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6-Nov-03
Accounting Systems
29-Oct-03
Microsoft buys Macs
23-Aug-03
Worms eat Windows
19-May-03
SCO sues IBM
15-May-03
RIAA vs Peer-to-peer
30-Mar-03
Office Depot Aids Monopoly
23-Feb-03
2003 & Beyond
2-Jun-02
You've got Klez!
13-Apr-02
MS Office .NET
28-Jan-02
The DoJ Settlement
04-Aug-01
Tech Stocks Tank
04-Aug-01
MS Guns for Intuit
04-Aug-01
.Net Gains Speed
15-Jul-01
Court of Appeals: Guilty!
13-Jul-01
Back in Operation
09-Feb-01
Software Licensing
15-Jan-01
Is Linux for Your Business?
1-Jan-01
Predictions
25-Dec-00
Microsoft Invades Accounting
21-Dec-00
.Net Takes Shape
24-Nov-00
The Next Windows
08-Oct-00
Winds of Change
23-Jun-00
Microsoft .Net
10-Jun-00
Microsoft strikes out at Linux
7-Jun-00
Tried, Guilty, Sentenced
28-May-00
OS/2 Finally Dead
11-May-00
The ILOVEYOU Worm
6-Apr-00
What's to be done with Microsoft
25-Mar-00
Our Web comes alive again
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Microsoft's Season of Discontent
Microsoft has long been criticized for a culture of paranoia, but it's
starting to look more than justified. Their controversial anti-trust
settlement threatens to come unraveled on two fronts
(A10, A11). Nearly two years
after proclaiming "Trustworthy Computing" the worms are coming on so strong
a desperate Microsoft is issuing quarter million dollar bounties for the
capture of worm writers (A3).
Microsoft has admitted losing $768 million in "unearned income" (license
agreement renewals) due to security problems (A12).
A few investment analysts have started describing Microsoft as "Ex-growth"
(A1) which has negatively affected their
all-important stock valuation, which had already been trailing the NASDAQ
average badly. If other voices join the chorus it could do severe and
permanent damage.
Microsoft's next generation computing platform, Longhorn, a strong return
to a strategy of customer lock-in, is already admitted late. It's drifting into
2006 and it's bound to get a lot later (A2).
Meanwhile they owe their License 6 customers an upgrade to justify the high
cost, and they don't have one. Without Longhorn, their business software
strategy, Project Green, is stalled (A4).
Microsoft's declared "Enemy #1", Linux, threatens international markets,
including first world countries like Germany where they recently lost the city
of Munich (14,000 computers) to IBM/SuSE bringing Linux and OpenOffice
(A5). China is pretty much a write-off
(A19) as is most of Southeast Asia and the Indian
subcontinent. As Microsoft enforces licensing, many governments and businesses
find they simply can't afford Microsoft products, and discover they really
don't need them.
Even the U.S. Army is moving to Linux (A9), and
Microsoft's share of the important Web Server market continues to decline
(A13) while the open source Apache soars.
On top of all this, Microsoft's most dangerous competitors have made strong
and well calculated moves that threaten their dominance even in U.S. markets.
(Top)
Enemies on a Roll
- Novell once dominated small business and
departmental networking. Many businesses are still running on Novell NetWare
servers, and many more wish they hadn't been hoodwinked or bullied into moving
to Windows NT/2000 servers, which are slower, less stable, less secure, and
far more costly to administer.
Novell today has many strong enterprise
products like eDirectory (A6) and Web Services
(A7, A8), against which Microsoft's
products do not compare well. Problem is, these products have been, at least
in perception, tied to NetWare, and NetWare has suffered for not being
considered a great application platform. No more. Novell is moving all their
products to the ever popular Linux platform.
Putting its money where its mouth is, Novell bought the second most
successful Linux publisher outright for the bargain price of $210 million.
SuSE will now operate as a subsidiary of Novell and take full advantage of
Novell's worldwide sales, dealer and support network. Novell will take full
advantage of SuSE's leading
Linux products.
Industry commentary has been loud, and overwhelmingly positive, and has
propelled Novell back into the technology headlines from which it has so long
been absent (A14, A15,
A16, A17, A18).
Hooray for Novell!
Novell also bought Ximian, a leading
developer of desktop, messaging and .NET compatible products for Linux,
including a leading replacement for Microsoft Exchange Server which supports
Outlook clients.
