Is the demand for desktop Linux negligible?
There's been much fanfare about Linux replacing Windows on desktops but we've yet to see any major adoptions take place -- this may have something to do with the fact that in Australia, none of the major PC manufacturers have offered Linux as a pre-installed option.
Dell has been offering Ubuntu, a flavour particularly popular with consumers, in the US for some time but we've yet to see it in any other countries. Acer recently started selling the Aspire 5710Z with Ubuntu, but only in Singapore for now.
The company claims it will not be offering it in the UK due to a lack of demand from resellers. At the time of publishing, a local spokesperson was unavailable for comment.
Toshiba is another manufacturer that claims it is not offering pre-installed Linux due to a lack of demand. The company's pre-sales technical specialist, Keith Rothsay, told ZDNet Australia that he has only had a handful of enquiries about desktop Linux.
"Five or six [queries] across Australia and New Zealand, and that's total in the last three years from end-user customers -- and the majority have been from Canberra," said Rothsay.
Toshiba customers that plan to install Linux are offered limited support, such as power management drivers from an information page on its Japanese Web site.
"We believe that with Linux in particular, it's best handled by the community, and that's the whole point of that project ... we don't have local support facilities although we will certainly do it on an 'as best' basis," said Rothsay.
Analysts say the cost of retraining staff along with the entrenched install base of Windows means it could be some time before Linux becomes a popular alternative to Microsoft's desktop OS.
Michael Warrilow from analyst firm Hydrasight, agrees that the interest from Australian businesses has been negligible -- because of Microsoft's hold on the market.
"There's just too much of an installed base and experience around Windows regardless of whether you think it's a good operating system or not. No matter what people [say] about Windows, there is no great impetus to move off it in the business community. People are just satisfied with Office or not dissatisfied enough to get off Office and Windows," he said.
He also agrees that there simply isn't enough demand from customers for an open source desktop operating system.
"There isn't any large demand in the business community for those products and that's why there has been such a lack of momentum to push that out as a standard offering on the hardware," he said.
"You'll tend to find in the business audience that's only going to happen when a huge government department [adopts Linux] ... The only reason I've seen government departments do it has been -- in Australia and across the region -- more of a political statement: 'we're going to go open source'.
"The business case justification hasn't been there because of the cost associated with migrating users and just the [assumed] learning curve associated with that," he said.
Migrating users to Linux would only result in a small cost saving when considering the total cost of ownership, Kevin McIsaac an analyst from IBRS said. "People argue that Linux is free ... but the operating system is probably less that five percent of a four-year TCO.
"You really risk lowering your acquisition cost by a few percent and be very unclear about what that means to your longer-term cost and impact. Most IT managers have far bigger problems to deal with today."
However, he believes that there are situations where Linux makes sense. "I honestly believe there are a couple places where the mix is appropriate. In developed countries like Australia it's great where you need a "fixed function" device [such as kiosks, ATMs, reservation counters and libraries] and not your classic knowledge worker network. Nobody cares what OS you're using," said McIsaac.
He said the greatest potential for Linux on the desktop is in developing countries: "Their labour rates are so much lower and hardware costs have dropped so much that in those countries the cost of the operating system, and particularly the office productivity software on top of that, will become a significant part of the TCO".