Linux will be deployed on no more than five percent of desktops over the next two to three years because of a lack of viable applications, claimed Gartner research director Phil Sargeant on Thursday evening at the Gartner Symposium and ITXpo.
"There's quite a lack of tools in that particular space," said Sargeant. "We are going to need to see more tools if it's to make any inroads." He cited StarOffice and Open Office as examples of the few good tools available.
"The other [operating systems] are not standing still," added Sargeant. "The real question is the application portfolio for Linux. If that increases out of sight [Linux' market share] may be larger, but if it stays where it is, as we expect it to, it will be about five percent."
Lindows, which targets the budget-desktop market in the US, offers hundreds of programs for a single fee through its Click-N-Run Web site, but Sargeant does not see this as being a serious threat to Microsoft. "Lindows is a player, but not a big player," he told ZDNet Australia . "We don't see a mass migration from Windows to something else."
Sargeant disagrees with industry speculation that Microsoft will eventually offer the Windows operating system free to continue selling its high-profit application software.
"They will make some concessions over and above the shared source concessions already made, but will not offer Windows free," he said. Microsoft is beginning to take Linux seriously as a threat, however, with senior executives until recently deriding it at every opportunity.
Microsoft has even offered third-party developers access to its code, albeit under strict conditions. "It's not quite open source, but shared source is a mechanism to address some of the threats [Microsoft] see," said Sargeant. Despite the analysts' predictions, a leaked document allegedly from Microsoft suggests the strategies appear to be failing.
However, the Linux community is not focussing on the desktop, but directing its efforts to the server market, according to Sargeant. "Most Linux distributors, for example Red Hat, are focussed on the UNIX sphere, there's no desire to move into desktops," he said.
"Linux is the fastest growing of the operating systems, it will account for around 18 percent of revenue from servers [in the next five years]," said Sargeant. However, he claimed Linux still had a number of hurdles to jump over. He sees Linux becoming more scalable in the next 24 months, while providing the same performance, and believes eight-way servers will be "doable".
"Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a really big topic with everybody I speak to because there is a perception that everything is free," said Sargeant. However, there are lots of components to a business's IT budget, including the operating system, hardware, applications and maintenance costs.
"They will probably be deploying a number of licensed products on a Linux base. So they have to ask themselves if, at the end of the day, they will save money."
At the low end of town TCO could be a factor in implementing Linux, according to Sargeant. "As you move into high-end, heterogenous mission-critical areas it will be much harder to see TCO advantages," he said.
"Distributors are going through a lot of turmoil as they change their business model to make money out of Linux," added Sargeant. Red Hat, for example, has recently released a reasonably expensive server. The extra money buys support and services contracts.
"Support and services really become the key to the strategy of any vendor moving forward," said Sargeant.
Of the Linux vendors, Sargeant believes Red Hat will remain the dominant player. "Red Hat is by far the biggest distributor of Linux. It's the only one to make money and the only one to be financially viable," he said. "Red Hat will maintain a market share of 50-60 percent as we move forward over the next five years."
It would be useful if either ZDNet or Gartner would identify the applications that are lacking in the desktop space. Otherwise it's just a bad case of bad reporting.