With a well known name and a reputation for rock solid products, Novell
is now positioned to go toe to toe with Microsoft in many markets, and that
includes the desktop, because SuSE, unlike Red Hat, is a strong supporter of
desktop Linux in the enterprise.
Further, IBM has promised to invest $50 Million in Novell as soon as the
SuSE deal is complete, further solidifying its relationship with the
combined company and its commitment to Linux. More on IBM below.
(Top)
- Red Hat, the leading publisher of
Linux and long time darling of Linux enthusiasts has abandoned the enthusiast
and consumer markets completely to focus on the enterprise server market
(A20). It has turned all its low end products over
to a community organization, the
Fedora Project, to which it will
provide some support.
As of November 2003, Red Hat Linux
is still free, but to get it you have to sign up for at least a one year
support and upgrade contract. After that you can decide for yourself whether
to renew it or go it on your own. The lowest cost contract is about $350 per
server, and they go up to several thousand depending on the version you buy
and the degree of service you desire.
The source code for Red Hat's products will remain available for free
download as required by the GPL (General Public License), but having the
source code is only a small part of organizing a distribution.
Nothing would please Microsoft more than for Red Hat to spread its limited
resources over the consumer and enthusiast markets, but this is now just a
dream. Red Hat, which has never endorsed Linux on the desktop because it
feared going up against Microsoft where Microsoft is strongest, now is
sharply focused exactly where Microsoft is weakest, the enterprise server
market.
(Top)
- IBM has put its full weight behind
marketing Linux on the server, over its full line of server products, from
small Intel boxes all the way up to its zSeries mainframes. This has
revitalized some of IBM's products, and they've invested serious cash in the
further development of Linux.
Using a zSeries an ISP (Internet Service Provider) can run thousands of
iterations of Linux on a single box with a single management console. A new
customers site can be set up and configured in a few minutes, rather than
hours. Microsoft's solution would require a huge server farm, which may or
may not cost less to buy, but administration costs would be far and away
higher and reliability relatively poor.
IBM has wisely chosen not to publish
Linux itself, but has strategic relationships with the leading publishers,
Red Hat and SuSE. IBM has a long running relationship with Novell, which is
now greatly reinforced by Novell's purchase of SuSE and IBM's investment of
$50 Million in Novell.
One thing IBM has not done before now is endorse Linux on the desktop,
preferring to support Windows instead of Linux or its own high quality OS/2
desktop environment. On 11-Nov-03, Sam Docknevich of IBM Global Services
officially pronounced Linux "ready for the desktop", which means IBM Global
Services is ready to support it (A21,
A22).
IBM itself expects to have 40,000 to 50,000 Linux desktops in place
internally within a years time, and say they have a number of large clients
ready to roll with Linux desktop deployments.
This move can not help but anger Microsoft, which will be
looking for vengeance, but lets face it, IBM's PC business is no longer either
large enough or profitable enough to provide Microsoft the leverage it's
accustomed to, and their vengeance capability is severely diminished by having
been soundly convicted on antitrust charges.
(Top)
- Apple's embrace of BSD Unix, the
open source operating system on which its Macintosh OS X is built, has brought
it from irrelevance back into the business mainstream. The strong similarity
and compatibility between BSD and Linux has cast Apple as a "friend of Linux"
in the eyes of many and made it far more acceptable to corporate IS
(Information Systems) managers.
A few years ago, Microsoft strong armed Apple into making Microsoft
Internet Explorer the default Web browser for the Macintosh. Microsoft has
since chosen to discontinue Internet Explorer and integrate its code into
Longhorn. Apple has made Safari the default browser for OS X, a
standards compliant browser based on KDE's Konqueror browser for Linux.
Konqueror is similar to the Gecko rendering engine in the open source Mozilla
browser.
This move has forced some banks and other on-line businesses to start
supporting standards compliant browsers instead of just Internet Explorer,
which helps the cause of Linux and OS/2 users immeasurably.
Apple still has one ax hanging over its
head, Microsoft Office as the dominant office productivity suite for the
Macintosh. Whenever Apple steps a little out of line, Microsoft threatens to
discontinue Office for the Mac. Why does it exist in the first place? Unable
to gain application market share in the DOS world, Microsoft originally
developed Office for the Mac, then moved it to Windows.
