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> Linux is smearing the operating system market at the expense of Microsoft's cash engine Is this true? I don't see too many Enterprise shops going "no more wi

> Linux is smearing the operating system market at the expense of Microsoft's cash engine Is this true? I don't see too many Enterprise shops going "no more windows, exchange, and active directory. its ubuntu, postfix, and ldap all the way!" Linux certainly has killed commercial unixes, but MS Server products never got popular for web and other areas Linux is traditionally strong in. The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened. MS still leads with many enterprise products. For all the hand-wringing over surface and bing, MS is swimming in money on the enterprise side.

shmerl 13y ago
> The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened. In the past. But now, MS desktop deteriorates and that process will only grow with Linux finally getting more traction. Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop.
- riffraff 13y ago
  > Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop. My wife uses windows because I can't convince her that google docs or openoffice are ok. She just prefers MS Office. Valve's push may get us better graphic card drivers, but I don't know anyone who uses windows over linux because of that (I know a few people who stubbornly use linux notwithstanding crappy drivers though)
  - phaus 13y ago
    Now you know one person. I use Windows solely because my game of choice isn't available for Linux (Until Valve finishes it), and I find the solution provided by WINE to be insufficient. Granted, I'm not a good representative of the average user.
    - brdrak 13y ago
      I gave up on gaming for a while because I got tired of booting into Windows. Lately have been playing way too much on Steam. :-) In fact for my new desktop decided to go with Ubuntu 12.04 because it makes it easy to run Steam. Otherwise I would have gone with Debian proper.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    I know quite a number of people who were hesitant to dump Windows completely because they couldn't run some games on Linux. Surely that's not the vast majority of Windows users probably, but it's a significant amount still. Lately, with all these new Linux releases and Wine improving greatly, many of them dumped Windows for good.
    - CmonDev 13y ago
      I would safely assume those people are mostly geeks/hackers.
      - shmerl 13y ago
        Certainly some of them, but not all. Some are just gamers who are upset with Windows and want to move to better systems (for example those who care about DRM free gaming and so on). In general PC gamers are more willing to experiment with new things than the regular crowd it seems.
  - brownbat 13y ago
    MS has a lot of user inertia, people can't make lateral shifts, they have to make clearly stupendously better shifts, because they don't have time to learn a new mode of doing things. That's why it kind of surprises me that MS sticks its neck out on UX redesigns like the ribbon or eliminating the desktop, since every change gives the core userbase another excuse to try something new. (Even if there are a few good underlying UX ideas, like larger buttons, more prominent placement of common commands, and saving me a Win key before I just start typing to search...)
  - clarky07 13y ago
    > My wife uses windows because I can't convince her that google docs or openoffice are ok. She just prefers MS Office. Depends on what you are using them for. I've tried to convince a lot of people that that is the case, and then I wrote a book and found out it isn't actually the case. They are good enough for casual use, they aren't actually good enough for more serious work. Editing in particular is far far superior with Word.
    - waps 13y ago
      Until you have to cooperate on writing. Then google docs becomes massively superior.
      - clarky07 13y ago
        Actually no. Without the editing tools it doesn't matter.
  - CmonDev 13y ago
    She obviously prefers a great product to the "OK" one. There is an obvious UX difference between Web and native.
nickbauman 13y ago
"the linux desktop never happened." Correct. Because it happened on the phone.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  No, it's next year, just as it has always been, just as it will always be.
  - pacofvf 13y ago
    I think SteamOS, is the killer-app
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Android is not exactly Linux.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
kaspm 13y ago
This probably would have been better put as "*nix-based" operating systems. If you include MacOS, iOS and Android as nix-based, it's very much happening at both the consumer and the enterprise level.
- zanny 13y ago
  I don't think iOS is anything unix, at all. They might reuse system utilities from OSX and its kernel, but that is like saying if you put the same motor in a pickup truck and a dune buggy you have the same vehicle.
  - lukeman 13y ago
    "The iOS system is based on the same technologies used by Mac OS X, namely the Mach kernel and BSD interfaces. Thus, iOS apps run in a UNIX-based system and have full support for threads, sockets, and many of the other technologies typically available at that level."[1] [1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone/conceptual/iphoneosprogrammingguide/TheiOSEnvironment/TheiOSEnvironment.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone...
    - brownbat 13y ago
      So the original prophecy was right, it just left out the bit about all the wonderful walled gardens that will help protect us from using the underlying *nix technologies in inappropriate ways.
sien 13y ago
Perhaps what finished off 'the year of the Linux desktop' in the end was OSX. It's incredible that the enterprise mail market is dominated by MS. How Linux didn't get that is beyond me.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  Push. Plus nothing really came along that was a viable alternative to Office. Don't count MS out of tablets yet, Surface falls into line quite well with an Office dominated culture.
  - thefreeman 13y ago
    Agreed. People love to trash talk Microsoft's mobile offerings, but really their biggest failing was being so late to the game. If I was in the market for a tablet (which I am not, because I am still perfectly satisfied with my 3 year old Android tablet) I would definitely be taking a hard look at the Surface.
