How about your working environment now

[eps]

Hi guys

I have feeling in these days, that The MS Empire's Force getting much stronger around me.

At working office, I can see about one hundred Engineering Work Stations which run CAD systems on Windows platforms.
Few years ago, I could see more CAE systems running on UNIX boxes, and even some OS/2 was there.
But now only remain two 3D CAD machines running on HP-UX.
This means 98% Clients Boxes are running on Windows in my working flower.

License and DB Server for these clients have been replaced to Windows 2003 from UNIX boxes at last April.
Because of previous version of the management system is the last one which supports AIX and Solaris.

I can only find a Network Attached Storage which running on built-in Linux.

Mail server, Proxy, Group ware and all other stuffs are running on Windows platforms, just except DNS which running on out of date Sun OS.
This means almost 100% systems are running on Windows in my working area.

I guess may be this is an average current environment at ordinary manufacturing company.

Now, I really think some driving force needs to change this situation, but don't know what it is.

Thanks

[jtang613]

Now, I really think some driving force needs to change this situation, but don't know what it is.
A more refined question would be: How did MS gain such a foot-hold to begin with?

The answer: Marketing -- MS has positioned themselves as the quick & easy solution to computing. Despite its stability, flexibility and security, Linux is still seen as "black magic" by many lesser informed IT managers and decision makers. The lack of any coordinated advertising leaves the door open for MS to market istelf as the only solution. I'm reminded of Ford's "... any color you want, as long as it's black ..." advertising.

And although I'm not a huge fan the marketing / advertising industry, sometimes it's necessary to actively promote a genuinely competetive product in order to gain recognition.

m2c,
Jason

[james_in_denver]

For most shops, what you describe is faiirly typical, the largest Linux/OSS installs are webserver farms, network/fileservers in otherwise Windows sites, Database servers running a "not free" RDBMS like Oracle or DB2, print servers, firewall/routers.

But for everyday "client side" work, microsoft still pretty much rules....

[mrtaber]

Perzactly, James. Where I work is a case in point. Microsoft rules the desktop. Period. However, in the backroom, we have a mix of servers: XServes (Apple, and very nice I might add), MS Servers (Exchange), and Linux boxen (RHEL), on which to host our website and run our enterprise databases (Oracle).

Oh, and our SAN and NAS devices are Linux.

Mark :)

[jtang613]

I'd also like to add that both the IBM Blue Gene/L and Nasa Columbia super computers run Linux. The Earth Simulator super computer runs Unix. In fact, just about every super computer out there runs some flavor of *nix.

m2c,
Jason