I don't see Enterprise going over to Macs, but Linux is a real threat. I know of two organisations with 100,000+ employees thinking of going that way and Vista is speeding them on.

Citroen last year installed 20,000 Linux computers and I am sure that this is the start of a trend.

BTW I am mostly a Mac User so I have no particular axe to grind in this.

Vista is a strategic disaster for MS. I plan on skipping this OS completely at this point. Too much money, too many hassles, and not enough benefits to justify the 'upgrade'.

Is Windows 95 more or less buggy than Vista?

Joe, does Forrester's report attempt to estimate Linux installations done WITHOUT per-seat/per-box license fees?

I STRONGLY doubt that the number of business Linux installations in the USA (much less Europe!) went up by only 0.5% -- the number of Linux boxes being built within 'Enterprise' IT, especially for small, specialized purposes (i.e., DNS, intra-departmental web servers) seems to be going up really fast. And on the truly enterprise scale, there seems to be more and more fault-tolerant load-balanced Linux clusters going on, too.

They're counting only paid-for-money licenses, right? Enterprise ADOPTION rates is something completely different from Enterprise License Fee payments (and probably VASTLY greater).

I'm not paying almost $300 for access to the report, please advise.

Do contemplate that SOME people buying Windows are people dual booting it on their MacBook Air's to run legacy Enterprise COBOL or Visual basic scripts. Thus; Vista may be doing more poorly than it looks at first glance.

Well, I'm dual booting into OS-X and Vista. So I'm one of many especially in higher ed who may be skewing the numbers.

If 2000 lost share to GNU/Linux and MacOS in large businesses in 2007, will XP be next? 2000 has marginal support. XP will be killed off next.

Large enterprises have the most lock-in. If support there is crumbling, migration could be huge this year. 2008 is a very interesting year.

Think about it this way...

Insurance: If you have a Mac, you can run Mac, Windows and Linux.

If you have any other Intel device, you can run Windows and Linux.

If you have a non-windows device, your choices are somewhat limited.

So in a shifting industry, Mac makes good sense, maybe even better sense than Linux.

Dual boot, this seems to be up there next to installing XP over their Vista machines. This is the second option people are taking on their new Vista machines.

Some are doing a dual boot with Linux and Vista. Some are installing XP and wiping out Vista but also doing a dual boot with XP and Ubuntu. Some are doing a dual boot with Vista and XP.

Why do a dual boot? Simple you get two worlds. With XP you get tried, true and testing and great performance...for a Windows machine. If you keep Vista on one of the boots you get eye candy and Direct X 10. With Linux, you get another OS which to be come familiar with...perhaps as a beginning step to migration to Linux.

For those wishing to eventually move to Linux and still keeping Windows for the present. Dual boot is the ideal migration step.

At the http://ubuntuforums.org ,...dual boot is pretty common and they get frequent questions on what is needed for dual boot.

Whats new in the the open source front? A lot. Government agencies throughout the world have adopted open source migration and mandates. Countries who have been migrating to Linux include.

Who has begun the migration?

Japanese Schools May Switch to Linux (400,000 of them),...Brazil is next,...12,500 Indian high schools move to Linux,..Taiwan mandates Linux ready PC's,..Calif. school district aims 5,000 desktops at Linux,..Venezuelan government 700 HP PCs with Ubuntu and 150 IBM Laptops with Kubuntu,...NYSE undertakes IBM mainframe migration to Unix and Linux,...San Diego Unified School District selects SUSE Linux Enterprise,....Forty percent of German university students now have access to Linux,.....Athens Michigan Schools to Linux,....Bexley City district all computers to Linux by 2010,....

There is more......

Just recently, The Philippines has adopted Linux to be in 23,000 of its school computers. While 23,000 is a lot of computers that pales in comparison with the next story.

Joining the mass defection to Linux is Russia,and by 2009 three of its regions will be all Linux and the rest will be all Linux by the following year. Thats a lot of school computers.

Were still not finished....

South America is picking up Linux,..The French Police is moving to Linux,..The U.S. Army is moving to Linux,...City of Munich moved to Linux and the Netherlands is moving to Linux,..Australia moving to Open source,...San Fransisco Bay Area schools move to Linux,..South Africa moving to Linux (Would save them $352 millions in license fees)

While Microsoft has been trying to have users migrate to Vista, many government agencies begun to migrate from Windows altogether.

