Linux losing to Windows.  Time to reassess how to compete in the server market
330476
Linux's server growth is slowing vis-a-vis Windows server growth.  The reasons are several.  The answer is clear: take on Microsoft directly.
725859
Although Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, about 80% of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows
45940
Microsoft Windows is still the dominant OS, but Linux is becoming a popular development platform.
637689
Ziff Davis - With Linux making an attractive alternative, Microsoft moved to scale down the size and the security holes of its operating system. The result? A retail-focused OS that is one-tenth the size.
27829
According to the Yankee Group, the adoption of Linux on the desktop should grow to the mid-single digits in the next year. It&#39;s common knowledge that Microsoft rules the desktop operating system (OS) environment
357199
Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.
734398
One project will let customers run SuSE Linux as a guest on Longhorn, and vice versa.
498465
Till now the adoption of Linux has been largely restricted to the server - thanks to disinterested ISVs and strong reluctance by Windows-only users.
113017
com November 12, 2004, 8:58 AM PT. Organizations are replacing aging servers with newer more-powerful boxes, often Linux--based, and theyâre also investing in storage.
202277
Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
613634
Ziff Davis - Microsoft's omission of WinFS from the Longhorn version of Windows may open options for open-source competitors to the forthcoming operating system.
43987
As Red Hat Inc. prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations.
99199
By Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle  Dec. 19--If you talk to a hard-core techie who's a user of the Linux operating system or one of the zealots who worship Apple's Macintosh, you won't hear many nice things said about Microsoft.
481653
I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
331673
Research: Businesses are going open source, but OS may still be too technical for most users. The open-source operating system Linux may be gaining a lot of ground in the enterprise space, but Windows will
533640
A year ago, InfoWorld wouldn?t have published an article describing how to switch from Windows to desktop Linux like this one by Neil McAllister. The operating system?s installation glitches hadn?t been smoothed out, app and basic utility support was still too spotty, and peripheral device support lagged. Oh, yeah, there was one more thing: The demand simply wasn?t there.
54701
Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.