I’m not going to go into a big anti-Microsoft PR FUD diatribe here, I think this ZDNET column speaks volumes all by itself. Somehow “Microsoft could lose up to 10 percent of mid-sized business customers to Linux in the next three years” when reported to the public became: “Linux Fails in Small Business Market“. How is that for creative PR work folks? You can see why they earn the big bucks right? As the saying goes, there are Lies, Damn Lies, and then there are Statistics. Read this little ZDNet snippet by Dana Blankenhorn as it says everything I would have only better. Techies are not supposed to listen to reports like these, these babies are destined for the CIO/CEO’s of the corporate world that don’t know any better. So before you believe everything you read, ask your resident geek for a reality check first. Microsoft is already losing to Open Source software in the webserver market by roughly 65/25%, so contrary to reports of this nature, a good many companies are running Linux or other OSS Operating systems. Just apparently not many of the ones asked by info-tech. There are some interesting snippets from that article though. Here’s one: “Of the respondents only 27 per cent runs Linux inside their organisation.” I’d prefer to word that as: “WOW!, 27 percent of mid-sized businesses are running Linux inside their organisation.” 27% is amazing when you consider how quickly Linux as risen to “enterprise capable” status. I’ll leave the conclusions to somebody smarter than myself, except to say that something smells seriously fishy.
INSERT: Joe Barr of Newsforge has written about the mis-representation of the facts in the original survey that tried to imply that Linux was stalled in mid sized enterprise. Turns out that these guys are the only ones that believe that to be the case and I believe IDC far more then Infotech. So should you.
