During the fourth quarter of 2004, Gartner surveyed attendees at the Gartner Symposium conferences in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, and Cannes, France, about their use of client operating systems. Based on these results, Gartner said just over 1 percent of enterprise users were running Linux desktops.
"For most companies, the cost to migrate away from Microsoft Windows is simply too high and outweighs the benefits companies expect they will receive," said Michael Silver, research vice president in Gartner's Client Platforms group. "Most large companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, and the cost to migrate them to run on or be accessible from Linux clients is huge."
Gartner said the public sector is more likely to be interested in Linux and open source office products.
"Open source is gaining ground in the public sector because the government calculates return on investment differently from the private sector, so the benefits that advance political agendas or enhance the economy can also be considered," said Andrea DiMaio, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner finds that even in emerging markets, open source adoption on the desktop has been sluggish.
"Migration issues have made it more difficult to adopt Linux, and in many places, pirated Microsoft products have been low-cost competition to Linux," said Martin Gilliland, research director in Gartner's Client Platforms group.
Further details are available in Gartner's research Spotlight report entitled Examining Where Desktop Linux and Open-Source Office Products Make Sense.
