Here’s why-
1. You don’t have to pay for license.
2. Savings on antivirus software
3. No expenses for data recovery. No matter what antivirus you install, Windows manages to catch some disease.
4. If it’s a big company, then employees can customize the software and the operating system to any extent wanted. That’s not possible with Windows.
5. With local mirror set up, updates are a lot faster, installation of new programs instantaneous.
6. With soft RAID, no data is lost, and for less money than hard RAID.
7. Many choices of flavor- SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and so on.
I like Linux, but there are a number of reasons it isn’t quite ready for large-scale business.
1) Microsoft Exchange. The open-source equivalents aren’t nearly mature enough, and the open-source Exchange clients (i.e. Evolution) simply don’t work well enough … yet.
2) OpenOffice just isn’t good enough. It was great for me during university, but working in a largely corporate environment, I am finding a lot of features in MS Office that I depend on now – particularly integration with Sharepoint and Exchange. Add Office Communicator to the mix (as we have), and you have an outstanding collaboration platform that there aren’t any real rivals to.
Oh, and Excel is leagues ahead of Calc.
3) Related to your point #4, that’s part of the problem. Large corporations want to have standard workstation builds deployed across their entire employee base, and Windows actually does that very well. Companies don’t want their employees tweaking their system however they want.
4) Related to your point #7, again, that’s part of the problem. Industry wants to standardize, not to have every employee and organization have their own little custom distribution.
5) With volume licensing, the costs of proprietary software are not that bad, especially for larger organizations. Plus, you get support with that.
6) Windows XP has become a pretty rock-solid OS now (after a few hiccups). Windows 7 is shaping up to be solid as well.
I wish it made business sense to use Linux, but it doesn’t yet. It definitely makes business sense for the server world, and for internet-centric companies like web development firms. But for many large corporations, which is Microsoft’s main revenue stream, the Microsoft offerings are actually very good.
Hmm… that’s quite true.
Regarding 4 and 7 the company can stop employees from doing that.
I guess the biggest advantage W has is that it’s very standard and a lot of expertise/experience is readily available along with some wonderful programs.
OpenOffice surely isn’t as good as Excel, but you can ask for features or even add them yourselves in your company.
Support too you can buy and it will probably come cheaper. However, it may be worth it for some to pay for MS’s support and license.
I just hope that they offer something as good as MS in all respects.