"A Monoply Shakes" is a interesting title, it should be more like "The Dynasty Collapses"...

Linux Push for desktop has not even started yet.

First stage will be KDE on Windows allowing application conversion. So if Linux is gaining market now. How much when they really do try.

I worked in Queensland (Australia) schools for 40 years and there was no hint of moving to Linux when I retired 2 years ago and from what I can see now there is still no hint of it.

I don't know where Ralph is getting his information but it appears to me that it is only grape vine stuff. Now I can understand Russia using Linux but I really need hard evidence in order to believe his speil. I heard on the grape vine that Munich was evaluating Linux but I don't think they have actually made the move....yet. The others, well I know nothing as sergeant Schults would say.

There is good hard data here in this article and it doesn't look good for Vista at this time but Microsoft has a big stick in the guise of XP support withdrawal and peripheral manufacturers who don't provide XP drivers for their new products.

We shall see what the rest of this year brings but ME II looks like the way it is going.

Maybe I'm missing something but what is the impact on these figures when someone uses Windows on a Macintosh?

They're still running Windows, and whether or not it's a Mac doesn't really make an impact as it's OS adoption, rather than hardware vendor enterprise market share.
Surely the point is that even though the user had OS X pre-installed on their Mac, they purposely chose to install Windows xp / Vista for work use.

I use OS X on my Mac for both work (IT Consultant) and play, but wouldn't note Macintosh in this kind of survey if i ran xp for work.

I have a variety of computers: 2 XP, 2 Vista, 1 iMac G5. I use Vista primarily.

Just last week, I upgraded my iMac from Panther to Leopard. Most impressive. Leopard is wonderful. Installing it has injected new life into my Mac.

I find Leopard much superior to Vista (nice clean interface; better security and performance), and for that reason, the iMac is now my main machine. (I've started a new web project on it.)

If there are more people like me who discover Leopard and eschew Vista for its various difficulties, then Windows is really in trouble, whether in the enterprise or at the consumer level...

I had to wait over 30 seconds to post this because SearchIndexer.exe is running non-stop in the background on my Vista machine, which unfortunately resulted in freezing my machine. This often happens between 10-30 times a day and lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to over 2 minutes. Vista is the worst computing experience I've ever ... experienced. NIGHTMARE! I HATE VISTA! My productivity has significantly decreased because of this OS. Make that two freezes within the span of writing this post!

Bernie, I believe that Linux uptake is growing strong and growing rapidly in Europe, Asia, and South America. You don't need "hard data" to support it, common sense will do. Linux is cheap or free, Linux is extremely secure, Linux performs well on low-end hardware, and Open Source provides tons and tons of applications. It's a compelling proposition for countries and companies on a tight budget (which is pretty much most of the world).

Only in North America is Linux failing to gain traction. That's because we're so addicted to Windows (and Office). North America is the home of the Microsoft God, so we're naturally loyal to the homeboy. But it's a poor bargain when OS X and Linux offer so much more.

Although most of my computers are Windows or Mac-based, I also dabble a bit in Linux. I like Ubuntu. I'm going to install Mint this weekend--I hear it's a wonderful distro...

whatever says:
"Maybe I'm missing something but..."

@whatever:
I don't think the absolute market share numbers mean a whole lot, nor are they very accurate. The important numbers are:

1. Apple's profit margins and growth. Are both healthy? Is growth increasing? There's the real story. Apple stores, once nearly empty, are now packed with people. And they're not just there for the iPods and iPhones anymore, but also for the iMacs and MacBooks.

2. Linux mindshare. Of course, this is NOT able to be expressed as a number, and its marketshare is NOT able to be reliably expressed as a number. But it's a grass-roots tide that is growing around the world. With the price of fuel rising and the price of food increasingly devastating, helping to make mega-billionaires richer will slip farther and farther down on people's priority lists. REGARDLESS of feature by feature comparison charts that show that Windows and Office on top. Food riots are not just a rumor: they are a current--and growing--reality. More and more people can't afford to feed their families. Their governments who are trying to adapt to support them won't have much room in their increasingly-limited budgets to keep monsters like Microsoft well-fed.

