I’m going to take a break from the usual political stuff for a bit and play with some tech issues. I’m not going to break any new ground here, but it’ll be fun to rehash some of the old ground.

As most everyone is undoubtedly aware, the IT world, at least for the end user, is pretty well dominated by Microsoft. Based on browser statistics, some flavor of Windows accounts for nearly 90% of the web traffic out there, which is fairly consistent with some of the more conservative figures on Windows marketshare. What is interesting about this is that Microsoft’s share has gone down significantly over the past couple of years - these days, Linux and Macintosh generate nearly 8% of all web traffic, which is up from a combined 4% in 2003. What’s also interesting is that Linux and Mac have been head-to-head since 2003, matching marketshare since November 2005 and Mac slowly working past Linux in marketshare since then.

Meanwhile, Vista recently came out, which is causing a lot of IT professionals to seriously consider alternatives, in part because of some odd choices from Microsoft, like restricting DVD playback to certain flavors of Vista. The problem with alternatives, though, is that Microsoft does a wonderful job of integrating everything together. Think about it for a second. I’m at work here, and what do I have? Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, which talks to Microsoft Exchange - Outlook is the only halfway decent thing that talks to Exchange and Exchange is the only halfway decent groupware client that talks to Outlook somewhat reliably. We have Microsoft Office for our docs - everything in the past 10 years has been made using Microsoft Word and Excel. Oh, did I mention our network diagrams are made using Microsoft Visio? At least other office suites can talk Word and Excel - what talks Visio? Oh, and yes, this is all running on Windows XP Professional.

This, of course, brings us to why IT professionals are starting to look at alternatives in the first place. Microsoft is only certifying MS Office 2007 as Certified for Windows Vista and only as far back as MS Office 2003 as Works with Vista. I have many clients that are still using Office XP, so upgrading to Vista also means upgrading version of MS Office. Meanwhile, you have a new interface to teach people, and that’s if you ignore the new ribbon in MS Office 2007. So, you’re going to spend a considerable amount of money and time in training people on the new system anyways, and if that’s the case, well… why cough up $190 for Vista Business and over $200 for MS Office 2007 when you can get most of the same functionality for free using something like Ubuntu, which also comes with OpenOffice.org for free?

Well, the answer to that is easy - businesses want a fall-back. They want someone they can call when their IT guy can’t figure something out. When OpenOffice.org isn’t working right, who do you call? If Ubuntu isn’t working right, who can you call (the answer: Canonical)? Plus, what’s with all the weird politics? In short, businesses pay for support because it’s worth it to them - the initial cost of a product is far less important than:

1. How productive it makes them.
2. What they can do about it if something goes wrong.

The good news here is that Microsoft’s competitors are making strides here at the same time that Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot. While MS is pushing an operating system that nobody wants, others are starting to come up with halfway credible alternatives to the Windows->Outlook->Exchange paradigm, such as cross-platform Google Apps, iCal server, and even products like Kolab and Open-Xchange. Even Novell Groupwise is still wandering around. Plus, with a little bit of effort, you can get Linux or Mac to talk through Active Directory, which means that IT professionals don’t have to completely overhaul their authentication servers.

So, what does this all mean? What it means where I work, at least, is that we’re beginning to take a serious look at Windows and Microsoft alternatives and we’re getting a fair amount of demand from customers driving this. For now, many of our customers are asking us to set up Windows XP on their boxes so they don’t have to make the switch, but this is eventually going to become impractical. Meanwhile, some customers are slowly pushing in more Mac laptops in their offices, and, sooner or later, we’re probably going to get asked about Linux PCs, too. If nothing else, larger companies are starting to go Linux, which means that, sooner or later, smaller businesses are going to start veering in that direction as well.

What does this mean to me? It means that, after I get my MCSE at the end of the year here, I’m going to have to start looking at Apple and Linux certifications.

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