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IBM leaving Windows Vista for Linux

M

mzkhadir

Diamond Member
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5436/

IBM will not use Windows Vista - but will move to Linux desktops
William Henning - Monday, March 6th, 2006 | 1:13PM (PST)


IBM switching to Linux destops in Germany according to a Linux Forum 2006 presentation by their head of open source and Linux sales in Germany.

Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006

During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement...

"Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista."

The question is, does this only apply to IBM in Germany, or IBM world wide?

If ALL of IBM switches to Linux desktops and OpenOffice... that would be a very significant loss to Microsoft; not only in direct licensing revenues, but also in speeding adoption of Linux by other companies. After all, if IBM can run on Linux desktops...




 
Thanks for posting this (interesting story), but please don't just copy the entire article into your post and not add anything. It's happened a number of times recently where people mistake the text for the posters own words (I did this time, until I followed the link). You could at least put it in the quote tags but a just a summary plus the link would be great.

Anyway, the news doesn't really excite me, not really sure why. IBM will continue to sell systems using windows so they'll obviously need to still be very involved with vista, although, I guess having sold their pc division, this news isn't as relevant to that idea. I'd also like to see a little of their reasoning behind this. Are they expecting vista to not live up to their needs? And, as the article asks, I'd like to know exactly how widespread this is going to be.
 
Significant loss? IBM is a big company but I don't see how it could significantly impact MS. I doubt MS didn't see this coming, wasn't IBM the one who promoted linux by putting stickers all over the place in SF?
 
I used to play a game called Supremacy with my friends. Think Risk + international market and nuclear weapons. Usually one player would become too powerful and the rest would form a temporary alliance to kill him off. You would go from top dog to smoldering ruin.

If Vista ships as a trusted computing platform , I can see how that would worry companies that share markets with Microsoft.

 
This is a non-story......IBM never had any plans or intentions of moving to Vista.....it had been stated last year that IBM would move to Unix based Q/S.
 
Originally posted by: kamper
Thanks for posting this (interesting story), but please don't just copy the entire article into your post and not add anything. It's happened a number of times recently where people mistake the text for the posters own words (I did this time, until I followed the link). You could at least put it in the quote tags but a just a summary plus the link would be great.

Anyway, the news doesn't really excite me, not really sure why. IBM will continue to sell systems using windows so they'll obviously need to still be very involved with vista, although, I guess having sold their pc division, this news isn't as relevant to that idea. I'd also like to see a little of their reasoning behind this. Are they expecting vista to not live up to their needs? And, as the article asks, I'd like to know exactly how widespread this is going to be.
Click to expand...


IBM sold off their PC line (lenovo now). Lenovo is a very active Linux tested partner. Pretty much all their desktops hit the rounds of testing.


Perhaps they just realized that for the tasks they do on the desktop/corp end of things, there is no NEED for Vista. From a company comfortable with Open Source, Linux, and Unix, what does Vista offer them, other then increased costs?
 
That is what I was thinking...unless there is something so specific that needs microsoft(or the mail server runs exchange...something like that), they could save a few dollars by using Linux.

Although I'm sure a few employees would be pissed that their mp3s no longer play natively 😉
 
Originally posted by: doornail
I used to play a game called Supremacy with my friends. Think Risk + international market and nuclear weapons. Usually one player would become too powerful and the rest would form a temporary alliance to kill him off. You would go from top dog to smoldering ruin.
Click to expand...

I think basicly that is what happenned with IBM versus Microsoft and the PC clones back when IBM was the dominate monster.

I think that is what people are trying to do with Microsoft right now, but Microsoft is absolutely critical for business. MS is absolutely dominate in PC-land and Linux has enough problems that there still is no alternative for most vendors then just to support Windows and such. In other words Microsoft could sneeze and put companies like Dell or HP or most hardware vendors out of business in under a week if they felt like it. If you have a corporation that depends on getting software or hardware out to end users that use Windows (as in 95% of everybody) then Microsoft is definately not somebody you want to piss off.


IBM will end up supporting Vista. IBM employees will end up using Vista. Just like most everybody in IBM probably uses x86 proccessors in their computers even though IBM makes and distributes POWER and PowerPC proccessors themselves.

If you want to make software and hardware that accessable by most people it has to be compatable with Windows or nobody will touch it.


Although I'm sure a few employees would be pissed that their mp3s no longer play natively
Click to expand...

Well.. You could always have done it 'illegally'. Probably not so much illegally, but it's definately in the gray of the law. Same way with wmv files, quicktime files, dvds and the such. Definately questionable enough I wouldn't personally allow these codecs to be used in a professional enviroment of any decent size or consiquence.

However Linspire themselves have had commercial and legal support for mp3s and Window Media formats and such for quite a while now. Replayer has linux native codecs for it's stuff nowadays also.

Also there is a company called Fluendo that developed the gstreamer framework that allows programs to make multimedia applications and embed multimedia functionality into programs in a fantasticly easy manner. They plan on making money by selling codecs that allows 100% legal support for the playback and creation of multimedia whatnot in Linux and any other platform that supports Linux.

Right now all they have is Mp3 plugin that is freely aviable to end users. They got a patent agreement with the makers of mp3 codecs to allow this. Suse will be the first distro that ships with it supported.
http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php

I expect support for things like dvd, wmv, quicktime and other formats to follow in the next few months. Even support for DRM'd items will be included.. For things like if you want to playback stuff you bought from itunes without hacking them first.