3. Microsoft's own quagmire. When a monopoly has well over 90% of the market share and still needs double-digit yearly growth to keep its value healthy, that monopoly is in deep trouble. Creating compelling content is vastly easier said than done, and especially so for companies the size of Microsoft who need so much more than is needed to keep a much smaller company healthy and growing.

Is the Mac ready for enterprise? OS X Leopard is certified Unix.

If you want hard data on Linux migrations, try here:

http://lxer.com/module/db/viewby.php?uid=108&option=&value=&sort=108&offset=0&dbn=12

We should not forget Desktop virtualisation here.
I'm running OSX with XP in a Parallels Virtual machine.
Performance (Development Environment) is good and I can use the two (or more) operating systems simultaneously.
I do not have to change desktop since the XP links reside in an OSX folder.

so windows is: 94.9
xp is: 89.8
vista is: 6.3
this means that, vista is probably only 82% windows.

I am a developer using MS technologies. I enjoy using the MS technologies and have even been known to defend MS. Installed Vista on my new dual core PC just over 6 months ago, oh boy what a nightmare it has been. not since win98 have i had to reboot a PC so much. i would love to revert My PC back to XP (dont want to lose the vista license that i got with my MSDN subscription). Vista is MS biggest threat. I am so frustrated with Vista i am seriously tempted to start learning Linux (looking to buy new laptop HD and install on my old laptop). If enterpries start using Vista im sure it will eventually result in a huge flux of people moving to Linux due to the hopless stability and performance. I would recommend any organisation to stay on XP as long as possible, im sure MS will extend the support period at least another 2 years

I have seen many articles like this one, slamming Vista. Like the previous poster I am a developer in MS technologies (over 12 years now). Maybe I am missing something, but I have been using Vista for 12 months now, running on a PC that I built myself, and I have very few problems. Certainly no more so than when XP SP2 appeared. The OS is fast, the UI is much better than XP, and for me includes a lot of stuff out of the box that I don't get with XP. On the other hand my XP laptop which was top of the range 5 years ago is slow by comparison. So what gives?

Hey, so its pretty sure by now, that
Vista makes LINUX and MAC ROCK!!!!!!!!

Hey,
Windows XP has better performance than Vista,
Vista is a XP with a fancy look, nothing more.
So why switch?XP to date is Microsoft's finest OS.
But after long consideration I have reach to the conclusion that why should I change to this new OS. There are no great new improvements. The web pages still look the same. My programs run the same way. And finally if you put them side by side (same hardware) XP is by far the winner, faster and still (more or less) reliable. So why to spend more money in better hardware just to get the same performance that I have with XP today?

Lest come to MAC, as far as MAC is concerned, its really sexy OS,
I can even run old MS-DOS programs that I still use from my office computers on mac.
at my store house, for programming,
I've already switched to MAC because of Microsofts' BS.

I find the analyst's assertion that -

"IT departments crave standardization, and Macs pose too many problems for IT departments."

somewhat amusing.

LOL.. I'm sorry, but how many versions of Vista are there? And how many possible hardware configurations?

I see OS X and Linux/Unix eventually sending Windows the same way as CP/M.

OS X is simply a better desktop operating system than Windows, and it partners well with Linux, a much more cost effective enterprise operating system than Windows.

Add to the the mix the growing numbers of software developers and IT graduates who aren't steeped in the whole MS history from DOS, through 3.1 and 95 to NT and XP, and therefore don't feel innately more "at home" on a Windows based machine.

The new generation has no respect for the status quo.

"dir" is dead.

log live "ls"

You guys are dreaming. Windows is here to stay that much is obvious.

Upgrading to any other OS simply would cost too much in a large number of ways and doesn't solve any problems.

I respect believing in the way you WANT the world to be but that isn't going to make it so.

ps. I agree that mac os is a better desktop os and I prefer linux ubuntu myself but honestly so what ... beta was better than VHS and we saw what happened to that.

There is a standard get on board or don't ... it doesn't really matter. Until you actually want to pay some bills.

Yes, Steve G., you *are* missing something. You are one of many happy Windows users. The truth is, most Windows users don't have serious issues and that's good.

