Stan Beer
Sunday, 07 December 2008 15:12
Opinion and Analysis
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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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