Not that I paticularly like that a whole lot. I am indifferent to it and would rather everybody use things like ogg vorbis, speex, flac, theora and other fully open source and non-patent encumbered items for video/audio formats. Of course thats not going to happen any time soon!
 
Originally posted by: thesix
Originally posted by: magomago
...unless there is something so specific that needs microsoft
Click to expand...

Most obvious one: Lotus Notes client, and the tools around it.
Click to expand...

Lotus Notes works in Linux now. At least in beta.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060305214231974
At the end of the presentation, Andreas Pleschek revealed that the laptop he used for the presentation was running a pre-release of their new platform, the Open Client. It is actually a Red Hat work station with IBM's new Workplace Client, which is built in Java on top of Eclipse. Because of Eclipse, it runs on both Linux and Windows, and they have been able to reuse the C++ code in Lotus Notes for Windows to run it natively on Linux via Eclipse. Internally in IBM, for years, they have had a need to run Lotus Notes on Linux, and now they can. And they will offer it to their customers.

Workplace uses Lotus Notes for mail, calendar, etc. and Firefox as their browser. For an office suite, they use OpenOffice.org.
Click to expand...

Aside from that blurb I don't know anything else though.
 
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: thesix
Originally posted by: magomago
...unless there is something so specific that needs microsoft
Click to expand...

Most obvious one: Lotus Notes client, and the tools around it.
Click to expand...

Lotus Notes works in Linux now. At least in beta.
Click to expand...

"works" doesn't mean work well (yes, we all know 99% of apps "work" in Linux, there's always WINE, right).

Having said that, it's absolutely possible not to use any Windows stuff at least in some depts/groups within IBM.

When I worked for Sun many years ago, we (in the place where I worked anyway) were not allowed to connect a Windows machine to the internal network. Now that's a "real Unix company" 🙂 and Scott was famous for being the enemy NO.1 of Microsoft.

The bottom line is you choose the best tool to do the job, cost v.s. productivity.
It's silly to be religious about the tools.
 
This German deal went down last year when Microsoft was there trying to renew it's bids in Germany. Microsoft in the eyes of the Germans had very high bids. After the Germans bid them down several times, they later became upset at how much bidding was going on in lower prices. It then made them wonder how much further they could go and how high Microsoft had jacked them up and where a fair real worth for the price of the bid should be at. So in disgust over a bidding war and what they thought was a outrageous bid Micorsoft had placed on them, the Germans in trying to figure out a fair market, later dumped Microsoft and went to Linux, feeling that Microsoft was bringing to them to high a bid and that Linux offered them a better price and that Microsoft in their eyes seemed to be a company out there charging any outrageous price they felt.

Actually to let you all know, this is not just a matter over IBM, but the fact that in Germany, which happens to be the center of the IT hub of Europe, which is a big blow for Microsoft. This change is in no way small peanuts and will have a major impact on how Europe will start looking to alternatives in the future over Windows.

This was a major defeat for Windows.

ALOHA
 
I imagine there's still one or two IBM employees PO'd at Microsoft over OS/2.
And there's been a lot of Government interest in Linux in Germany for quite a while.

IBM really has little choice but to go "non-traditional", like with Linux. IBM has failed in its numerous attempts to compete in the mainstream with desktops and CPUs.
 
I seriously dont think the general public is going to want to learn how to run or use linux. Especially having to do this in the shell.
 
Originally posted by: MBrown
I seriously dont think the general public is going to want to learn how to run or use linux. Especially having to do this in the shell.
Click to expand...

Most everybody doesn't want to learn how to use Windows either. That's why they hire IT personal and pay other people to deal with that stuff. It'll be the same for Linux.

This German deal went down last year when Microsoft was there trying to renew it's bids in Germany. Microsoft in the eyes of the Germans had very high bids. After the Germans bid them down several times, they later became upset at how much bidding was going on in lower prices. It then made them wonder how much further they could go and how high Microsoft had jacked them up and where a fair real worth for the price of the bid should be at. So in disgust over a bidding war and what they thought was a outrageous bid Micorsoft had placed on them, the Germans in trying to figure out a fair market, later dumped Microsoft and went to Linux, feeling that Microsoft was bringing to them to high a bid and that Linux offered them a better price and that Microsoft in their eyes seemed to be a company out there charging any outrageous price they felt.
Click to expand...

When you say 'Germans' you mean IBM Germany specificly, right? Or is this a more general corporate/government push?

I've heard that the German government has always looked at Linux rather then Windows for reasons other then costs or whatnot. It is kinda perceived that Linux would benifit German-based programmers and such. There are linux-based operating systems aviable from German companies, were with Windows your making yourself completely dependant on a US-based company.

It would be very significant if there is a more widespread push for Linux in Germany then just IBM. I don't think that IBM is paticularly relevent in terms of desktop stuff anymore.
 
This is what I read before, but this happened a few years ago and is probably the samething.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industrie...003-07-13-microsoft-linux-munich_x.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/28/microsoft_down_and_out/
http://www.techweb.com/wire/26801900

Here are a few URLs I found just using Google, the information over this is still on the Web. 😉

This was over a city contract with IBM backing SuSe Linux

On May 28, the city council approved a more expensive proposal ? $35.7 million ? from German Linux distributor SuSE and IBM, a big Linux backer.
Click to expand...

ALOHA
 
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