the situation taken by all the hardware manufacturers places linux today in the entry level (when it's taken in account) and their own unix system in the middle and high level.
reality is sometimes more cruel than the situation wanted by the marketing department :-). technically, a linux distribution has no cause to be envious of the manufacturers unix solutions,
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and we can often see that users dope their unix workstations with free software to complete their usage.
to be precise in the talk, we should consider manufacturers unix solutions as split in stations and servers.
on the station side,
Office Pro 2010, there's no doubt in my mind: for a customer, the only reason today to buy one is linked to the availability of a software or a hardware which wouldn't exist in the free environment, or due to intrinsic performances of the machine.
in the first case, we can see that this argument should have a short life time, because logically every software editor (except maybe hardware manufacturers) and every hardware manufacturer has interest in porting their applications or allowing the use of their hardware on all the major environments in the market.
as shown by oracle, informix, sybase, ... linux becomes today one of the major environments.
in the second case, the difference in term of performances between the linux dominant platform (ia-32) and the other competitors decreases and will disappear with the generalisation of the ia-64 architecture, which seems to be adopted largely by a majority of actors.
more over, linux is often available natively on the processors of these actors (sparc, mips,
Office Pro, powerpc, 68xxx, alpha, crusoe, pa-risc). i think linux may represent the famous unique and standard unix that everybody dreamed of from a long time, without succeeding to impose it (the open and free characteristics brought by linux are not without influence on that).
i think that at the end hardware manufacturer unix workstations will be restricted to some niches such as high end computation, virtual reality, ... and that as long as solutions are not available on a free environment.
linux offers all the functional qualities of the other unix systems, and thus of the workstation, on a more various hardware platform and potentially at a better price, if on pcs.
so it is the natural choice of every computer engineer with a strong unix culture (old customer of the workstation) who will prefer that solution to the migration to a microsoft system typically.
with ia-64, we can see that linux was the first operating system available (including graphical support).
on the server side, in addtion to the points mentionned previously for the stations, problems are more complex.
ram, disks, processors capacities,
Office Home And Business, extensions of every kind make them difficultly repleacable by machines with a ia-32 architecture for example.
more over,
Office 2010 License, certain solutions such as high availability clusters for example have just been put in production in a linux environment, compared to years of operation under unix.
the other brake is often linked to investments already done around software solutions deployed on these servers.
whatever their natural life time is much higher than those of the stations.
changes will thus be made more slowly in that domain.
here we can consider rightly linux solutions as an entry/middle level solutions, when hardware manufacturer unix servers are the middle/high level.
the introduction of linux in place of these machines will begin only with a massive availability of applications, mainly in the management sector.
again ia-64, with increased smp capabilities (16 processors today), higher bandwidth, ... will make things change.
the advantages of the hardware manufacturer solutions, explaining why they are so often chosen when applications are critical, are linked to the homogeneity of the solution (hardware and software mastered by the same entity, which can't invoke a third party in case of problem), and to the support and maintenance guarantees furnished.
finally, there is not so much antagonism between these systems, because they are full cousins.
their association allows today to computer teams "pro-unix" to have solutions from start to finish, without having to lose in functions, as it's so often the case with other operating systems available for personal computers.
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