What keeps Steve Ballmer awake at night? No, not Mrs Ballmer’s snoring. And probably not the IBM Lotus portfolio. Linux maybe? Well, someone from Microsoft did once tell me that Lotus doesn’t keep Bill Gates awake at night (hence my comment) but Linux does. Why Linux? Because it starts to break down Microsoft’s halo effect… Linux servers replacing Windows servers will hinder .NET and SharePoint deployments and Linux desktops will scupper Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s main cash-cows.

If the noise of Steve gnashing his teeth over Linux drowns out Mrs Ballmer’s snoring, what effect is Apple’s popularity having? Regardless of how good Zune media players may be, the cool-ness of wire-lessly sharing media with other Zune owners is dampened by the fact that there may be no other Zune owners within a fifty mile radius. Throw a Zune randomly over your shoulder in an urban area and chances are you’ll hit two iPod owners (one directly, and the second when the Zune bounces off the first person’s head).

What about the Mac versus the Windows-based personal computer? From here on I’ll adopt Microsoft’s moniker for the ‘PC’. According to a comment on Cult of Mac, PCs outsell Macs by ten-to-one. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Macs are more expensive (we’ll have the “you get for you pay for” argument later) – that may not be so much of an impact for the private consumer who will have to save a bit longer or dip into more of the savings to cough up £1,500 for an iMac or MacBook Pro, versus £800 for a good-quality Windows PC or laptop. But in business that amount of extra money doesn’t wash when you multiply it across two, five, ten or fifty thousand people. Companies will look for a massively-discounted deal on some fit-for-business kit… not top of the range but it’ll do the job. And that’s not the business Apple are in, although they have some traction in some market sectors. Some companies are indulging in the idea of consumerisation – the idea of giving an employee a sum of money to choose their own computing kit – but if their critical business applications run on Windows only it becomes Hobson’s choice for the operating system.

This makes me wonder what Microsoft are playing at with their PC vs Mac mini-site. Are they worried about starting to lose the corporate market? Probably not. However, consider the fact that Microsoft get a lot of mileage from the fact that people use Windows and Office at home (and college) and then take that advocacy into the workplace… could a growing number of Macs used in personal life start to chip away at the Windows dominance in the business environment? Maybe, but I also think that Microsoft are targetting those people who may be seduced by Apple’s cool factor… people like me… I was seduced and it was the best £1,500 I ever spent (not including money spent on an engagement ring to secure the hand of the current Mrs Adams).

Microsoft put forward a number of compelling arguments to halt that seduction…

You can’t get a Mac that ships with a Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader, or built-in 3G wireless.

Some of that may be true, but you can get a Mac with a built-in SD card reader. Whatever, none of those omissions have bothered me in the slightest.

Macs can’t connect to an Xbox 360.

Why would I want to connect my Mac to my Xbox?

Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC. For example, the mouse works differently.

Indeed, that’s why I clicked on the option to make my Mac mouse behave like a PC mouse… so now the mouse works in the way I got used to on a PC. The Mac is a different beast to a PC in many ways, so why would everything work the same? This statement implies that Windows is perfect in every way, and to deviate from that is a step back. And that’s complete garbage, because there’s loads of things that Windows does badly that the Mac does better.

With a Mac, it’s harder to set up secure sharing for your photos, music & movies, documents, and even printers with other computers on your home network.

That’s a statement totally lacking in any evidence. I’ll give you one example… I have an Archos media player, and it was a hell of a lot easier to set up media streaming from the Mac than from Windows. In fact I wouldn’t even say “set up” because from the Mac it just worked. Windows required some tinkering, encouragement and a small amount of swearing.

If there’s a Mac version of a program you need, you’ll have to buy it again and relearn how to use it on a Mac. [Note the 'If' in italics].

What do users of GarageBand and iMovie for Windows think about this statement?

Macs only come in white or silver. PCs are available in a full spectrum of colors across a range of price points.

This is clearly Apple’s biggest mistake. They made iPods available in a range of colours but failed to do the same with the Macs, a decision that could ruin the company </sarcasm>. Ironically in this one statement, they mixed the most ridiculous reason (the colour choices) with the strongest factor of PCs… the fact that there is a great variety of choice in specifications, price, vendor and ultimately quality. Apple’s offerings are more expensive and more limited in choice.

But do you get what you pay for? After using an iMac at home for over a year, and now a MacBook Pro when out and about, I’d say yes. Even on a well-specced ThinkPad I’d experience an awful lot of egg-timer in a day. On the Mac everything is almost instantaneous. Bear in mind that on the iMac at home there’s usually two other people logged in and I’m running a lot of applications, but it never goes into one of those disk-thrashing death spirals of unresponsiveness. Yes, it’s better specced than the ThinkPad and it cost more, but that’s why I do say that you get what you pay for and (in my humble opinion) it’s worth it.

Fact #1 – I never read manuals or instructions. So I merrily downloaded the Ubuntu 9.10 installation ISO, created a CD and then set about upgrading my 9.04 installation. And then I got to the options… install as a separate partition or erase the current installation and install the new version? Neither thanks, I want to upgrade. It was then I checked the Ubuntu site and realised that the upgrade option was a separate download.

But actually there was an easier option… just go to the Update Manager in the Ubuntu System Administration, check for updates and then let it do it’s thing. And that’s what I did. It took a couple of hours, but only because I was doing other things (it was a day off work) and there were some OK buttons that were required to be pressed. The process said the final part would take about four hours but actually completed in about fifteen minutes… not a terribly good estimation, but better than estimating fifteen minutes and taking four hours I guess.

