I had a beer with a couple of friends of mine the other day who run a small Value Added Reseller (VAR).
They were asking why Linux for the small business hasn't taken off faster. "The customers always ask for Microsoft", one of them said. "I guess I'm at fault I haven't pushed it more", said the other. "Everyone needs Exchange so we just set them up with the Small Business server and away we go".
This shows to me the four reasons that linux hasn't taken off more for small businesses.
1) Agressive pricing moves by Microsoft - $600 for 5 CALs for businesses. with SQL server etc. Often business will pirate the rest of their needed licenses or they can buy an additional 20 CALs for $1900.
- Microsoft can only reduce the pain - they can't remove it. They have a huge machine to feed
2) Marketing - Customers haven't heard of linux enough to ask for it and VARs aren't pushing it.
- Vars need more marketing material and value added solutions that are linux based (Accounting/ Workflow etc)
3) Technical know how on the part of the VARs
One of the two guys I had the beer with felt he didn't know enough about linux
- Vars know about linux but they are often scared of it. They need to see a recent distro that is easy to use (Suse etc)
4) Exchange
- Thunderbird calendar needs to improve,
- Evolution needs to be ported to windows
- Chandler needs to go gold
Linux penetration into small business should be something like this:
1) Firewall (reuse an old server), email routing
2) Web server
3) File and print
4) Workflow
5) Get firefox on all the desktops - hide ie
6) Email - Exchange replacement
8) Open office for those users who can use it
9) Move to some linux desktops for users who can investigate linux terminal server