A Small Company Moves Away From Microsoft

Water Paradox writes: "A couple of years ago our company was firmly entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing business. All of our development was in Visual Basic and related proprietary tools. Open Source / Free Software advocates were a minority. Last week we made the switch from VB to Open Source development (Apache, PHP, my SQL, etc) on a Win32 box. This decision was made quickly, but came after eight months of evaluation. I wrote a short article about it here: Moving from Microsoft to Open Source, which may be useful to other folks contemplating the same switch. Yes, we're even proposing Win32 Apache as our default server, since it has been reasonably stable for us over eight months."

Comments

The problem...

[bconway]

...which I've run into with my current company, is that Microsoft aims for the big companies (and smaller ones too, of course) and gets them so firmly entrenched that a move just isn't possible. I'd love to move our mail server to something that doesn't crash every week, but with a few thousand users, it's just not going to happen. It's a good read, though.

Why stick with windows

[MrBlack]

After making the change to Microsoft development tools why did you stick with Win32? Persumably new PCs that you buy can be installed with your favourite distro, and no doubt you will want to keep a few Windows boxen around for your legacy VB code etc. My other question is why did the developers make this decision? This seems to be more of a business decision to me, not a decision that developers should make. Developers should make technical decisions and business people should make business decisions. If can achieve you goals using VB or open source tools, then the question of which tool-set to use becomes a business one rather than a technical one. Which tools are most productive (so costs are lower)? Which tools are cheaper to purchase? (once again - so costs are lower - but this is less of an issue than tool productivity, since productive tools will usually pay for themselves quite easily). Which tools are more widely supported (to mitigate risk)? Where do our existing strengths lie? Don't get me wrong, I think open source tools can hold their own from a business perspective as well as a technical perspective, I just don't think business decisions should be made by technical people (unless they are also the business people). Developers always get pissed off when sales/marketting says "we can deliver X in 3 months". The business people are making a technical decision. Technical people making business decisions is no different. BTW if you're a VB shop moving to Open Source try Python and wxwindows (if you need a gui) and straight python (if you don't need a gui). You'll find the change very pleasant.

Re:Why stick with windows

[MrBlack]

I DID read the article, thanks very much, (although perhaps I did skip over the last part because I didn't remember reading anything about consulting the owner). I was quite convinced by the author's reasoning, but I was just questioning why (it seemed when I read it that) technical people were making a very major business decision with a lot of potential ramifications. Apart from this one paragraph mentioning the owner the rest of the article makes it sound as though the decision was made in a vaccum (i.e. one day the developers all had a meeting and decided to make a MAJOR change for our company). I'd still argue that a decision like "should we use visual basic or C++" is a business decision which should be made based on a number of things, including (but not limited to) technical considerations. Perhaps it is just my perception (or I'm smoking crack), but I think a number of things developers consider when chosing tools/languages/whatever are business considerations (Like productivity for example). From a purely technical perspective C++ is far superior to visual basic, but many developers might choose it for certain types of projects (where the limitations of VB aren't going to be tested) because they know (or think) they can be more productive in it. Having established that all programmers are also shrewd business-people at their core, now all we need to do is get sales/marketting to allow themselves to tap the innate technical knowledge they all posess and bring it to bear in their daily business dealings %{8^).