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Our Blogs Open Sauce Why IDC-Novell survey is a dud
Our Blogs Open Sauce Why IDC-Novell survey is a dud | Why IDC-Novell survey is a dud |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 17 March 2009 | |
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Novell had a terrible quarter - here's a quote from the company's chief financial officer, Dana Russell: "As we have stated before, our Linux business is dependent on large deals, which may result in some fluctuations of our quarterly invoicing. This quarter, we did not sign any large deals, many of which have been historically fulfilled by Microsoft certificates. Today, we have invoiced $199 million, or 83 percent, of our original $240 million agreement." (emphasis mine) (It must be borne in mind that Microsoft made an additional $100 million investment in Novell in August, something which indicated to me that all was not well at Novell. Several American IT pundits, however, saw it differently. It looks like they were wrong.) Indeed, the very fact that Novell had to commission a survey shows what dire straits it must be in. Over the years I've been writing about free and open source software, I've seen numerous surveys from the proprietary software crowd - which always tend to paint a positive picture of proprietary software. And then there have been surveys from proponents of free and open source software - which, mysteriously, end up favouring the FOSS community and its software. It's not surprising that the great Benjamin Disraeli once referred to statistics as being the third kind of lies - after lies and damn lies. The conclusion reached by IDC is quite simple: companies that are already using Linux are deploying more of the free operating system as times become tough. Period. Even a gun for hire cannot come up with something more pleasing to the ears of the sponsor of a survey. CONTINUED |
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