How Linux Will Succeed: Forget About Windows
Penguins throw down your arms. The Linux battle for the desktop is a fruitless waste of time.
I'm saying this for the benefit of the attendees of the Linuxfest 2000 conference that gets under way today in Kansas. Techies love the open-source operating system created by Linus Torvalds. Unlike Windows, they can modify it to do just what they need.
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Message to the Linux counterculture: Expecting consumers to abandon the de facto Windows standard to go to Linux is like asking them to return to DOS. It's not going to happen. But Linux can succeed if it does two things successfully: gets big (becomes a popular choice for large enterprises) and gets small (becomes embedded OS of choice for small devices).
GET BIG Enterprise computing is a natural environment for Linux because there are almost as many potential applications as there are businesses. Linux offers a system that is both free and very reliable. It's now the second-most-popular server OS after Windows NT.
But Linux has barriers to becoming the enterprise OS of choice. Dataquest put together the latest stats about why businesses don't use Linux. These are obstacles that Linux must overcome to grow.
Lack of in-house expertise. 25% of businesses shy from Linux because their IT staffs don't know how to operate it. This is the biggest reason pointed...