    - sien 13y ago
      Definitely. The ASUS T100TA is an impressive tablet or mini-laptop based on the new Bay Trail Atoms and will allow many corporate users who are tied to the MS stack to do what they need on a tablet. They run Windows 8, not RT and are start at $350. http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book-T100TA-Bay-Trail-Tablet/ http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book...
    - err4nt 13y ago
      Oh gosh. The battery life alone terrifies me! Microsoft simply doesn't know how to make an efficient OS.
      - kvb 13y ago
        Really? http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-surface-2-review/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-surface-2-revie...
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Its true in two very interesting ways - First it has nearly sealed off the 'cloud' from Microsoft. Sure there is Azure, and you can ask many VPS providers to put Windows into the box, but Linux system images dominate the 'cloud' OS space by a large margin. So a lot of what Microsoft used to sell as 'back office', aka an NT server for a small business running exchange and maybe Access is shifting over to gmail + AWS. The other place its getting crushed is of course mobile phones. If it weren't for licensing revenues from patents the Android (and Linux kernel) would be doing more financial damage, as it is, the number of 'seats' which run the operating system of choice are running a Linux derivative. We've talked about how this is the 'post PC' era, and it is, and the Post PC, whether it is your Samsung 'smart TV' or your phone, predominantly doesn't pay Microsoft an OS tax. So revenues that Microsoft used to get for OS installs are now time limited patent licenses.
- Maascamp 13y ago
  Don't know if I agree with your first point. AWS got a head start, but Azure is gaining and fast (Azure revenue - not profit - is at least 30+% of AWS already). That says nothing about SkyDrive either, which is already the biggest cloud syncing service out there. So saying Microsoft is getting "crushed" in the cloud is _far_ from being true.
  - theatraine 13y ago
    Right, from the revenue report: "Commercial cloud revenue grew 103%". This appears to be the largest section of growth reported, so it looks like Microsoft is doing pretty well in the cloud space.
    - csense 13y ago
      Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/ http://xkcd.com/1102/ Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.
kbenson 13y ago
> The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened. That's partly because the desktop became more irrelevant, while mobile became more relevant, and linux dominates the mobile market. One could say that the it switched from being about "the year of the linux desktop" to "the year of the linux palmtop", and that already happened. Of course, depending on your point of view, that may just be double speak to obscure original point, which to varying degrees it most certainly is.
- serge2k 13y ago
  No, that's just the excuse linux fans use. Linux failed in the desktop market thus far, and probably will until someone comes up with an OS that is at least as user friendly as OS X and then actually has the ability to get it into users hands.
  - meddlepal 13y ago
    But why does it need to do that? The desktop paradigm is dying a slow but inevitable death for most consumers.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Android is not exactly Linux. Ubuntu-like builds are far from dominating anything.
  - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
    How is Android not a Linux distribution?
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      It's not a GNU/Linux + X + Gnome/KDE stack traditionally associated with Linux desktops.
      - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
tomphoolery 13y ago
Who said it was "a year"? I thought I read "the age of the Linux desktop". That would imply much longer than a year, which would IMO be a lot more accurate. Regardless of what it actually is, my point is that I don't believe we will see the kind of overwhelmingly quick adoption of Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux until somebody makes a laptop or desktop computer that runs Ubuntu, does everything a Mac/Windows machine can do (and I mean EVERYTHING...the only reason I'm not running Linux all the time is because the best DAWs and audio plug-ins are for Mac or Windows), and somehow also markets it to be a cool computer to have. That's the only way they're going to beat Apple at this, by being better. But that's not going to happen. What will happen, I believe, is that over time, more and more people will gravitate to using Linux as they tire of the limited choice offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft. Hopefully, so many will that major software vendors will begin porting their stuff to Linux, at which time it will become more and more obvious for people to be using it. With Steam for Linux and SteamOS based on Linux, we've already seen some trickles of this in action. I think we'll see more gamers gravitate toward Linux when Steam for Linux gets more popular and if that succeeds, other industries will follow suit.
phaus 13y ago
>The fabled year of the Linux desktop never happened. Maybe history will prove me wrong, but I've got a feeling that Valve isn't quite ready to stop batting 1000.
- sseveran 13y ago
  Valve is not trying to, nor will it, replace windows.
- hollerith 13y ago
  The year of the Linux gaming console does not automatically lead to the year of the Linux desktop (though of course it helps).
eball 13y ago
>Linux certainly has killed commercial unixes, but MS Server products never got popular for web and other areas Linux is traditionally strong in. IIS runs a lot of websites, ~23% of websites tracked by Netcraft and does that while their competition gives away their products for free. I wouldn't say that it's not popular.
snambi 13y ago
Yes, still a lot of enterprises are stuck with outlook etc. But how many new companies are going for outlook. I heard even large companies are moving to gmail. Example : genentech( roche). Most of us are forced to use outlook, because it is our corporate mail server. It is horrible, but our IT guys don't know anything else. Typiclly IT departments are run by who only know microsoft.

