The Channel Wire

August 20, 2009

The growth of netbooks and Linux-based netbook operating systems like Intel's Moblin bode well for Linux on the client, according to John Dragoon, chief marketing officer for Novell.

Dragoon's confidence was buoyed by an IDC report released this week which predicts that Linux related revenue will grow from $567 million in 2008 to $1 billion in 2012 and $1.2 billion in 2013. Although 2008 was a rough year for many companies, Linux revenue industrywide grew more than 23 percent, according IDC.

In a Tuesday blog post, Dragoon said Novell grew its Linux market share more than five percentage points in 2008 to 29.8 percent, and saw its overall Linux related revenue grow by 50 percent between 2007 and 2008.

IDC noted in the report that Linux on the client side "remains the great hope," and Dragoon said there's plenty of reasons to believe that adoption will continue in this segment. "We agree that IT professionals are becoming increasingly comfortable with client side Linux," Dragoon said in the blog post.

Linux vendors would obviously like to see Linux finally start taking market share away from Windows and OS X, but that has yet to happen on a large scale. Last September, Forrester analyst Ben Gray likened perennially rosy forecasts of client side Linux adoption to the eternal hope -- and suffering -- of Chicago Cubs fans.

"The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' has been ballyhooed every year for the past decade," said John Locke, principal consultant at Freelock Computing, a Seattle-based open-source consultancy. "And while it is seeing phenomenal growth, when you look at absolute numbers, it's still a tiny fraction of the market."

Despite the sluggish pace of desktop Linux growth, Microsoft appears to finally be taking the threat it poses seriously. In its recent 10-K filing, the company named Red Hat and Canonical (Ubuntu) as "strong competition" to its Windows client business.