IDC pronounces Linux unimportant to European economy

A RECENT IDC white paper on the economic impact of Microsoft's super soaraway new Vista operating system seems to be lacking one crucial ingredient - other operating systems.

The paper, which is part of Vole's campaign to become liked by the EU, fell into the hands of webpronews hacks.

While the report waxes lyrical enough to bring a shine to all the floors in Nicolae Ceausescu's palace, it fails to mention that there are other operating systems in the EU. This could be pretty important if Linux sweeps across the EU, or if everyone has a rush of blood to the head and buys Apple OX, or Free BDOS ever takes off. However, for some reason, IDC didn't mention any of these at all.

IDC ignored the phrases "free software" and "open source" so the whole analysis seems blinded my the light of Vista.

The white paper predicts sales of the "Microsoft ecosystem" to tip $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies and somehow create 100,000 jobs. The paper admits that this is due to companies having to buy new hardware to run Vista on. And spins this as a good thing. After all, this expenditure would be unnecessary if everyone ran Linux on their old machines, and then where would we be?

We assume the 100,000 jobs to be created will be of folk learning how to make sense of and support Vista. Of course these could be trained to use some other OS instead.

While none of these extremes is likely, we would have thought it would have been something IDC would have considered if it was trying to create an analysis that was worth the paper it was written on.

While we accept that IDC was paid by Microsoft to provide this white paper, and it does not do to upset your customers too much, weighing it too heavily in favour of your client really does damage your street cred a bit.

Anyone might think your opinion is for hire. µ

L'INQ
webpronews.com