Tux Watch

The Microsoft launch of its new operating system Vista could possibly loose its previously held Window’s market share due to the fact that Vista carries a whole new set of Graphical User Interface features and enhancements that will require the new end-users of Vista to first receive a significant amount of training to manage the new interfaces. Secondly, Vista may be trying to copy a number of features from products developed by the FOSS community including the Firefox browser.

Third, Vista will not be living up to its promise of including new ground breaking enhancements such as a new file system so people will be getting more of a resource hungry eater than a full of new features operating system. Fourth Vista is going to be one of the most resource hungry Operating Systems ever and you can say goodbye to all your old low-performing hardware equipment like Pentium-4 and below whereas Linux has the capability to even make such low-performance hardware become effectively useful.

Microsoft has already copied most of the features of Firefox to its new release of Internet Explorer IE. Within Vista, Microsoft has further enhanced this version and thus even the typical IE usage learning curve will also be different on the Vista. If the market irrespective of being a Windows or Linux user has to again learn all the features of a new operating system like Vista, why not use either a free Linux Desktop or low-cost support subscription paid version of Linux instead of Vista? There will be newer costs associated with deploying Vista including training costs, hiring new skilled human resource, retesting and certification of skills etc. These are the same assumptions being shared by Jonathon Oxer, President of Linux Australia and Tim Anderson, Information Services Director at the NSW Department of Education and Training (DET).

In an interview to ZDNet Australia [here], Jonathan said that the Vista launch will boost desktop Linux. The launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market, according to the president of Linux Australia. New features combined with a slightly different look and feel mean that migrating to Vista from an older version of Windows will cause disruption in the workplace.

He believes that people will have the choice, they are going to get a major disruption and have to learn a whole new interface and way of working to switch from a previous version of Windows to Vista. It’s just as much disruption or as little disruption to move to a version of Linux. So what we will probably see is that a lot of companies now are going to very seriously consider, when they do their next refresh cycle, not switching to Vista but switching to a Linux-based platform instead.

The next year and a half will be a very important time for the Linux and open source communities. Right now is probably one of the biggest opportunities that Linux has had to make huge inroads on the desktop at a large scale corporate level, it will be very interesting to see what happens over the next 12-18 months. It is going to be a really critical time that will lay out the computing landscape for many years to come.

Tim Anderson in an interview with ZDNet last year highlighted user retraining as a significant cost as one of the big costs the DET always faces when changing platform is retraining, because we have 1.2 million users. Traditionally we try to make the new platform look like the old platform as much as possible. Clearly some of the changes to the user interface may well be things that users find attractive. In that case we will have to include the cost of implementation and training as part of the Vista roll out. Anderson is considering increasing the number of Linux-based desktops.