On the face of things, the fact that fewer CIOs are considering Linux these days isn't terribly surprising to me at this point.

It seems to me that if the OS wars aren't over (of course they aren't) then they are at least in a truce period; most decision-makers have heard the hype, and taken the time, to check out what their options are over the past few years while Linux was making in-roads, and to come to some decision about the short-term applicablility of the OS to their own operations. Particularly now with the release of Vista, the lines have become polarized once again and there is less flux. The time to plan for next year's upgrades is here, and people have made their choices by now.

Personally, I would be curious to see a few more numbers, some follow up on how many of those reporting considering Linux as an alternative actually went with it, and what the reasons were. I was actually surprised by the relatively low number of CIOs considering it as an option both last year and this year; the Vista upgrade has been sufficiently controversial and encumbered that I thought it would be a natural point for otherwise content Microsoft shops to at least consider some of their other options. That was definitely the advice that I gave-an platform change is an platform change, the costs of rolling out Vista in terms of training and actual process hours aren't going to be significantly different from those of Linux (maybe less, considering how hard Linux coders have worked to mimic XP's UI, and how considerable Vista's departures from those conventions have been).

I suppose that the factors that militated against taking that step back and looking at options were simple inertia and comfort. A lot of CIOs are too busy to take that look ahead; others are frankly frightened by such moves, preferring to stick with the known industry standard (chorus here: "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft!"). At any rate, I think the cards have fallen and we probably won't see a lot of additional discussion about such transitions until the water becomes roiled again in the course of future events.

You can read Information Week's more informative article on the study here.