It's the minority of unhappy users that we should be worried about. If even 20 percent of Windows users have annoying problems with the platform, that's tens of millions of disgruntled users. More than all the Mac and Linux users put together.

So for someone contemplating the adoption of Windows in general, and Vista in particular, he has to ask himself one question: "Given that there are one in five odds of being pooched by Vista, do you feel lucky?"

Well, do you, punk?

(With apologies to Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry.")

@Don Franklin:
No one is denying that Windows is here to stay. But that doesn't mean that Windows marketshare isn't shrinking. Or that there aren't many people migrating over to Mac and Linux.

There are many businesses for whom switching OS platforms would be too costly, but you can't extrapolate this across the entire industry. Obviously, there are also many businesses that *can* switch and thereby derive significant benefits.

You say it "doesn't solve any problems." Dead wrong. Moving away from Windows can solve security problems, performance problems, and usability problems. If you're one of the lucky ones who don't experience such problems, that's fine. But if you do, the Mac and Linux alternatives are great.

Your worldview is far too rigid and narrow. People's attitudes toward OS platforms *is*, in fact, changing. Outside of North America, for example, Linux is making great strides. And it's really only a matter of time before it catches on here.

As for consumers, they're adopting the Mac in ever-increasing numbers. I am always amazed at how packed the Apple Stores are, and at the large crowds huddled around the Mac hardware tables. I see nothing like that when I visit the big-box electronics chains such as Best Buy. So for consumers in general, there is a much lower barrier to migration. Windows is losing the battle here.

I use both Vista and Mac, and, trust me, I know why consumers love the Mac. You need to pull your head out of the sand.

I don't think anybody is dreaming here, we are facing realities that others runaway from, we need to change gears and and review where we stand here. Times are changing, yes windows is here to stay but only if we allow it, if we decide we need to keep feeding this monster we've created or not. I personally rather not, and much rather prefer educating people on other alternatives.

I've always imagined a Mac in the enterprise environment as a Bang & Olufsen stereo in an auto-body shop. Microsoft has allowed a vacuum to be created. Apple is all to happy to fill that space. But I can't imagine the entire enterprise space filled with Apple products anymore than I can imagine everybody in Fort Wayne IN driving BMWs because Ford went out of business. If Apple changed its spots to accommodate the "less than hip" they'll bump into competition from work-a-day Linux. If you're competing with the "less than hip", then you are less than hip. Apple won't go there, it would jeopardize the other areas of our culture where they are the undisputed King of hip.

It's clear that the numbers with Linux are masked, the official statistic are only that described by Ralph and Lawrence, but everybody know that it is solely the point of Iceberg, all the I.T. people for respect to themselves use dual boot or tree boot and we can't forget to the youngsters and children too (this numbers are in no exact statistic).
But certainly Ms is the King of Hill yet.
Then, which is the risk for Ms?
Simple,the people that use dual boot now are the people that have skills and they will be showing the way to follow in the future and they are boring of Ms abuse too (exaggerates prices, to be treated as thief and pay for rubbish similar to Vista)
Ms will try to respond with a good product maybe it could be Windows seven.
But it will be enough?, 2 or 3 years more , Linux evolutioning quickly (example; Ubuntu, base of some distros improve a lot each 6 months 3*2=6 Ubuntu).
In 3 years more the learning curve will almost defeated, the cheaper PCs (with Linux S.O. for prices issue) will be threatening the median plane ( you know Mac in the high plane) and the costumer perception (sympathy) for sure not in favour of MS. Add to the equation surplus of good and cheaper (free) software.
Do you are amazed why Ms is buying desperately others businesses?

The problem with North America's adoption to Linux is that North America is nothing but a greedy, spend crazy, money mongering continent. Even with the value that Open Source brings, its like North America realizing that a Toyota is more feasible than a Porsche. Its just not going to happen. So, while the rest of the world is moving away from spending and moving towards actually getting work done and having a safe, secure, performing computing environment, North America will fall apart financially and have to rely on other countries to bail them out (As they already have). Someday, as I have hope, they will see the light as the rest of the world moves forward and will catch up before its too late.

EmbraceThePenguin: No my friend, North America is NOT adopting to Linux, the cheaper hardware and (free)software IS adopting North America.

