During a client meeting this week, the IT services team leader gave me a perfectly succinct reason why Microsoft recently turned in blow out numbers:
I see no real demand for open source among the mid-range customers with whom we deal. The thought of maintaining what would in many cases become a proprietary code base isn’t attractive.
This compares sharply with what James Governor said yesterday:
MySQL useage is exploding. In many cases its being used as a bucket of bits, rather than a relational database management system. But check out 95% of Web 2.0 Services (that number is plucked out of thin air, feel free to challenge it) and they are using MySQL. Then look at look at companies socialised to open source. MySQL is everywhere. Would IBM really be running MySQL alongside DB2 if they weren’t seeing exponential growth across the open source platfrom? No. Way.
I don’t track these things but I do know that most of what I use is based upon open source components. But then I also know I ‘live’ out on the edge of what software can deliver. That’s a very small world.
As an aside, I remember that at one time I was the only person in my organisation running Windows.
Technorati Tags: MySQL
