Limitations of OS advocacy today

by Brad Wardell

August 2001

 

Almost every advocacy post or article for an alternative OS can be summed up with: "I don’t need feature X of Windows so I can use operating system Y just fine.”

 

That argument always strikes me as someone trying to convince themselves that they made the right OS choice rather than true advocacy.  In my OS/2 days, I used OS/2 not because I hated Windows or didn’t like Microsoft, I used OS/2 because it was qualitatively better than any alternative.  It was significantly superior in features that no one could deny.  In 1992, OS/2 was the best desktop OS out there for PC’s.  You didn’t need to put many qualifiers on it.  And you didn’t have to go with the argument “Well I don’t need those features or programs on my system” because OS/2 ran all your DOS, Windows and the new breed of 32bit multithreaded OS/2 software.

 

Anyone arguing against the forces of inertia has to present a pretty compelling case for someone to fight inertia.  That means that the thing they are arguing for has to be substantially better.

 

That’s why I was so bummed out when I read my long time friend, Nick Petreley’s July 9^th Infoworld column on why Linux is a good desktop OS that you should choose over Windows.  At this point in the game, odds are that the reader of the article is already using Windows. Thus, his challenge is to convince someone already using Windows to switch to Linux.

 

His article states, after having led off by saying “So here’s more ammunition [as to why Linux is a good desktop OS], as requested”, “Many pundits contend that office applications for Linux aren’t as feature-rich or sophisticated as Microsoft Office.  They’re right, but so what?” and goes on to essentially say that there are good open source programs that are good enough.  You don’t need all those Office features.  He makes a good argument that most people don’t need nearly the power that Office gives today.

 

But so what?  The issue he needs to address isn’t that Linux is fine because I don’t need the features on Windows.  The issue is, what does Linux give me in return for giving up features I may or may not find useful?  Is Star Office 5.2 faster than Microsoft Office 2000?  Not in my experience.  What is the trade off then of moving from the mainstream OS to the alternative (in this case, Linux)?

 

Nick concludes by saying “If…you can’t let go of MS Office, then by all means continue to lock yourself into enterprise software designed solely for Microsoft to milk its cash cows when it can no longer sustain its upgrade model. Natural selection in business is a wonderful thing.  Your smarter competitors can move to Linux on the desktop and spend their money expanding their own business instead of Microsoft’s.”

 

But that essentially sounds like “Microsoft is evil, don’t support them.”  As much as I’m not a fan of Microsoft nor of their corporate behavior, I can’t make OS choices based on wanting to strike back an imperceptible blow to them.  Companies, as Infoworld has pointed out, have not been forced down the upgrade path.  Most companies are still using Office 97 – 4 years ago.  They clearly have not been milked.  If the average corporation is upgrading only once every 5 years, then a $300 office purchase every 5 years comes out to only $60 per user per year which isn’t going to affect an enterprise one iota.

 

If the argument is to try to convince corporations to adopt Linux on the desktop, then a compelling business case needs to be made.  Companies pay for convenience all the time.  Large companies will choose convenience over slight savings nearly every time.  That’s why if the choice is a trouble free Windows box or a tweak fest Linux desktop that costs less up front, they’ll probably pick Windows (and sorry, Windows NT and higher ARE just as solid as Linux on the desktop as many of our corporate clients would tell you).

 

Instead, I would argue towards a better overall way of computing in which Linux is better at.  For instance, Linux could be a much better distributed computing solution.  One Linux server with Star Office on it in which everyone connects and runs that pre configured version.  Linux could be used as a desktop “super terminal” in which data is kept locally but the programs are all executed from a group of clustered servers and displayed on the local desktop.  Linux has the potential to be a better corporate desktop environment because it is much better at providing a distributed environment.  So instead of arguing how you don’t need those Office features, you could argue how much time and money could be saved by having a single master setup of Star Office on the corporate server cluster in which everyone is always standardized on the same copy of Star Office at once.

 

Or argue that Linux is much more customizable than Windows so corporations can much more easily configure it to be melded to their business processes (of course, Stradock’s Object Desktop for Windows can do much the same for Windows but that’s another story). 

 

But whatever argument you choose, it shouldn’t fall back on “Our OS may not be as good but it’s not controlled by an evil corporation.”  Because evil is in the eye of the beholder.  After all, while Nick argues “[You can run Office via Emulation] while migrating to an all-open-source desktop.”  To some of us, GPL Open Source is a far more evil entity than Microsoft is.

 

Nick knows his stuff, he is a leading expert on operating systems. But I would argue that at this point in the game, an alternative OS has to be more than good, it has to be much better in significant ways to justify switching to it. 

 

Nick's article:

http://iwsun4.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01/07/09/010709oppetreley.xml

 

 

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