Mick responds
I agreed with some of Florin's comments and disagreed with some others, so I wrote back to him, saying just that:

I disagree with your views on the costs; I believe that the effort of moving to Linux is hugely more than a Windows to Windows move, even if that is to Windows 2000 or XP from Windows 98, say. I do agree that the infrastructure costs might be similar, but to an end user, the training and familiarity issues of a move, from, say, Windows 98 to XP, are minuscule compared to a Windows to Linux move. That's because Windows 98 and XP basically behave the same. My son, for example, started to use his new laptop with Windows XP straight away, no learning curve. But Linux has a different UI paradigm and a different file system paradigm. You have, for example, to teach people to single click where they used to double click in some places, and you have to teach them new tricks with the file system.

And you say that applications are easily ported. Yes, they might be, but most Windows applications don't actually need porting from one Windows version to another. They just run, so all your old CDs of stuff still work. If you move to Linux, they don't, and you have to spend time and money finding new solutions. No port is cheaper than any port.

I can't disagree on the reliability comparison between Linux and Windows, but for general users, Windows is reliable enough; they come in the morning, start it, use Notes, Office, maybe a terminal emulator, and shut it down at the end of the day. When used like this, Windows rarely fails. It's software developers who subject their machines to weird stuff who have the bulk of the Windows crashes. So while Linux might be more reliable, Windows is not unreliable enough for the bulk of users for that to be a really pressing issue with corporate IT departments. If it was, many more companies than there are would be looking to move off Windows, and Microsoft's share price would not keep on rising.

And as for speed, just buy a faster machine; maybe you buy it a little sooner than you might otherwise, but remember that many corporations replace computers every three years or so, and the new ones are always much faster than the old. Again, it's the developers like you and me who really complain about machine speed. For the regular user with a machine less than three to five years old, it's just not an issue.

I also disagree with some of your comments about development. I'd suggest that Linux development in C++ or Java is actually no faster or slower than on Windows. Okay, so there may be some libraries available with better functions, but I'm not sure that corporate mission-critical applications should ever rely on free libraries with no paid-for support, unless you get hold of the source code and your company is totally prepared to support it for your internal use though you had written it yourself.

Finally, there is no way that Lotus will do a Linux designer. They sell maybe one designer for every 100 or even 1000 regular Notes clients. The market for a Linux client is the regular end user, and the technical person who uses a Notes client for mail and applications, but not a developer--the same sort of people who use Mac Notes clients. Let's say the Notes client market is 100 million or so.