Google to employees: 'Mac or Linux, but no more Windows'

[Fernbay]

We first heard rumors of this policy change a couple of months ago, but now it's made the papers: the Financial Times is reporting that Google is phasing out the use of Windows internally, as employees are migrated to either Linux or Mac OS X on machine turnovers or new hires. The policy change was precipitated in large part by the security breach attributed to Chinese hackers; Google's IT leaders apparently feel that Microsoft's OS represents too great a risk across the enterprise to leave it in place.

The story says that in January, subsequent to the security breaches, Windows installations on desktop computers were no longer allowed, although laptops were still eligible for Windows at the employee's discretion. Many Google staffers, however, were already heading for the Mac as a security measure, and at this point things have been pretty well laid down in stone: "Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval," according to one anonymous Googler quoted by the FT.

Google has long offered employees a choice of OS for their primary workstation, and some dissatisfaction with the new rules has been registered; however, the sentiment is apparently not that negative, considering the alternative possibilities. "It would have made more people upset if they banned Macs rather than Windows," says an unnamed employee. No doubt.

Business Insider suggests that Google's infrastructure represents about 20,000 Windows licenses that now will not be renewed or upgraded. Of course, the existing Wintel hardware will run Ubuntu Linux or the company's upcoming Chrome OS, but adding Mac OS X to the mix will mean purchasing Mac hardware. Maybe that's what the Steve-Eric Coffee Summit was about: truckloads of MacBook Pros heading for the Googleplex.

(As one commenter suggests below, this also means that malware developers may have new reason to focus their efforts on Mac OS X. Every silver lining has a cloud.)

With the biannual list of the the world over released, the following screenshot of a graph showing the operating systems used in those 500 peta-flop crunching machines, and produced by the University of California Berkeley, makes for an impressive visual glance at Linux’s dominance in Super Computing.



Check it out in its full interactive form @ to get down and dirty with the stats behind it.

Sadly Ubuntu doesn’t feature in the list breakdown, but given these rigs are used for number-crunching rather than World of Goo and twitter that’s no surprise!image

[Uncle Fester]

Gates got rich because his operating systems were responsible for creating the computer for the family home and as a second niche creating a better typewriter for offices.

Unix/Linux was always for high end computing and to my knowledge the OS of choice for (Inter)network servers. Even in the 80's we only used DOS and later in the 90's NT in the front end and communicated through UNIX servers to the telephone hardware stations when I did some jobs for ALCATEL.
... and when I had call outs it usually had something to do with the front desk.
It surprises me that MS Windows actually managed to sneak onto Workstations given it's infamous unreliability issues from the beginning on until today. IMO I can only explain that with the laziness of operators unwilling to separate consumer & hobby computing from work and the industry knew that.

Today's demands are far to great and failure or vulnerabilities are becoming less and less acceptable.
Perhaps MS should build a consumer friendly OS around a UNIX kernel that runs popular MS apps

...well, Apple did