Why the IBM Linux desktop will fail

Stan Beer
Sunday, 07 December 2008 14:12

Opinion and Analysis

If one was to believe IBM, the days of the Microsoft desktop are numbered, soon to be cut short by a combination of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, IBM's Lotus range of office applications and a virtual desktop from Virtual Bridges. The trouble is IBM's solution is nothing new and addresses none of the issues associated with moving away from Microsoft.

So what is IBM offering? In essence, the IBM vision is for business users to drop Microsoft Office and Windows and instead use a virtual desktop generated from a server running Ubuntu and Lotus.

Under the IBM plan, users would run the virtual desktop on a thin client or an old PC acting as a thin client. IBM claims that this would save users heaps because the hardware would be much cheaper and software support is priced at just US$59 to US$289 a seat.

It all sounds very nice in theory but in practice the IBM offering is unlikely to cause more than a tiny ripple in the vast pond of enterprise Microsoft desktop use. There are at least a couple of fundamental reasons for this.

First, let's take a look at the office productivity component. It seems that everybody's favorite sport these days is to take pot shots at Microsoft Office, pointing out how overpriced, unwieldy and bloated the software has become.

There is no doubt quite a good deal of justification for these criticisms and there are a number of free or low priced open source desktop alternatives to MS Office such as OpenOffice, Star Office, Lotus et al. In addition, there are the new breed of Cloud office apps such as Google Docs, Zoho, Think Free and so on.

In fact, today there are so many "free" alternatives to MS Office - all of which run on Windows - that users are spoiled for choice. Yet finding a case study where a substantial enterprise has moved off MS Office is a rare occurrence indeed. Why?

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