[Am-info] DESKTOP REVOLUTIONS

[Fred A. Miller]

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From: RUSSELL PAVLICEK: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com, 
Wednesday, December 5, 2001

DESKTOP REVOLUTIONS

Posted November 30, 2001 01:01 PM  Pacific Time


HARDLY A WEEK goes by these days without some expert on
the future of technology declaring that "Linux will
never make it to the corporate desktop." And I have to
admit that some of the arguments supporting this
conclusion seem convincing.

First, the corporate desktop appears locked in a
seemingly endless cycle of upgrades through key
desktop software packages like Microsoft Word,
PowerPoint, and Outlook. It is hard to conceive of
organizations discarding all of this infrastructure in
the near future. Second, the corporate world is
definitely attuned to the Windows interface, and any
retraining would be prohibitively expensive. Companies
need to spend time doing business, not learning new software.

Although these observations are persuasive on their
face, they pale in the light of the lessons of
computing history. Recently, we celebrated the 20th
anniversary of the creation of the IBM PC. Anyone care
to remember the comments that accompanied the birth of
said device? I am old enough to remember hearing
corporate vice presidents declare that PCs would never
replace dumb terminals because PCs were too expensive.
In most cases, "never" didn't last the decade.

Look at the history of the PC itself. Remember when
MS-DOS was king? How about when WordPerfect was the
standard in word processing? Have you kept up your
Lotus 1-2-3 skills? Can you even remember how to
navigate Windows 3.1?

Things change quickly in the computer world. If one
human year equals seven in the life of a dog, then it
must be 20 in the life of a computer. Five years
constitutes ancient history in this industry. Beyond
that, no one can seem to remember how things used to
get done.

So what does this mean with regard to Linux? It means
claims that Linux will never make it to the corporate
desktop have to be seen from the perspective of
computer time. Every five years to seven years or so,
everything on the corporate desktop changes --
absolutely everything. Today's software Cadillacs are
tomorrow's boat anchors.

And how will corporate offices migrate to this new
desktop? Is the transition between products ever
really as seamless as the advertising hype would lead
you to believe? If I had just a tiny fraction of the
money that companies spend on desktop training with
each major product release, I would be an unimaginably
wealthy man.

The truth is, the currently popular desktop
applications won't survive more than five years,
regardless of what replaces them. And companies will
pay to train their people on the new products --
whatever those products might be. The only question is
what the next generation of software will look like.

With this in mind, I support the notion that Linux will
never make it to the corporate desktop -- provided you
understand that "never" could arrive as early as 2002.

Russell Pavlicek is an independent open-source
consultant. Contact him at pavlicek@linuxprofessionalsolutions.com.

- -- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org

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