There were a number of new Linux distribution releases to help ring out the old year. Fedora 10, openSUSE 11.1 and Ubuntu 8.10 all arrived in time to celebrate the holiday season. Note that Ubuntu 8.10 is not a "Long Term Support" or LTS release, so brace yourselves for another Ubuntu release around April 2009. Ubuntu users who need LTS should stick with Ubuntu 8.04. Fedora and openSUSE users are not offered long term support releases. However, most personal users or enthusiasts don't usually mind being on the "bleeding edge" of a new release. Note that Novell, which sponsors openSUSE, does offer long term support for subscribers to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Desktop 10. Look for Novell to release SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and Desktop 11 around the middle of 2009.
Windows Vista, which has been around for almost two years, seems to have become the "Rodney Dangerfield" of operating systems because it can't get any respect. Businesses have largely avoided it and most IT professionals seem to be either bored or annoyed with it. Only Microsoft fans and the buyers of home computers have embraced it. The former because there is no end to their love of Windows and the latter because it came already installed on their computers so they are stuck with it unless they want to remove it and install Linux.
While Microsoft is currently preparing Vista SP2 for release in 2009, Microsoft business customers running Windows XP are holding out for Windows 7, which should be ready in 2010. Although Windows 7 is built on the Vista code base, it will be modified in ways to make it more attractive to business and professional users. The question is just how much pent up demand will there be for Windows 7 by the time 2010 rolls along? With Microsoft Windows now running on less than 90% of PCs, could we be witnessing the beginning of the end of the Windows era? Will Windows 7 be too late to stop the decline of the Windows monopoly?
2009 could be the year of the cloud because a critical mass of vendors, developers, consultants and customers are starting to turn to cloud computing to deliver on demand computing, storage, applications and development services. Cloud computing heavy weights like Amazon and Google are revving up their application and storage engines, while Ray Ozzie and company prepare Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, for release sometime in 2009. And with a second tier of cloud computing players and tool makers getting busy, you can bet that things are going to get more interesting in 2009, so pay attention to what is going on in the cloud.
Why cloud computing now? After all, some aspects of cloud computing, like SaaS (Software as a Service) have been around for years. Well, with the economy in a severe recession, businesses are looking for ways to reduce IT operations costs and IT capital costs. So what does this have to do with cloud computing? It is going to be 10% to 90% cheaper for business to move their "premises" applications to the cloud. And by moving their "premises" servers and storage devices into the cloud their maintenance and operating costs will be reduced along with their IT capital costs for replacing those "premises" servers and storage devices.
Who will be putting all those applications and servers into the cloud? The smart guys are saying small and medium sized will be the initial adopters. They tend to run less complicated IT infrastructures and their applications tend to be more standardized. IT is headed into the cloud and 2009 will be a good year for a lot of small businesses to figure out how it can use the cloud to deliver IT services while reducing IT costs. And a more prolonged economic recession could hasten business IT migrations to cloud computing infrastructures.
Finally, will we ever see the end of the long-running SCO saga? In July 2008, the U.S. District Court in Utah handed down its "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law and Order" which upheld most of the August 2007 judgment that declared Novell the copyright owner of Unix and UnixWare. In November 2008, the court rendered its Final Judgment. Case Closed. But an appeal by SCO, which is currently in bankruptcy, could delay the final outcome. Who knows when it will really be over but 2009 could be a good bet.
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