[ Thanks to iaf for this link.
]
“The development and growth of the Linux operating system has
brought a new question to the lips of IT managers: Why should I buy
Microsoft? Five years ago, the answer would have been easy. With
the dominant development tools, client operating system and client
applications, Microsoft owned a certain portion of the
enterprise.“But now that the Linux OS is rapidly maturing and companies are
looking to shrink IT budgets, the choice is not so easy. Almost
everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now
find somewhere else–without some of the baggage that comes with
Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying
licensing practices. Enterprises finally have a real choice, and
that spells big problems for Microsoft.“In a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about
25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows
servers with Linux. However, the switch may not be quite as
seamless as one would hope. In fact, for enterprises that run their
entire organizations on top of Microsoft products, a wholesale
migration to Linux would be costly, Bill Claybrook, research
director at Aberdeen Group, told NewsFactor. ‘Not only do you have
the porting costs, but you have the systems administration costs.
You have to retrain a lot of people,’ Claybrook said…: