Some three score years ago, a meeting in Munich played a pivotal role in determining the course of a world war. As that Bavarian city gets set to roll out Linux to the desktops of its 14,000 knowledge workers, it might evolve into the most important battle yet in the escalating war between Windows 2000/XP and Linux.

It is increasingly common to see "Linux in the enterprise" articles. When I saw the story in a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal, though, the word "desktop" jumped out at me. Linux at the desktop is almost unheard of. Clearly, the technology planners believe that costs will be lower and productivity higher.

The story's mention of Munich's bureaucrats sent my mind back to the mid-1980s when I was technology manager for BMW of North America doing an overseas stint. Certainly, productivity wasn't high back then. To be "legal," I needed both a work permit and a visa. All I can remember is that I had to have a visa before I could get a work permit and a work permit before I could get a visa.

While Munich is neither the world's largest city nor the most complex computing environment, it is a "marquee" account. Should the conversion be successful, a lot of large companies would see Linux in a whole new light. Conversely, should the project be scrapped - Linux fails to deliver - and Microsoft comes in to save the day, "Remember Munich" will become the slogan on every Microsoft salesperson's lips.

I bet that the project will be successful - ironically in no small part because of work that Microsoft has done to Webify its applications. It has integrated Web technology so effectively into its key products that, even without Microsoft technology at the desktop, Linux end users still can conduct usual, Microsoft-centric "corporate" computing.

Microsoft Exchange provides a perfect example. While I don't know whether this is an issue in Munich, Exchange is the e-mail of choice for vast numbers of businesses and government agencies worldwide. For them, a solution without Exchange and its Outlook client is no solution at all.

It is no surprise that Microsoft's "flagship" Outlook client always has been built on the native Windows operating system. Some years ago, Microsoft first bent to the will of the 'Net by creating a terrible active server page implementation of the Outlook client that it called Outlook Web Access. This was built largely in recognition of the fact that synchronizing Outlook across low-speed links was impractical if not impossible.