Opinion: Penguin potential

Oh, let’s stop pretending there’s any other proprietary thing out there of interest, it’s Windows they want to declare dead with a penguin standing cheering on the corpse. It ain’t gonna happen. Not in this lifetime anyway. Or at least not until Microsoft decides to throw in the towel and joyfully embrace the tuxedo-wearing flightless bird.

Of course the reason isn’t anything to do with Windows per se, it’s all those third party applications out there which don’t work without Windows under the hood. Yeah, we all know the big guys such as Adobe and so on, could fairly quickly cut their code-base across to Linux, but all those thousands of small software outfits across the globe haven’t got the time or the money, much less the inclination.

I’ve been trying to convince one local software developer to take a look at Linux, to stop his clients bleating about the cost of Windows on the server and workstations. They’re paying Microsoft more than they’re paying him.

But he can’t keep up with the existing demand for his nice little Windows-based offering, so why should he put in the effort to move his code-base? It’s not like there’s even any competition barking at his door wearing a penguin hat. There are only his clients wishing for cheaper servers and workstations.

But they don’t blame him, they just make do with the cheapest version of Windows they can get away with, and get back to running their businesses. Then Microsoft announces the end of support for WinXP and they panic and rush off to the shop to buy Vista. Yeah, sure, WinXP isn’t actually going away, and they never even made a support call, but better safe than sorry in business.

If the open source crowd wants to get serious traction beyond web servers and mail servers, they need to make it trivially easy to move an application from Windows to Linux.

OK, you’re all going to rush into the comments box to tell me they can already do it. Good to hear! Now get out there and tell all the ISVs so something actually happens.