shmerl 13y ago

> The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened. In the past. But now, MS desktop deteriorates and that process will only grow with Linux finally getting more traction. Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop.

riffraff 13y ago
> Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop. My wife uses windows because I can't convince her that google docs or openoffice are ok. She just prefers MS Office. Valve's push may get us better graphic card drivers, but I don't know anyone who uses windows over linux because of that (I know a few people who stubbornly use linux notwithstanding crappy drivers though)
- phaus 13y ago
  Now you know one person. I use Windows solely because my game of choice isn't available for Linux (Until Valve finishes it), and I find the solution provided by WINE to be insufficient. Granted, I'm not a good representative of the average user.
  - brdrak 13y ago
    I gave up on gaming for a while because I got tired of booting into Windows. Lately have been playing way too much on Steam. :-) In fact for my new desktop decided to go with Ubuntu 12.04 because it makes it easy to run Steam. Otherwise I would have gone with Debian proper.
- shmerl 13y ago
  I know quite a number of people who were hesitant to dump Windows completely because they couldn't run some games on Linux. Surely that's not the vast majority of Windows users probably, but it's a significant amount still. Lately, with all these new Linux releases and Wine improving greatly, many of them dumped Windows for good.
  - CmonDev 13y ago
    I would safely assume those people are mostly geeks/hackers.
    - shmerl 13y ago
      Certainly some of them, but not all. Some are just gamers who are upset with Windows and want to move to better systems (for example those who care about DRM free gaming and so on). In general PC gamers are more willing to experiment with new things than the regular crowd it seems.
- brownbat 13y ago
  MS has a lot of user inertia, people can't make lateral shifts, they have to make clearly stupendously better shifts, because they don't have time to learn a new mode of doing things. That's why it kind of surprises me that MS sticks its neck out on UX redesigns like the ribbon or eliminating the desktop, since every change gives the core userbase another excuse to try something new. (Even if there are a few good underlying UX ideas, like larger buttons, more prominent placement of common commands, and saving me a Win key before I just start typing to search...)
- clarky07 13y ago
  > My wife uses windows because I can't convince her that google docs or openoffice are ok. She just prefers MS Office. Depends on what you are using them for. I've tried to convince a lot of people that that is the case, and then I wrote a book and found out it isn't actually the case. They are good enough for casual use, they aren't actually good enough for more serious work. Editing in particular is far far superior with Word.
  - waps 13y ago
    Until you have to cooperate on writing. Then google docs becomes massively superior.
    - clarky07 13y ago
      Actually no. Without the editing tools it doesn't matter.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  She obviously prefers a great product to the "OK" one. There is an obvious UX difference between Web and native.

