| Munich Linux decision official |
Jun. 14, 2004
Bloomberg News reports that Linux has officially won 14,000 municipal desktops in Munich, Germany, after a year-long decision process that saw Microsoft reduce its pricing and merited a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Baller. The 82-member city council formally votes tomorrow on a proposal to dump Windows NT for Linux. Bloomberg says a published agenda for the meeting notes the switch to open source.
In April 2002, German Heise Online reported that the city was examining Linux over privacy concerns and yearly fees. Munich selected Linux and issued a press statement regarding the move from Windows just a year later.
Novell's vice chairman Chris Stone has often called this now-famous deal "the poster child for the desktop Linux movement." Novell now owns German Linux maker SuSE, which was brought into the Munich deal last year by IBM to develop a Linux plan. IBM made a $50M investment in Novell at the time Novell's acquisition of SuSE.
Bloomberg is calling this the biggest PC loss yet for the Redmond software maker.
IDC forecasts that Linux-powered PCs will grow 25%-30% this year. Linux desktops continue to gain market share and IDC says that Linux will account for 6% of desktop operating system shipments by 2007, passing 3% in 2004.
In the article, Microsoft's Martin Taylor is quoted as saying "This is a case of one city in one country that is deciding, through the help of IBM, to deploy Linux for their own very specific reasons." Taylor is Microsoft's Manager for Platform Strategies. He notes that other German cities including Frankfurt decided to renew their software deals with Microsoft for PCs.
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