Agree to much of what has been said. As a freelancer using specialized programs for Windows, staying on Windows is my only option. But to switch to Vista for my next laptop, that's really something I don't look forward to with all the bad news about Vista. If I can't be sure that things will just work, I'd rather buy a new copy of XP... instead of the OEM's Vista. Hopefully Windows 7 will really be worth the upgrade.

If not for MS Office and other programs such as speech recognition that work with them, I'd switch to a fast Linux KDE environment (Kubuntu probably), mainly for security reasons.

As for dual boots, in my experience its tedious to keep things synchronized (bookmarks, organizers etc.) or to switch from one OS to another when you need a specific program. But I haven't seen any virtualization in action yet. Who knows if I find the time...

Rick Stockton wrote: "Joe, does Forrester's report attempt to estimate Linux installations done WITHOUT per-seat/per-box license fees?"

Hi, Rick, I almost didn't publish the Linux numbers, because they seem low to me, too. I suspect that Forrester's methodology didn't capture all the Linux installations. This has been an ongoing problem with almost ALL the analyst firms because of the licensing. One Linux license could be used on many computers.

Joe

When I converted to XP from 2002 years ago ... XP had the same "relationship" to 2002 as Vista currently does to XP. Back then, XP was "buggy", had device driver problems ... etc ... etc ... etc.

I have installed Vista (Ultimate and Business) on three machines now ... an AMD MB (circa 2003), an Asus Laptop (Circa 2004, 1 MEG ram) and an Asus MB (circa 2005). My experiences have all been (and still are, after SP1) fantastic. I love Vista. All my machines seem to me to run faster and with virtually no needs for reboot � unlike XP that I systematically had to reboot. My laptop runs cleaner and faster than it did under XP � AND � the wireless connection works and works and works � whereas under XP it was constantly dropping out.

But I installed Vista on brand new or reformatted drives. I did not "upgrade" XP or buy a vendor�s machine with a lot of "bloat ware" on it. What really surprised me was that I did not have to install a single �device driver� to get everything to work. In fact, in one case, I replaced an INTEL MB/CPU with an AMD MB/CPU and booted from the same Vista OS Drive � with absolutely no problems � except having to reactivate Vista. In all my 20 years of installing systems, I have never experienced such an easy OS installation as I have with Vista � even going back to DOS 6.2.

For the 1st time in years, MS has really revamped the underbelly of its OS. Why? Because the old legacy framework was based on the old less secure technology � going back to DOS days � and NT 4.0 (which became 2002 and then XP) when they started embedding device drivers in the Kernel, instead of keeping that beautiful driver interface of NT3.x and earlier. They did it for speed reasons, but opened up the machine to a much less secure environment, with greater probability of blue-screen-of-death, as well as invasion from the network.

So MS revamped the internals while trying to keep as much of the legacy faith as possible. The third party vendors chose not to be ready for Vista (they had plenty of time), and so Microsoft is the bad-guy, because you�re favorite third party vendor (including Adobe) chose not to invest time and energy in the newer driver and security model.

@race.cond:
I am confused by your figures. It seems to me that Vista/Windows*100%=6.7%. In other words, Vista has barely changed, at less than 7% of all Windows installations.

GZFrank : what are you even on about? Your post makes utter non-sence. 2002? year XP finalised? sure you can upgrade cpu and motherboard and reactivate. thats a given! but I surely hope you meant going from windows 2000 ( not 2002) to XP lol Surely, your post is somewhat converted from another language maybe? would explain why it reads so poorly at best. Quote: "an Asus Laptop (Circa 2004, 1 MEG ram)" surely you gest here as well, for win95 ran on 8 megs of ram, win98 on 16 megs of ram and win2000 needed 32 megs of ram to run, where do you even get the understanding that 1 meg of ram allows XP to run? lmao from your post I surely get the idea you don't know enough to even post any reasonable experience as you're just blowing out hot air for the sake of posting inaccurate info here. I feel sorry that you even tried to input info relating to the above artical.
And further more: whats up with the � ? is that part of the cheap language translation service you used?.

