What chance the Microsoft-free desktop in the real world?
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Linux, Lotus, IBM, Microsoft on
The big news from the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco this week has got to be the IBM partnership deals with Canonical, Red Hat and Novell. IBM has, quite plainly, gone on the offensive and stated that in combining its Open Collaboration Client Solution software suite (with Lotus Notes, Symphony and Sametime) with Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse Linux distros it can convince its customers to make the move to a Microsoft-free desktop experience.
With Canonical already confirming that Lotus Symphony will be distributed via its Web services programme within a couple of weeks, the other players in this trio will most likely follow with similar announcements real soon.
Now, according to various online sources, the fourth largest maker of computers is looking to get involved. The Chinese-based company that acquired the IBM laptop business some years back, Lenovo, is apparently involved in ‘active discussions’ with regard to bringing out a series of systems with a Microsoft-free desktop running the Linux/Lotus combination.
Should Microsoft be worried? Well, truth be told, probably not. After all, IBM has been pushing the Microsoft-free desktop thing in Europe for some months already to no great effect as far as I can see. Why it should make any bigger an impact in the US is beyond my ken.
Throwing Lenovo into the mix could be interesting, but again I doubt that it will win too many converts. There is, to be fair, enough choice of Microsoft systems out there in the market and while the Linux market share continues to grow slowly, the emphasis is on slowly.
Just as Firefox has eaten away at the Internet Explorer userbase, so Linux will claw at the Windows market. But as with the web browsers, Microsoft will still be left with the lion’s share and then some. Convincing the business market to switch from a Microsoft desktop to a Linux one is going to be a lot harder, as their is already much more invested in both financial and cultural terms, than simply switching a web browser client.
Even allowing the for the credit crunch argument of businesses being strapped for cash so looking more favourably at the open source sector does not really hold water when push comes to shove. Buying new hardware does not save money, it costs money. Those businesses are far more likely, surely, simply not to upgrade and therefore not spend a budget they do not have.
The only possible chink in the stick with Microsoft argument comes with the number of enterprises which are not upgrading to Vista, leaving a slight possibility that they might look elsewhere when the time does come for new hardware…
Rated: 40% (4 votes)
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Lotus is not dead
By Davey Winder in Editorial
With a name like Enterprise 2.0, you kind of know that there are going to be the odd one or two surprises thrown up as announcements during such a ‘collaborative technologies’ conference. I wasn’t expecting, however, to hear that Lotus is not only alive and well but, and you might want to sit down at this point and put your coffee out of the way, actually innovating as well.
But there you have it, an announcement from IBM confirmed just that. IBM Lotus Connections is, apparently, the industry’s first integrated social software offering for business.
Well, actually it a suite of a handful of Web 2.0-alike components covering blogging, profile building, community creation and bookmarking. In other words the ability to bring relationship building into the enterprise in order to unlock the employee knowledge asset.
Did I really just say that?
Ok, so it might be a first in that it has integrated everything within one enterprise suite, but it’s hardly earth shattering stuff is it? Are there really any enterprises left who don’t already make use of some kind of blogging software, be it customer facing or internal, and most productively both, in order to share knowledge? Is there an enterprise that has somehow managed to be left behind by the bookmarking and tagging revolution, which is still trying to find folksonomy in a dog-eared 20 year old dictionary?
Social networking is not a new concept, in fact it’s starting to get a little long in the tooth, tired and predictable, boring even. Lotus is not dead, but putting wheels on the zimmer frame doesn’t make it any the more exciting…
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