Page II: Former Ximian chief executive David Patrick, now a general manager at Novell, says the Office productivity suite is the key to breaking Microsoft's hold on the desktop.
Why do you think the public sector seems to be leading the charge here?
Patrick: The public sector has more things driving decisions politically. I think that a lot of countries like the fact that Linux is an open platform and they can hire their own nationals to maintain it and pour their own dollars into their own economy. Even in Munich they have acknowledged that the cost of porting to Microsoft will be higher because of transitional costs but long term they believe it is the right decision; long term they have eliminated this dependency on a company with a closed platform.
It seems that those same factors would motivate private companies -- so why aren't they?
Patrick: Well, they will but it's just that they are on a different time scale -- they can wait until the platform matures a bit. There are many pilots going on inside private organisations and the interest level is very, very high.
What needs to change in order to encourage more private companies to step up and announce their support?
Patrick: There are several things that are important here, for example: ease of use, tight integration, and interoperability with Microsoft's environments. We know that these are going into shops that support Microsoft, so that means supporting Microsoft file formats, being able to talk to Exchange server -- which we do with Evolution. We are also integrating with all of Novell's back-end services such as GroupWise and iFolder.
The first big global deployment of desktop Linux will be Novell. We are moving 6,000 employees over to Linux. By 1 August, everyone in the company is going to be on Open Office and then, by this autumn, roughly half the company will be on Linux and the rest we are finishing off as soon as possible after that.
But what about all the intensive Excel users -- the functionality isn't there in OpenOffice at the moment to support them?
Murray: That is probably the last barrier that has to fall, but the approach we have decided to take is to move to OpenOffice and port all our stuff over. Once we have broken the Microsoft Office dependency than breaking the operating-system dependency is trivial.
Patrick: The hardest piece is the Office layer. We are also using ourselves as a case-study and using our migration to develop a set of migration tools for companies. Everything we do we are adding to our consultancy practice to help other customers move over. The core thing is application support and we are focusing on the core seven applications such as OpenOffice and Mozilla and others such as Evolution our groupware suite.
If you look at all the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that Microsoft has levied against Linux, it is all about cost of deployment, cost of management, cost of administration. The reason the costs are lower on Windows is because the management tools are more mature. We are now bringing all that to the Linux platform and the cost of administrating and deploying is going to come way down.
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