"Linux has a scalable footprint that has always been the Achillies heel in the Windows model, robust application support for the programs that people want to use and the ability to connect seamlessly and easily (for the most part) to most of the services that people want to use.
"However, today I want to talk not about individual desktops, but the view from the enterprise. Not a dozen or so machines in a purpose built environment but thousands of machines in a true heterogeneous environment where ease of use, manageability, and program operations are essential and saying Let’s migrate to Linux takes on a whole new level of complexity and challenge.
"Let me start with a story. About two years ago, I interviewed for a job with a federal agency (for those outside the United States, let me give you some background. The U.S. government is divided up into three branches: Legislative (Congress), Judicial (the Courts, like the Supreme Court) and Executive (everything else). The branches of the Executive, often referred Cabinet level, are also called Departments, like Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security. These departments generally have subunits, usually called agencies but not always, with in them, such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or the United States Secret Service). I am interviewing with a contractor who has a job at Agency P, a sub to Department C. The contract was a review and validation of the desktop operating system being used by Agency P to do its day-to-day work. Its current platform at the time was Windows XP and Microsoft Vista had just been released. I was being interviewed to be the lead architect on the project."
