In the coming months, the company plans to apply its analysis to a few more applications, including a mix of Windows- and Unix-based applications that are due for a significant rewrite. "If you're not doing a significant amount of rewrite," Saul says, "that takes away a lot of the incentive for rethinking the whole platform and everything else."
Saul says he can't see much point in moving infrastructure such as a mail server built on top of Microsoft's Active Directory to Linux. He says he'd be "ridden out of town on a rail" if users lost access to their mail folders. "One of Microsoft's major strengths is the degree of integration between the Web server and the applications," Saul says.
Even Ed Anderson, vice president of global product marketing at SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc., says the company doesn't see much Windows-to-Linux conversion. "We've seen Linux servers being installed alongside the Windows servers," he notes.
Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager of platform strategy, says he has seen scattered cases of companies that tried Linux servers for their Web sites but decided to replace them with Windows boxes. That tends to happen if users encounter integration issues or spend more money for support or put more effort into maintenance than they expected, he says.