Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 08:40
Opinion and Analysis
Page 5 of 6
iTWire: Apple, I suppose, can't get into this desktop thing because of the cost?
CZ: If the market wasn't for netbooks, if it was for laptops, Apple would be competitive. When you factor in the lifecycle cost of an Apple product as compared to a Microsoft product, Apple could be competitive. But Apple still has the same issues that Linux has - it may be more seamless, easier to use, but it's still not Microsoft. Decision-makers only feel comfortable with Microsoft, because that's what their colleagues are doing. If they do anything different, they stick their necks out. If they do what their colleagues are doing, even if their colleagues are wrong and they are doing what they're doing because it's what they've done in the past, then they are safe.
We are talking about something at a macro level which can only be analysed at a micro-level. I have the skill to look at an organisation and say 'this is what you need to do for the next 18 months to clear the road for moving away from, say, Microsoft Office, or some other proprietary software to a Linux desktop, an open source offering.' In most cases it is fundamentally feasible for most Australian industry and public sector organisations today to move some amount of their infrastructure to Linux desktops and certainly to Linux servers. They are not doing that for any number of different reasons - mostly vision and political will or the lack thereof. If you talk to most IT people nowadays, the question they ask is 'how can we reduce costs but not by doing something fundamentally different?'
iTWire: Who will bell the cat?
CZ: In this country if the public sector does not lead, then it will be just a case of osmosis, small victories here, marginal victories there and so on.
iTWire: Wouldn't it be private businesses which are more focused on cost reduction?
CZ: Sure, but then businesses are also pretty risk-averse. If a large enough organisation has enough layers of coverage and there is no shying away - the cover your arse syndrome - something may happen. You need someone with some degree of intestinal fortitude to move away from the mainstream. It is happening in smaller businesses - a large part of what I do is OpenOffice.org training for for 5, 10, 15, 20-person businesses, every now and again for a 200-person business and every now and again for a multi-hundred person government agency. But the bigger cases do not happen that often. If you sat down and did the rational analysis, you would ask why this is not happening more often. Lots of organisations do not need a full-on office suite. But they find it politically easier to fork out the next hundred thousand or so for the next set of Microsoft Office licences - even when the next version of Office is going to cost them a non-trivial fracture in terms of staff usage patterns, retraining issues and so on.
iTWire: You paint a fairly bleak picture.
CZ: From an industry perspective, it's bleak because things aren't happening fast enough. They could be always happening faster. The flip side of the coin is that the open source industry has become big enough to support the existing players and to nurture and grow them. I guess as an industry we would like see more innovation, more change, a greater growth rate. For any one of a number of reasons we seem to be lagging in adoption. If you look at our adoption rate, you might say that we're half of what Europe is. That's the minus; the plus is that we're sustaining a viable industry in the open source space now. Imagine what will happen when our adoption rate doubles.
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