In my last post we talked about comparing Linux and Windows on the basis of bugs and/or vulnerabilities. Not surprisingly this generated lots of discussion. One of the comments that caught my attention was a one-liner that said "No matter. 2005 is the year of Linux. We have Microsoft right where we want them."

Well, in my opinion, I don't think that this is the case. However, what may be a more interesting discussion is whether 2005 is the year of commodity hardware. From the discussions that I have had with IT Managers in the past, there seems to be a recurring theme, they want to reduce the amount of money that they are spending to run their IT systems. One possible way of doing this is replace vendor specific UNIX systems with lower cost Intel or AMD based hardware running either Windows or Linux.

I think that over the next 12 months we will see more and more companies moving mission critical applications off UNIX servers onto servers running Windows Server 2003. For a large number of these companies, these mission critical applications are based on off-the-shelf software that is available for Windows, Linux, and UNIX. As companies start to do these migrations, they need to ask themselves which operating system to run on the new hardware. As you look a little bit closer, it would seem to me that in an environment that already has a Windows presence (which most customers do), does it really make sense to introduce yet another operating system into the mix. If a company is trying to reduce the number of different platforms they support to reduce cost, introducing a new operating system that they would need to hire or train people to manage and maintain seems counter-productive. In contrast, most, if not all customers already have Windows Server administrators in house.

I think that 2005 is more likely to be the year we see companies migrate some applications away from vendor specific UNIX and onto Intel and AMD based hardware.

What do you think?