No matter, Vista is a slow adoption, yes it has its features and slowness rolled into one, but XP was exactly the same in it's beginning as well, support will always be an issue with any OS and those being New! Venders can choose to support it or not, ( even if MicroSux bullies them into it ) yes I actually added that. Point being, theres always alternative OS out there and learning is always good, I've used Linux, Mac (Darwin) OS, Windows 2.0, 95,97,98,ME,2000,XP and now Vista. All of them had thier strengths and weaknesses via support issues, slowness, servicepacks etc. any new OS is always going to warrant a Hardware upgrade to run smoothly. Dunno why GZFrank posted like he did, but its read like utter non-sence to me lol Adoption of any OS is going to cost money ( via hardware, IT time, Compatibility testing, driver support, and lastly Bug Bounties <-- yes Bug Bounties due to companies will actually hold contests to have programmers exploit bugs and document how they done the exploit to prove it and help programmers write new improved versions of software), with that being said I've said enough lmao

I've been using Vista since RC1 and the only problems I've had are with drivers, manufactures slow in releasing drivers to work with my hardware. My only complaint had been learning where everything is. Even UAC isn't so bothersome when you get used to it. I'm using SuSE Linux to make this post and find it great; I use it more often than Windows lately. However, when it comes to installing software, there is no contest. If there are many dependancies, it becomes extremely tedious to find and install them before installing the app. Drivers are worse than Vista if you have an obscured piece of hardware. A switch to Linux at its current state would be an huge IT expense just to get everything working. I will still use Linux but will not recommend it as a consumer/mainstream OS.

I'ge been using Linux full time (no windows for nothing) for almost 5 years now in my home and laptop computers. I use XP in my job. But I am telling you. You can libe without windows for all tasks!!!!.
Another example, I recently installed on a new small business, 7 generic PC's and a small Dell server, all using mandriva/open office, web developments based on mysql, apache and php. 0, zero, nada, of Windows. The owner very happy because he spent 0 dollars on licenses and no worries about the future for paying upgrades or things like that.
Bottom line, discard (little by little if there is no choice) any kind windows, Linux is the smartest choice.

On the consumer side, Vista-preinstalled dominates new personal computer sales.

Darwin39: I find GZFrank's post much more cohesive and understandable than what you wrote. And everybody knows why those funny characters some times pop into otherwise innocent posts.

There is no such thing as "non-sence". Keep a dictionary handy, it would help other people understand YOUR post.

That said, I don't even know GZFrank, but their comments are much more believable due to the simple prose than yours.

Crap, I hate trolls.

Anyways, I don't see the point of myself moving to Vista, the new laptop that I bought, back in November, I chose to have Windows XP with it instead of Vista.

But then maybe the benefits are not *that* apparent yet. Windows is definitely here to stay despite the fact that there is a whole new generation who might be more comfortable (as another poster above) with using ls rather than dir.

GZFranz makes his comment.
Darwin39 answers to those points that he considers
weak (ui, some..harsh). That's what generally occurs in any blog.
But you, uXuf: what is your point? you simply attack Darwin without any arguments.
You say you hate trolls? Well, a look in the mirror might lead to a suicide or self-harming, then.
My humble recommendation is that you try to make your opinion coherent something different to Ms' TROLL.

Vista is failing to impress, because on one simple concept - it provides no BUSINESS value. Automatic upgrades to new operating systems are not going to happen as IT organizations mature.

The increase in Cost of Ownership issues and the LOSS IN PRODUCTIVITY hits which come from VISTA are immense.

Microsoft has become a bloated monoploy which believes its own BS. It cannot believe that a move to VISTA is a net loss for most organizations. It needs to rediscover itself or become ripe for market replacement.

Its monopolistic pricing and dictates have angered companies and countries (the European Union). This is the environment of longterm disaster for the company. Not tomorrow, but in the next decade.

People will pay to leave Microsoft if they believe that the replacement OS will allow them to still do business efectively. We are seeing cracks in the invulnerability today.

Yes, Microsoft is rich enough to do anything it wants. However, it has such an investment in a particular vision, it will never effectively compete with the next vision of computing which will inevitably appear.

I don't see what all the fuss with Vista is about. I pulled an old 486 out of my basement and installed Vista Ultimate with no issues. I was burning DVDs and surfing the net simultaneously(sarcasam here).

