Some interesting quotes:

   "Siemens Business Systems, the $6 billion global IT consulting
    and outsourcing company, has conducted extensive testing with
    real-world, non-technical workers and is declaring that Linux
    has matured as a desktop and will quickly vault to the #2
    most-installed OS in the world."

   "Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's
    testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in
    enterprise settings, believes that Linux will grow quickly as
    a desktop OS because it can deliver equal productivity at
    significantly lower costs than Windows in very large enterprise
    environments -- installations of 4,000 to 40,000 desktops."

   "McNutt says that when Siemens, with 33,000 employees in 44
    countries, initially evaluated Linux as a productivity desktop,
    it saw little utility outside of technical departments. 'We
    didn't see Linux on the desktop as a major market, but we were
    wrong.'"

   "However, McNutt, interviewed by phone from Frankfurt, says
    Siemens has been prodded to investigate the viability of
    Linux on the desktop by customers who are both impressed
    by the success of Linux servers and annoyed by Microsoft's
    pricing and licensing policies."

   "The stakes are high, says McNutt: even a single day of
    productivity lost to technology issues like version upgrades,
    multiplied by 10,000 or more workers, quickly shows up on
    enterprise customers' balance sheets, and that's very bad
    news for the CIO. So, while lower IT costs are 'very important'
    to large customers, maintaining productivity is even more
    critical."

   "That's why testing was conducted with 'secretaries and
    managers, not IT people.' McNutt believes that the Ximian
    desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red
    Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what
    most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade:
    one day to acquaint users with the desktop, and one day to
    introduce the OpenOffice suite."

   "McNutt went on to say that Ximian's suite -- consisting of a
    Gnome-based Linux desktop, Evolution mail and calendar app, a
    tweaked OpenOffice suite, and Red Carpet admin tools -- can be
    deployed in very large enterprises at lower cost and with no
    greater disruption than a Windows upgrade, and with significant
    savings going forward. McNutt says that Linux will save 20% to
    30% in administration costs, 50% in hardware costs, and 80% in
    licensing fees."

   "Siemens has no 'religious' attachment to a particular distro
    or desktop environment. Before settling on Ximian, Siemens
    evaluated plain vanilla Gnome and KDE as well. Siemens found
    KDE to be more 'Windows-like' than Gnome, but that lead to
    problems when non-technical users expected a more Windows-like
    experience. Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was 'different
    enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be
    less like Windows, which led to fewer adoption problems.'"


Full article (with more interesting qoutes) at:
    http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/08/13/1424212

I am asking myself: Has this thrust been prompted be the recent
publication of the KDE <--> Windows XP usability study,
conducted by 'relevantive AG'?

Cheers,
Kurt