This threat will be progressively weakened as OpenOffice / StarOffice take
more business market share. A version of OpenOffice currently runs on the
Macintosh and a fully native version is in development. This will free
Apple to become a more serious Microsoft competitor in the business
marketplace.
(Top)
- Sun Microsystems is the odd man out.
It has an impressive array of powerful enemies: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP,
Red Hat, Apple, Novell, and more. It has only a weakened Oracle as a friend,
and Oracle too has made a "bet the company" move to Linux. Linux threatens
many of Sun's traditional products as sharply as it threatens Microsoft.
On the other hand, Linux may be Sun's salvation. The company is totally
schizophrenic about this, denouncing Linux at one moment and supporting it
the next. This is thought to reflect a serious power struggle within the
company.
Sun sponsors the leading competitor to
Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and publishes its own enhanced version,
StarOffice. Sun has just announced its SuSE Linux based Java Desktop thin
client environment (which, strangely, has almost nothing to do with Java).
Then they turns around and denounces Linux as a toy unsuitable for enterprise
computing, just as Microsoft once did. They've contributed anti-Linux money
to SCO Group too.
Sun's refusal to turn control of its Java programming language over to
a standards body and to support an open source version of Java have turned
many Linux developers against it. This slows the spread of Java and leaves
Sun more vulnerable to Microsoft's .NET initiative and to various open
source projects.
The recent moves by Novell, SuSE, IBM and Red Hat may force Sun to do a
major reevaluation and side with Linux and open source regardless of how
many of its employees want to stay with Solaris. One thing is certain,
they're going to have to make some major move soon or fade to irrelevance.
(Top)
SCO Group - A Fly in the Ointment?
But what about SCO Group and its $3 Billion lawsuit against IBM, its
loud and continuous clamoring that Linux is an illegal rip-off of their Unix,
and their endless threats to sue the pants off Linux users?
The only people who believe any of SCO Group's claims are investors,
the very same investors who poured billions into a Dot.com bubble completely
unsupported by any shred of viable business plan or hope of profitability
in the next 1000 years.
There has been no slowing of Linux adoption, in fact it has
accelerated since SCO provided it so much additional publicity. Nobody with
a technical background and just about nobody with a legal background thinks
they have a valid case either (and there's evidence that may include SCO
Group's lawyers). See SCO - Death Without Dignity
for links to legal and technical opinions.
Even if SCO Group did have a case, Linux is now so much bigger than SCO
Group the problem would still go away, one way or another. When the flap
first began, IBM could have bought SCO Group out from its petty cash box, and
SCO was more than willing, but IBM thought so little of SCO Group's claims it
chose to fire up the Big Blue Crushing Machine instead.
Interestingly, Novell, which sold the Unix licensing business to Santa
Cruz Operation (the real SCO) which in turn sold it to SCO Group, retains
certain rights and controls over the licensing, possibly enough control to
completely void SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM regardless of any merits
it might have or not have.. Novell's committment to Linux and purchase of
SuSe certainly shows what they think of SCO Group's chances.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is pouring millions into SCO Group because its
litigation is a last hope of restraining the Penguin. So far $8
million is confirmed, another multimillion block is confirmed but of unknown
size, and a $50 million "investment" is suspected. This is all money lost, but
Microsoft hopes it will be worth the cost.
(Top)
So what does this mean to your business?
What it means is that you'll have a whole lot more choices about how you
structure your information systems, and you'll probably have to structure
them in a much more flexible way to accommodate customers and vendors who
have chosen to do it differently.
I realize many of you are not happy about having more choices, and more
risk of making the wrong choice, but Microsoft isn't happy about its fading
dreams of World Domination either. Longhorn is the one last hope for turning
the tide of history, and it's going to be very late.
For middle managers and PHBs (Dilbert - Pointy Haired Bosses), Longhorn
may still be the "safe choice", but whether it's the safe choice for the
companies they work for is highly questionable. See my article
Accounting Systems - the Future for a lot more
on how Longhorn will impact your business.
(Top)
- Andrew Grygus
Additional Reading
(Top)
Change Log
- Changed "IBM will endorse Linux desktop" to "IBM endorses Linux desktop"
with addition of A12.
(Top)
©Andrew Grygus
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9-Nov-03 - rev 9-Nov-03