AH says:
"I'm using SuSE Linux to make this post and find it great; I use it more often than Windows lately. However, when it comes to installing software, there is no contest. If there are many dependancies, it becomes extremely tedious to find and install them before installing the app."

@AH:
Suse and Fedora are notorious for poor installation dependency management. Ubuntu or one of its related distributions are just the opposite: Smooth, easy, reliable. The "Windows Experience" is a sad dusty relic by comparison.

I also see Linux making headway into the corporate desktop arena. At the company where I work, I have methodically been moving everything in the backend to the Centos and BSD Unix platforms for several years now. As far as servers go, there is really few if any reasons not to go with Linux or BSD, all of them are easily overcome. I have one legacy windows server a windows 2000 box to host the symantec server for the windows desktop clients. But as this product version naturally ages, it can be replaced with a central server on a Centos platform. So, already we are free of windows domains etc. The biggest obstacle now to switch to Linux for the desktops is a handful of proprietary industry specific desktop apps, that are being slowly migrated to web based applications. One technical workaround now is to get past the "internet explorer only" sites with firefox. I see overcoming user objection the last of the major hurdle to moving to something like Ubuntu and Open Office... as the cost savings of not having to update office or windows, or hardware ever again unless it fails, I think will sell itself.

@Richard Chapman:

I think you nailed it. I think the Mac numbers reflect current social trends, not business trends. The Mac is currently generating a lot of buzz, but I'm not convinced its share of the market will ever approach MS numbers. Parachute pants and zippered jackets were once all the rage...

To me, the Mac growth trend is a result of style-over-substance marketing. It's based more on owner status and creating a "lifestyle." This creates a small but loyal (almost cult-like) following. To use a music industry trend analogy, the Mac is hair metal; it is grunge; it is emo. In other words, it's a fad.

Now, I'm not knocking the product. There are certainly advantages to owning / using a Mac. I AM saying that I don't expect a massive market shift - at least not toward the Mac. I think that's just wishful thinking from Mac owners.

Why do I think the Mac won't dominate the market? It's because Apple isn't trying to dominate the whole market. Apple seems to only target very specific groups. That's fine. That's a great business model (and Lord knows they are making money). Having 15%-20% of the market isn't a bad thing for a low-overhead company like Apple. I think they'll sit in their niche and be very happy.

Now Linux and open source... that's a real threat to Windows. The Linux numbers in the report are just laughable. I've seen a greater that 10% adoption rate in my consulting relationships in just one region of the USA alone - and I'm a Windows solution provider!

Linux, or open source in general, has a real shot at dethroning MS. Conversion is relatively cheap and easy in the back office. The real battle is on the desktop - especially in large enterprises. User adoption (especially in North America), desktop application conversion, and enterprise level support services need addressing, but once these issues are tackled... who knows.

Me, I do like Windows - even Vista. Despite all the things MS has messed up over the years, their support for software developers is unmatched in the industry (cue Ballmer screaming "developers, developers, developers..."). It's easier to write software on and for Windows than any other platform I've ever worked with (to include multiple distributions of Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and Macs). Vista may currently be a flop, but Microsoft's .Net-centric reorganization could help solidify their dominance of the market. Microsoft's .Net Framework makes developers more productive (and development more cost effective), which encourages organizations to conduct new development targeting Windows desktops (or Windows servers and Web clients). More applications / solutions for the Windows platform means continued adoption.

We'll see - 2008 should be a very interesting year.

I bought a Vista machine due to the price. However, While MS might count this as a Vista machine, I changed it to Linux as soon as it locked up the 4th time.
Don't be too hard on ME. At least you could keep reloading it if needed. Try that with Vista.

MS Vista is just bug, nothing more than it. It outdated my all previous owned hardware and software. Name it? My Bluthooth adapter. MS Vista behaves very rude to free/open source softwares. I switched to LINUX, I use LINUX since 10 year, always duel boot PC. If just count MS VISTA, then this monopoly number. Let me explain, how can I buy PC/laptop without MS OS in US? If it is available, it cost more. I heard rumors that customers are charged extra $$$ for un-installation of MS OS for no OS PC.

Hope i had my own SearchEngine,
or
atleast i could fire:
Select * from Google
ya
i said correctly, i wanted to fire,
Select * from Google
and wanna make some good use of it!!!