"There was a lot of fear around open source because folks thought that we were going to decimate the local software industry, but when that didn’t happen open source came into the mainstream. People thought that we were going to socialise the software industry. In August 2005 when we put out our Open Documents policy, every corporation was supportive of what we doing with the exception of Microsoft,” says Quinn.

“When you think about the desktop arena, there is ubiquity around Microsoft. They won the marketplace war. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft but there is a fundamental change going on the industry right now that is going to challenge the safety net around buying Microsoft. That comes around from how people use the desktop. Because folks are migrating to web services; because most of us are content creators, the fact is that we are making this investment in technology the desktop that for the most part doesn’t get used and, if it does, it gets woefully under utilised for the investment we make in it.

“I would say to CIOs, CFOs, CEOs, government agency heads and political figures if they are not challenging their technology people in terms of how and what they’re investing in the desktop and truly understanding what’s going on there, I think there’s something wrong. This isn’t anything about being an anti-Microsoft conversation. It is about where we are investing the scarce dollars we have and whether this is the best use of your money.

“You need to think and analyse what people are doing with the tools that you’re giving them. They’re using them dramatically differently today than they did five years ago. If you can fully appreciate what happens on the desktop, it allows you to approach what it is you do for your next generation of investment in a completely different way.

“I would suggest that our desktops are going to get a lot simpler because we’re migrating towards web services, which means that what you really need is a substantial browser. Email in my mind continues to be the critical application in many enterprises. What happens after that for the most part is that we are content consumers, so we read but we don’t edit or create. When you get things today, most of the time it’s not a document attachment; it’s either a link to a web page, or the salient information you need is embedded in the email. So it’s a very different paradigm.
“If you think about it from that perspective, then the cost differentials become very different. There has been a lot going on in open source development over the last couple of years and this the year that so much is going to change. The tools are going to be there in a way that they haven’t been before and the ability to bifurcate and trifurcate what happens on the desktop and unbundle rather than have this bundled approach is going to much more prevalent. It’s all coming together a bit like a perfect storm.

“The other thing that helps this is that the Microsoft products have been delayed. The debate is rising to a crescendo and that’s why I think this the tipping point.”