nickbauman 13y ago

"the linux desktop never happened." Correct. Because it happened on the phone.

MartinCron 13y ago
No, it's next year, just as it has always been, just as it will always be.
- pacofvf 13y ago
  I think SteamOS, is the killer-app
CmonDev 13y ago
Android is not exactly Linux.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

kaspm 13y ago

This probably would have been better put as "*nix-based" operating systems. If you include MacOS, iOS and Android as nix-based, it's very much happening at both the consumer and the enterprise level.

zanny 13y ago
I don't think iOS is anything unix, at all. They might reuse system utilities from OSX and its kernel, but that is like saying if you put the same motor in a pickup truck and a dune buggy you have the same vehicle.
- lukeman 13y ago
  "The iOS system is based on the same technologies used by Mac OS X, namely the Mach kernel and BSD interfaces. Thus, iOS apps run in a UNIX-based system and have full support for threads, sockets, and many of the other technologies typically available at that level."[1] [1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone/conceptual/iphoneosprogrammingguide/TheiOSEnvironment/TheiOSEnvironment.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iphone...
  - brownbat 13y ago
    So the original prophecy was right, it just left out the bit about all the wonderful walled gardens that will help protect us from using the underlying *nix technologies in inappropriate ways.

sien 13y ago

Perhaps what finished off 'the year of the Linux desktop' in the end was OSX. It's incredible that the enterprise mail market is dominated by MS. How Linux didn't get that is beyond me.

Shivetya 13y ago
Push. Plus nothing really came along that was a viable alternative to Office. Don't count MS out of tablets yet, Surface falls into line quite well with an Office dominated culture.
- thefreeman 13y ago
  Agreed. People love to trash talk Microsoft's mobile offerings, but really their biggest failing was being so late to the game. If I was in the market for a tablet (which I am not, because I am still perfectly satisfied with my 3 year old Android tablet) I would definitely be taking a hard look at the Surface.
  - sien 13y ago
    Definitely. The ASUS T100TA is an impressive tablet or mini-laptop based on the new Bay Trail Atoms and will allow many corporate users who are tied to the MS stack to do what they need on a tablet. They run Windows 8, not RT and are start at $350. http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book-T100TA-Bay-Trail-Tablet/ http://hothardware.com/Reviews/HandsOn-ASUS-Transformer-Book...
  - err4nt 13y ago
    Oh gosh. The battery life alone terrifies me! Microsoft simply doesn't know how to make an efficient OS.
    - kvb 13y ago
      Really? http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-surface-2-review/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-surface-2-revie...

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Its true in two very interesting ways - First it has nearly sealed off the 'cloud' from Microsoft. Sure there is Azure, and you can ask many VPS providers to put Windows into the box, but Linux system images dominate the 'cloud' OS space by a large margin. So a lot of what Microsoft used to sell as 'back office', aka an NT server for a small business running exchange and maybe Access is shifting over to gmail + AWS. The other place its getting crushed is of course mobile phones. If it weren't for licensing revenues from patents the Android (and Linux kernel) would be doing more financial damage, as it is, the number of 'seats' which run the operating system of choice are running a Linux derivative. We've talked about how this is the 'post PC' era, and it is, and the Post PC, whether it is your Samsung 'smart TV' or your phone, predominantly doesn't pay Microsoft an OS tax. So revenues that Microsoft used to get for OS installs are now time limited patent licenses.

