M
I think yhou are very right, and you are dead wrong. I work for the 38th largest company in the world: Morgan Stanley. We have a billion dollar IT budget. And we use a little of everything. Unfortunately. Excuse me, a LOT of everything.
The trend I've seen in the last ten years -- and I'm one of the architects of our infrastructure -- is the exponential growth in the variety and the depth and breadth of installation of open source software in our infrastructure.
Not in our applications. You go to a trader's desk -- the guys who make eight figure salaries and don't deserve them. (Turns to XX) Yeah, they have a Windows desktop. We gave up. You can have the desktop. It's a pain in the ass. I don't want it. I just want the comm where all the money's made. They use a lot of applications that are proprietary; but to be honest where they push the botton is where the money is made. Where the money is made is in the back office, where the databases run, where we do the real-time market data, where we do all the real number crunching. Almost all of that now is either on a proprietary Unix system -- we're still mostly a Solaris shop, but we are rapidly moving to Linux, though I'm not supposed to talk about that, for fear of being sued by SCO, which is the reason why I couldn't go to your conference (indicating Matt Asay), the OSBC, I wasn't allowed to go -- what I'm seeing is that in the infrastructure, the core infrastructure, open source is going to take over, leaps and bounds.
I'm predicting, right now, that by two thousand-six or -seven, we're going to be a ninety percent Linux shop. And we're one of the biggest Wall Street firms. Now, wer'e talking about the infrastructure then. The core OS. We're going to see open source take over.
When I go to red hat, Michael Tiemann and those guys don't just sell me the right to use their OS. They can't do that, because most of it -- virtually all of it -- is open source. These guys have to sell me on the services they add above that. So, while, if you look at what we pay on subscriptions to Red Hat, versus licenses to Windows, that piece becomes a wash over time and you buy lots and lots of stuff and it scales up. But we're getting a lot more services out of these guys (indicates open source) then we do out of them (indicated Microsoft) because they don't have to sell us as many services because they've already got a huge chunk of cash, just like, allowing us to use their stuff and install it. And what I think we're seeing more and more is that these open source companies have to be competitive with proprietary companies by giving us somethign the proprietary companies don't do a good job of. And that is, a better kind of rich support and better services.
We all -- everybody I know -- who has to deal with an 800 number for support, they almost break down in tears when they have to call the number. Because they know they're about to waste two hours with someone who does not understand the kind of code they're to support.
This is a problem in every giant large (vendor) that gets big. They always block out their areas of support to protect the good engineers who have your solutions, from you, the customer, who have to get through all those layers to the source of the answer. (Applause.) Okay?
What I do, for every company we negotiate a sales contract with. I threaten these people ... if they don't give me direct phone numbers to people who can solve my problem. Now, that's easy. All it takes is three phone calls to the 800 number and they don't ever want to hear from us again.
We're really brutal in our demands. If I'm paying ten million bucks for a software product, I want ten million bucks worth of value, and I get that ten million in value when the company provides me with the engineers to help me do my architecture, to help me set this thing up, to help me do something more creative than just an idiot can do by pulling it out of a box and dropping it into a system. That's where the value-add comes.
Now, back to my key point here. (Laughter.)
This in my opinion is why the open source companies, I believe, are going to take over the core infrastructure. I thinkn you'll see proprietary companies shifted out to the leaf nodes, coming up with special purpose applications that are difficult to do on a large scale.
But I will bet my career that Microsoft is going to get wiped out on the desktop in the next ten years. Not in this country. You're going to own it here because America loves you guys (to Microsoft). You're set, for at least ten years. Look overseas at what's happening. It doesn't matter what distribution. Because it's economical for people in foreign countries. It lets them invest in their own local software companies without putting money into these guys' pockets (indicates Microsoft), or some other foreign corporation that doesn't have a vested interest in your own economy and your own culture. That's going to be the number one reason why open source ends up taking over the planet.