While there were - as I mentioned last issue - lots of good news and good feeling coming out of the recent BrainShare Europe get-together in Barcelona, Novell CEO Jack Messman once again took the opportunity to place his foot deftly into his mouth.

It was just two years ago at BrainShare in Salt Lake City that Messman declared Linux to be an "immature" operating system.

This time he laid out the grand strategy for selling Linux to the enterprise as a desktop operating system rather than a server platform. I wasn't in Barcelona, but according to a story in The Register, Messman declared in his keynote that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop, catalyzed by the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading to it. The story quotes Messman as telling the audience: "The window of opportunity for migrating will be when Vista comes onto the market. The cost of migrating from Windows XP to Vista will be higher than the cost of migrating to Linux and that will push migrations to Linux."

While it might, indeed, be true that migrating from XP to Vista would cost more in terms of hardware upgrades and software licenses, I do think Messman is overlooking two things. First, retraining your IT staff and all of your users to install, maintain and use Linux will be an expensive proposition. Training them on Vista would be a small incremental cost.

But the major thing Messman overlooks is that there's no obligation on Windows desktop users' part to migrate or upgrade at all.

Both Novell and Microsoft have well documented proof that users are often very reluctant to upgrade or migrate. There are thousands and thousands of NetWare 3.x and Windows NT 4 servers installed throughout the world. There are even more NetWare 4 and NT 5 servers as well as countless NetWare 5, NetWare 6, and Windows 2000 servers. In fact, I'd be very willing to wager that NetWare 3, 4, 5 and 6 servers vastly outnumber Open Enterprise Server installations, and that there are a lot more NT 4, NT 5, and Windows 2000 Servers installed worldwide than there are Windows Server 2003.

People (at least rational people who need to live within a budget) do not upgrade their operating systems simply because a new one is available. But, in addition to budgetary concerns, many people don't upgrade or migrate because they can't. They've tied their business' success to one or more applications that simply aren't available, or can't be ported to a different platform. Somewhere in between are those who resist upgrades and migrations because they feel they know their current system very well and can't afford to invest the time needed to learn a new one.

Intelligent organizations pick the applications that they believe best satisfy their business needs and then choose an appropriate platform for them. If you have the applications running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP and aren't ready to replace those desktops with ones running Windows Vista would your first choice be to throw out the apps and the investment in Windows training by replacing your desktops with Linux? Or would you, rather, keep what you have while perhaps exploring other options? If there was ever a mantra that's common to IT folk the world over, it's "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Windows Vista isn't going to solve Novell's revenue problems. But perhaps the next CEO will have a different idea. We can only hope.

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Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found here.