“Administrators at Training Pages, the UK’s largest online
training directory have just identified a very interesting change
in the pattern of demand for IT training. Today the word “Linux”
appeared on the site’s real-time graph of its most popular keyword
searches at the same time as no Microsft-related word (e.g. “MCSE”,
“Microsoft”, etc) was listed at all. Whilst “Linux” has made the
top rank before, it has never edged out Microsoft completely, until
now. Members of the ABM (Anybody But Microsoft) will no-doubt also
be heartened by the high scores for “web” and “java” keywords.”
“Dave Fisher, Head of Business Development at GBdirect (the
company which runs Training Pages commented): “I doubt if Bill
Gates will be quakeing in his boots just yet, the overall demand
for Microsoft-related training is still higher than that for Linux,
but he should still be worried. The trend is very definitely, if
not conclusively, in the direction of Linux and away from
Microsoft. We have noticed a significant and steady increase in
demand for our own corporate Linux training, but it has not yet
reached levels that would cause us to concentrate on that
alone.“
“Mike Banahan, GBdirect’s MD said “When people ask us if we
would actually bet our own company on Linux, our stock response is
`we already did, two years ago’. Of course, that was only possible
because Linux is just another implementation of UNIX. We can sleep
safely in our beds, knowing that in the unlikely event that Linux
ever failed us, we could tranfer our entire IT infrastructure over
to another UNIX at relatively low cost.”