Linux- Gaining Ground

THREATENED BY THE PENGUIN contd...

Another company, which was facing the heat due to growing popularity of Linux, was Sun. It was reported that most of Sun's customers were shifting to Linux, which performed similar functions to Solaris at very low prices. While Microsoft chose to downplay the threat posed by Linux, Sun^[16] extended its support to Linux.

It had a two-pronged strategy to deal with Linux: offering servers with Linux for serving up web pages, and beefing up its own operating system, Solaris, to stay ahead of Linux. Scott McNealy, (McNealy), CEO, Sun Microsystems, said “We have a very deliberate plan here. We're going to stay focused. We're not going to do what IBM or HP are doing --- abandoning a 20-year investment in mission-critical Unix operating systems. They're marooning customers.”

Unlike all other industry analysts, Sun stated that Linux's impact would be greater in the desktop markets and it announced its plans to begin selling desktop computers with Linux applications. However, analysts felt that it would be very difficult for Linux to be successful in desktop markets, as shifting from Microsoft applications to other Linux-supported applications would be very costly.

Al Gillen, IDC analyst, commented, “Microsoft won the desktop battle a long time ago.^[17]”
By 1999, Microsoft woke up to the threat from Linux and started its campaign to counter the growth of Linux. In 1999, Microsoft created a portal – ‘Linux Myths'- questioning the performance and reliability of Linux. Through this portal, Microsoft challenged the five claims of the Linux community –

• Linux performs better than Windows NT,
• Linux is more reliable than Windows NT,
• Linux is more secure than Windows NT,
• Linux can replace Windows as a desktop operating system, and,
• Linux is free.

Microsoft referred to lab tests, which indicated that Windows NT was faster and more secure than Linux, and also claimed that working on Linux o/s was actually costlier than working on Windows NT. However, the Linux community said that Microsoft was making comparisons with the older version of Linux.

They said that while Microsoft had taken 1999 June ‘PC Week'benchmarks, which showed Windows NT performing better than Linux, it had not mentioned the fact that the same problems had been fixed by programmers, and a new version of Linux – Linux 2.2 had been released since then.

However, the Linux community agreed that Linux had to be improved to make it more reliable for critical mission servers. The portal created by Microsoft could not contain the growing popularity of Linux. By 2000, Linux's market share increased to 27%, and according to an IDC report, Linux's growth rate was 24% against Microsoft's 20% (Refer Table I).

TABLE I
MARKET SHARE IN THE YEAR 2000

OPERATING SYSTEM	MARKET SHARE
WINDOWS	41
LINUX	27
UNIX	13
NETWARE	17
OTHERS	2

Source: The Economist, April 12, 2001.

More>>

THE FUTURE OF LINUX AND THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

EXHIBIT II - TIME LINE OF LINUX

EXHIBIT III - EVOLUTION OF WINDOWS contd...

EXHIBIT IV - COMPARISON OF LINUX AND WINDOWS

ADDITIONAL READINGS & REFERENCES

^[16] Solaris is the computer operating system that Sun Microsystems provides for its family of Scalable Processor Architecture-based processors as well as for Intel-based processors. Sun's Scalable Processor Architecture is 32 and 64 bit microprocessor architecture from Sun.

^[17]The Linux Uprising, BusinessWeek, March 3, 2003.