| March of the desktop penguins |
Jul. 19, 2007
Opinion -- When Microsoft's Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux?
When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of the Web browser market it had pioneered, and Linux, while beginning to gain steam as a server platform, was a desktop platform that only a true geek could love.
Today, OpenOffice.org has grown into a viable competitor to Microsoft Office, with enough clout to have forced Microsoft toward a dramatically more open file format strategy. Firefox has risen from the ashes of Netscape and--along with Opera, Safari and other smaller browser players--is steadily dismantling Internet Explorer's market share.
And the Linux desktop now boasts two major desktop environment options, GNOME and KDE, that have grown slick enough to deny Microsoft's newest client operating system, Windows Vista, anything near the prima facie usability advantage that Windows enjoyed against the circa-2001 Linux desktop. Linux has certainly been a worthy competitor to Windows on the server side, but can Linux really challenge Windows as an enterprise desktop alternative?
To continue reading this article by Jason Brooks at eWEEK.com, go here.
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