I did impose standards (and got alot of flack from the new unix admin for it). We went from downtime once per week to almost no downtime for six months.

However the Unix admin still gives me grief on a daily basis and sometimes I feel like cutting off his hands so he doesn't "fix" the exisitng implementation.

Linux has steadily been gaining in any aspect you want to measure. For example, I'm typing this on a Fedora Core 2 system which is very nice.

Having said that, the problem that I see is that Linux users are used to getting their software for free. This works OK for so called "killer apps" like web browsers, email clients, mp3 players etc. But there are other apps which don't fall into that category but are "killer apps" for individuals. Maybe it's a particular accounting package you're used to working with and you've got years of legacy data on. Or maybe it's a particular game that you enjoy playing. Or whatever.

I guess what it comes down to is that there are free replacments for a lot of apps but there aren't free replacements for all possible apps.

At some point, the for-profit software business model does make some sense. And up to this point, you don't see the for-profit companies rushing in to make either free or not-free versions of their software for linux.

They don't see a large enough installed base, they don't want to give away their products, and they don't think the linux community will cotton to the idea of paying for software since they got their OS and most of their apps for free.

For linux to hit the bigtime, I think this Rubicon will have to be crossed. It should be interesting to watch.

However the Unix admin still gives me grief on a daily basis and sometimes I feel like cutting off his hands so he doesn't "fix" the exisitng implementation.

Heh, I can sympathize with that. Our sysadmin has to get my authorization to touch any of the servers that are under my authority. I'm a firm believer in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy for my servers and I smack down requests to tinker all the time. If a server has perfect uptime (and many of ours have been up for a year or two), it is hard to justify messing with them.

I think part of the problem is that our primary Unix sysadmin is bored. Nothing ever breaks, and so he needs something to do.

Okay, you're talking about the inability of an idiot AA-hire admin, not an end-user, to manipulate the data. I didn't pick up anything about a VP end-user trying to do this.

You're talking about taking data from diverse sources, manipulate it, and regurgitate it in a usable form. This is difficult even if you're working with databases all running on Windows platforms. The best tools to do these tasks might very well run on a Windows workstation, but as far as I can tell from your story doesn't have much to do with Linux.

You don't indicate whether your organization took time to actually train anyone on any of these platforms... perhaps you're expected to pick up Linux / Unix / whatever expertise by magic?

You're talking about SCO. If you're running an old copy of SCO Linux you need to get current (think "DOS 6.2 vs Win2K3"). My hunch is that you're running SCO's UNIX? Poor basards.

My world would throw you for a loop, just as you think that yours would baffle me. Every day I get dropped into a new environment, mostly with no documentation and precious few clues as to how things are supposed to work. I don't get the luxury of perfecting one client, and then sitting back and watching it run. As you think that I can't handle your world, I'm pretty sure you couldn't handle mine.

The user interface for desktop Linux is dreadful.

Which one?

Seriously, there are a number of them.

I use KDE 3.3.x. I find little to complain about.

Granted, it's not the best GUI ever, but neither is Windows, or Mac OS.

The best design for a GUI, IMO, was the OS/2 Workplace Shell. It was not always implemented in the best way, but it (and the underlying System Object Model) was, again IMO, the best foundation for an object-oriented GUI ever.

I wish that IBM could open up the source for SOM/WPS and give it to the KDE developers.

"On the other hand, the Linux server stuff rocks. And, what end user cares what is going on in the server room, so long as it works well?"

I think you have hit the nail on the head. Microsoft owns the desktop and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future. The server room is the Linux market.

I work at a large University with about 20,000 PCs and a ton of servers. The web stuff is on Linux and Unix servers. The Oracle databases are the same.

Almost every desktop is either WinXP or Win2K. The office networks are running on Windows and Exchange Server is becoming more common every day. The scheduling, sharing, storage and email functions of Exchange Server and Outlook are starting to become the norm in every office. Our staff is utterly dependent on Exchange Server. That pretty much guarantees Windows Server will survive for the foreseeable future.

I see Linux killing Unix, but not Windows.

Microsoft is arrogant, but there is a big difference between MS and Novell. MS owns the desktop market. Novell didn't. Novell had a niche that most users didn't see or understand. They didn't notice the difference when it was replaced. If you do away with MS Server and Exchange Server, the people in my office will scream bloody murder.

Personally, I refuse to use Outlook or Exchange Server. I've never had a virus and I don't plan to get one. I won't even open shared files sent to me by the Director. The staff used to make fun of me, but they all had to reformat their disks and reinstall everything over Christmas break. The Director sent them all a nasty trojan and they opened it. I've been having a month-long gloat-a-thon about it.

Oh I agree, I cut my teeth on Novell 3.x 4.x but sadly Novell just doesn't have the install base it once had. I can't see going to my CIO and saying let's switch to Novell!.

For most of us in this business, and correct me if I'm wrong, were hired into environments that are based on X architecture. (be it nixed based, novell or windows). We never had the luxury of being the people who had a say in what was or was not implemented at day one.

With that in mind you make do with what you have. I have apps that are critical to our functionality but will only run on NT4 Service pack 5 (no SP6a for me). These apps were custom built at a huge cost. The companies that created the apps are no more and it's hard to find a replacement.

I've sat with my CIO in many meetings and the answer is always the same. "It works, it never goes down and we can't afford the time, man hours or money to replace it."

I explain that the only reason it still works to the duct tape and chewing gum in my pockets but that mainly falls on deaf ears.

Now I've depressed myself I'm going to grab a beer.

"As you think that I can't handle your world, I'm pretty sure you couldn't handle mine. "

This isn’t about me doing your work, and I never the converse. It’s only about your original question, and my reply.

You asked what users care “what goes on in the server room”? I said power users and explained how. You didn’t understand so I gave and instance of a business analysts and explained in more detail.

When there aren’t enough of you to go around, or when those available get so focused on the technical parts of their jobs that communication with them becomes as difficult as our conversation, management finds ways to get jobs done without them. And that sometimes requires dipping their toes into “what goes on in the server room”. That’s all I’m saying, nothing more.

I’m sure I can’t “handle” your job. I know Unix interfaces have improved, but I’m sure they’re still a bigger hurdle for power users coming up from the windows world to manage than windows servers. And even though many of those people also juggle changing responsibilities with little time for thorough cross platform training, I’m sure it’s worth the effort in some cases and not it others. I’ve got to go now.

Sorry, I missed your OS/2 statement.

Have a look at Cocoa - Apple's object-oriented framework for software development. It is an elegant solution for development with the Mac OS X environment, with the "InterfaceBuilder" application for GUI design, and XCode IDE for development with Objective C++ and Java.

Cocoa is based on the award-winning "NeXTStep" development system.

Wow a contractor from a competing company (which has lost a ton of market share to Linux) told you linux was not good... Ill also take his word for it. Linux is ready for prime time and companies like Amazon.com prove it every day.

Whoa, hold up there, chief. It depends entirely on how the boxes are being used. Linux may serve some people like Amazon as a web server -- but that's been it's classic use, anyway. But, if you want to run Linux in your company as a database server or in some other kind of mission-critical role that demands five 9's of availability, it's not going to have the same kind of track record or reliability as Solaris. I hate to break it to you but Linux simply doesn't handle hot-swapping and other kinds of on-the-fly maintenance operations as Solaris, while allowing the server to continue functioning.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.