Overall impressions… excellent, a big improvement on version 9.04. It doesn’t really look any different, but the performance is much better, especially things like the screen redraw which were awful with 9.04 because of the display drivers for the ThinkPad W500. Now the display performance is great (better than Windows XP on the same laptop) and I can use the advanced wobbling screen effects. Suspend and resume (always previously unreliable) seem to work fine. Overall 9.10 feels much more polished.

So what about the Canonical claim that configuring via the command prompt is a thing of the past? I think if you properly understand the Synaptic Package Manager then you are very likely to avoid the dreaded Terminal. Although I did resort to the command prompt to upgrade Notes to version 8.5.1 I could actually have avoided it. My Linux knowledge let me down, but doesn’t that tell us that it’s still not as user-friendly as it could be? I never had any such issues with the Apple Mac which I felt at home with instantaneously.

The other negative is that the ThinkPad’s trackpad is permanently on (aarrrggh, I hate the thing) and there’s no way in Ubuntu to turn it off. I tried creating a configuration file (following advice from a tip on the Interweb), but that didn’t work. So I’ll have to turn the trackpad off at the BIOS level.

On the positive side Ubuntu 9.10 is packed with great utilities, the WiFi is a doddle to configure, and time from cold boot to ready is extremely quick. Both navigation and the customisation to get your own comfortable look and feel are very easy. It seems like a very viable client platform growing in maturity, and I hope it gets some serious consideration from companies who are looking at the costs of upgrading to Windows 7.

Karmic Koala? No, I haven’t been smoking something grown in a hippy’s window box. Like many, I’m a) fed up with hearing about Windows 7 and b) looking forward to the release of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (otherwise known as Karmic Koala) later this week. It seems that Microsoft’s unofficial PR machine in the UK (BBC News) has taken ten minutes off from fawning over the new Windows version to recognise that technology companies other than Microsoft, Google and Apple do actually exist… and also name some of the companies who have freed themselves from the Microsoft shackles. I knew the French Police had gone down the Ubuntu route, but didn’t know that San Francisco Airport had taken the leap. You can view the article here.

Being a BBC reporter, Gary Parkinson does of course take the opportunity to see everything from a Windows point of view, but I suppose this is understandable. He homes in on the fact that iTunes isn’t available on Linux operating systems, and then discusses the fact that Linux (even Ubuntu) hasn’t always been seen as user-friendly. Windows, irrespective of what you think of it, has been honed to be pretty user-friendly over the years… rarely (if ever) do home users have to go to a command prompt to configure things. Thankfully Canonical’s Chris Kenyon says the new release puts a stop to all of that (I’ll tell you later in the week if it really is true).

Parkinson talks about recommending Linux to older family members or friends, but is that really where Ubuntu wants to sit, with the home user? Certainly I’d have no bones about recommending Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice to home users, and indeed I have. But I see Linux as something that needs to be properly rolled out, supported and maintained within organisations, like those named in the Beeb’s article. A lack of support for iTunes isn’t really going to matter there. Home users (in my humble opinion) should buy an Apple Mac… it’s businesses that have the potential to decrease costs through properly maintained open-source software. Whatever your opinion, it’s very important that Microsoft have competitors in this space, and thus improvements to Ubuntu can only be a good thing.

Check your diaries folks – on 16th October 2009 IBM Lotus and Canonical (the providers of the popular Ubuntu Linux platform) will join forces to deliver an event designed to help businesses understand and realise the benefits of open source collaborative solutions.

Adam Jollans, IBM’s Linux and Open Source Strategy Manager, will kick off with a session about open source solutions revolutionising the IT market. Then we have someone called Darren Adams (who is apparently very good) talking about Web 2.0 collaboration and the desktop of the future (today), followed by more information about Ubuntu and freeing yourself from the Microsoft Windows and Office lock-ins. After a free lunch, there’s a hands-on technology workshop which will allow delegates to experience the IBM Lotus collaboration suite running in a Ubuntu Linux environment.

With organisations continuing to look for ways to drive down costs, Ubuntu and solutions such as IBM Lotus Symphony offer the potential for cost savings – just ask the French Police. So why not invest a day to see how your business could benefit?

The event will take place at IBM South Bank. A page for registration will be available soon. In the meantime mark it in your diaries and check back here for a link in a couple of days.

Update: the link for registration is now available.

Two months after taking one step to phase out Windows (the acquisition of an iMac), I taken another step. Today… or yesterday depending on where you are… okay, on Friday… I converted my work laptop to Ubuntu Linux. While working at IBM’s Warwick office with an older laptop (too busy to ignore work completely), my frolleagues Ray Davies and Stuart Crump assisted in converting me and several other people to the popular Linux distribution.

The base installation was extremely easy. Part 2 seemed a little complicated but I was assured that this was because they had all of the necessary updates downloaded to a cached proxy, and they had also provided an automated script to install IBM Lotus Notes 8.5, Symphony, Sametime and Mobile Connect. So in next to no time everything was set up.

Okay, let’s be honest – I’ve been a Windows user for 18 years. There are still some things I need on Windows, so there will be times when I need to put the other hard disk back in. Work stuff like Hyperion and some personal stuff like my favourite genealogy application (and my 1-2-3 spreadsheet used for financial planning – it uses 1-2-3 macros) aren’t supported on Linux, although I could use Windows XP in a VMWare session. That’s fine, I didn’t expect to drop Windows cold turkey-style – I’m expecting to phase it out as I find Linux alternatives. I expected to lament the loss of Paint Shop Pro, but I’ve already discovered the built-in graphic editor known as GIMP.

First impressions of Ubuntu Linux? It boots up faster than Windows, it’s ready to use immediately after login (Windows still takes a good 2 to 3 minutes to sort itself out), the wireless networking is so simple that someone over 40 could do it (kids are no longer the benchmark for simplicity because they often out-techno their parents), and it seems very easy to navigate and configure (time will tell if that’s reality day in day out, but it’s looking good).