As has been predicted, with the economy in a down turn, businesses (and everybody) are abandoning sucky proprietary software for free and excellent OpenSource software ...
A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper.
Sixty-five percent of the 330 respondents said they plan to increase Linux server workloads by 10% or more this year. Sixty-three percent said they will increase their use of Linux on the desktop by more than 10% this year, although such an increase would still probably represent a miniscule share of all desktops. Forty-nine percent said they expect Linux will be their primary server platform within five years.
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I think most offices could switch their people over to linux and be up and good within a few weeks. Heck, they could start buying netbooks and eee-boxes and save a ton of money on that too. How much machine do you need to crunch spreadsheets and write docs? How much training do you need to switch from clicking "MS office" to "open office?"
Personally I think all but a few things should be on the internet (or private network server, in security issue places) and therefore platform independent as far as the desktops accessing them are concerned.
Spiv, I must disagree. Conversion for most businesses would be non-trivial, thanks to Office documents being in proprietary formats, frequently peppered with VB macros. Add to that some websites mandating IE on Windows (and sometimes Firefox, plus Safari on Macs). The latter happens with depressing regularity: some of the sites I frequent (BBC, ticketek.co.nz...) have been taken over my MSers.
I hope I live to see the day when standards are adhered to and vendor lock-in is a thing of the past.
...have been taken over by MSers.
Excuse my cold.
Office documents being in proprietary formats,
There are no proprietary formats that are not easily opened, saved, and manipulated with OO.org.
frequently peppered with VB macros.
Not really. They are too dangerous to actually use.
Add to that some websites mandating IE on Windows
It's all over for windows. Only a matter of time, and with the panic about the economy, the time is now.
Not so much any more, and that is going away as we speak.
Did anyone say Visio? ;-)
But vanilla documents and spreadsheets can still trip up OOo. I've been using OpenOffice (and before the open source fork, StarOffice) as my main office suite since 2002 and in that time both compatibility and overall quality have improved immensely -- but because Office file formats have to be reverse-engineered it'll never be 100% compatible. (it's not even 100% across different versions of Office). I still get glitches opening up some Office files, if only minor layout issues.
I think the only way around this is to move to open standards for file formats (as some governments are doing).
I wish someone would tell that to the web designers and developers who go out of their way to code for that platform and IE in particular. Thankfully it's not as common a practice as it was in the "browser wars" days, and switching to something like Firefox is probably the easiest first step to using open source on the desktop.
Having said all that, the focus of the original article is about the increased use of Linux on servers. If you're deploying new machines to run the usual file/print/web serving, firewalls, app servers and so on, you can transparently (to the users) switch to open source.
And when has that ever stopped business (or other not-technically-competent) users from doing so?