N+I: Linux, MS in two-horse race - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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N+I: Linux, MS in two-horse race

By Byron Kaye, ZDNet Australia
March 09, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/N-I-Linux-MS-in-two-horse-race/0,139023166,120208125,00.htm

The OS manufactuer's battle for market share has narrowed down to a hand-to-hand duel between Linux and Microsoft, according to one local Linux executive.

Speaking at a keynote at NetWorld+Interop, the regional manager of Linux Caldera Systems, Gordon Hubbard, said the market share of applications based on other operating systems, such as Netware and Unix, had dropped off considerably.

The combined market share of all Linux and Microsoft "shrink-wrapped" desktop applications had increased almost ten percent in the year from 1999 to 2000.

During that time, Linux's market share had grown by 12.5 percent, from 24 percent to 27 percent. Microsoft's had grown around 14 percent, from 36 percent to 41 percent, Hubbard said.

"It's really a two-horse race. Linux and Windows are fighting it out," he said.

However, Hubbard admitted some shortcomings were still stifling the global mainstream uptake of the open source software.

Linux products would still need greater scaling flexibility to appeal to the enterprise market. "It's not scaling so well on multi-processor systems," he said.

And further development was still needed in the area clustering support, he said. Many corporates were reluctant to deploy Linux for smaller projects because other systems, particularly NT, were more scalable.

Linux developers also needed to create more comprehensive management tools. "At the moment there's really very few (management) tools out there," he said.

Enterprise customers were also reluctant to deploy Linux because the open source software code had insufficient integrated global support.

A Ziff-Davis study conducted last year found that Linux operating systems ran for an average of 10 months without crashing. Systems running NT4 lasted an average of six weeks. Researchers sent identical "typical" loads of Web server and file server traffic through the operating systems to test the OSes.