Maascamp 13y ago
Don't know if I agree with your first point. AWS got a head start, but Azure is gaining and fast (Azure revenue - not profit - is at least 30+% of AWS already). That says nothing about SkyDrive either, which is already the biggest cloud syncing service out there. So saying Microsoft is getting "crushed" in the cloud is _far_ from being true.
- theatraine 13y ago
  Right, from the revenue report: "Commercial cloud revenue grew 103%". This appears to be the largest section of growth reported, so it looks like Microsoft is doing pretty well in the cloud space.
  - csense 13y ago
    Business 101: Whenever you see a ridiculously huge growth figure like 103%, it's usually measured against a tiny base. See http://xkcd.com/1102/ http://xkcd.com/1102/ Improving growth does mean either Microsoft's doing something right and/or the size of this market is increasing. But seeing a growth number this high means you should be very skeptical that cloud products will be able to carry the rest of Microsoft on their back going forward, or successfully challenge market leaders.

kbenson 13y ago

> The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened. That's partly because the desktop became more irrelevant, while mobile became more relevant, and linux dominates the mobile market. One could say that the it switched from being about "the year of the linux desktop" to "the year of the linux palmtop", and that already happened. Of course, depending on your point of view, that may just be double speak to obscure original point, which to varying degrees it most certainly is.

serge2k 13y ago
No, that's just the excuse linux fans use. Linux failed in the desktop market thus far, and probably will until someone comes up with an OS that is at least as user friendly as OS X and then actually has the ability to get it into users hands.
- meddlepal 13y ago
  But why does it need to do that? The desktop paradigm is dying a slow but inevitable death for most consumers.
CmonDev 13y ago
Android is not exactly Linux. Ubuntu-like builds are far from dominating anything.
- fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  How is Android not a Linux distribution?
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    It's not a GNU/Linux + X + Gnome/KDE stack traditionally associated with Linux desktops.
    - fauigerzigerk 13y ago

tomphoolery 13y ago

Who said it was "a year"? I thought I read "the age of the Linux desktop". That would imply much longer than a year, which would IMO be a lot more accurate. Regardless of what it actually is, my point is that I don't believe we will see the kind of overwhelmingly quick adoption of Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux until somebody makes a laptop or desktop computer that runs Ubuntu, does everything a Mac/Windows machine can do (and I mean EVERYTHING...the only reason I'm not running Linux all the time is because the best DAWs and audio plug-ins are for Mac or Windows), and somehow also markets it to be a cool computer to have. That's the only way they're going to beat Apple at this, by being better. But that's not going to happen. What will happen, I believe, is that over time, more and more people will gravitate to using Linux as they tire of the limited choice offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft. Hopefully, so many will that major software vendors will begin porting their stuff to Linux, at which time it will become more and more obvious for people to be using it. With Steam for Linux and SteamOS based on Linux, we've already seen some trickles of this in action. I think we'll see more gamers gravitate toward Linux when Steam for Linux gets more popular and if that succeeds, other industries will follow suit.

phaus 13y ago

>The fabled year of the Linux desktop never happened. Maybe history will prove me wrong, but I've got a feeling that Valve isn't quite ready to stop batting 1000.

sseveran 13y ago
Valve is not trying to, nor will it, replace windows.
hollerith 13y ago
The year of the Linux gaming console does not automatically lead to the year of the Linux desktop (though of course it helps).

eball 13y ago

>Linux certainly has killed commercial unixes, but MS Server products never got popular for web and other areas Linux is traditionally strong in. IIS runs a lot of websites, ~23% of websites tracked by Netcraft and does that while their competition gives away their products for free. I wouldn't say that it's not popular.

snambi 13y ago

Yes, still a lot of enterprises are stuck with outlook etc. But how many new companies are going for outlook. I heard even large companies are moving to gmail. Example : genentech( roche). Most of us are forced to use outlook, because it is our corporate mail server. It is horrible, but our IT guys don't know anything else. Typiclly IT departments are run by who only know microsoft.