Verizon Switches Programmers to Linux

wackysootroom writes: "According to this article at News.com, Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice. The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000." jeffmurphy noted the same story, and wonders "What kind of (Windows) desktops were they buying previously at an average cost of $22k? It seems like software alone wouldn't account for that big of a cut."

Comments

$22k per machine?

[TechnoLust]

I wondered about that, too. Then I read this in the article:

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle.

That seems to me like they were using mostly HP-UX machines. It's coming from the news media, so the figures are probably exaggerated anyway.

$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[Zwack]

Linux, a clone of Unix, is similar enough that programmers don't need the more expensive Unix workstations

That average of $22,000 per desktop was not for Windows machines. They were buying machines for their Unix developers to work on... Sure they bought the top of the range hardware from Sun/HP. I've never yet met a developer who would argue that they could do their job with a bottom of the line machine.

Z.

They were using Gold plated desktops of course ...

[Bob Loblaw]

... with diamond encrusted, platinum mice and padded leather keyboards.

Now their computers are made of pressed particle-board.

EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Two years ago the HP C3600 workstation, single-CPU 1gig RAM dual 9gig SCSI hard drives went for just over $20,000. Add in hardware and software maintenance, then any upgrades/software (like HP Ansi C compiler) and $22,000 is not a lot of money.

These machines have been HPs Workstation line for a while, it looks like they were with HP, so yes, they're asving $19,000/desktop.

Savings.

[saintlupus]

Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice.

I'm surprised they didn't just fire all the programmers, to save the maximum amount of cash.

--saint
(bitter ex-Verizon employee.)

Verizon to Microsoft....

[wowbagger]

"Can you hear me now? GOOD!"

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ptomblin]

You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies don't work like garage shops. Generally, the bigger the company, the more likely you are to be bombarded with documents written in Word, Power Point presentations, MS Project files, etc, from the ever increasing levels of management above you, secretaries below you, and ancilliary support personell (graphic designers, QA departments, documentation, tech support, etc) beside you. 50% of it is crap that you can safely ignore, 35% of it is crap that you can't tell if it's crap until you read it, and the other 15% actually applies to you.

Besides MS Office files, my current nightmare consists of Lotus Notes, the single worst computer application ever written, and Photoshop. Thankfully, Office, Notes and now Photoshop all run under Crossover Office.

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[kawika]

>> Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey

Sounds like you didn't know that developers can get every business and OS product that Microsoft makes for every international language in the MSDN Subscription on DVD for $2,500. Most US developers would only need the Professional subscription which is $1,200. That includes MS Office, Visual Studio and all the compilers, Project, SQL Server, SDKs, DDKs, every version of Windows since 95, and a year of updates. The MSDN versions of most products allow 10 licenses, which is plenty for most developers. The price of the Windows licenses alone far exceeds the cost of the subscription.

>> Later, when and if they got enough sales, they'd reconsider XP.

I don't know their application so I can't say for sure, but in most cases that's ass-backwards. You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

differences in how processors treat numbers

[Skapare]

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle. "It's now working, but what a mess," the employee added.

Translation:

We were dumb and wrote endian-dependent code, such as accessing multi-byte numbers by loading one character at a time. We assumed the high-order bytes were first, but with the Intel processor, it's the other way around. So we had to go back and re-do it all over again. Don't worry, we'll find some way to blame management. They told us to write endian-dependent code; yeah, that's right.

Isn't it ironic?

[adam613]

Verizon refused to set me up with their DSL service when they found out that one of my computers was running Linux. They told me it wouldn't work. Even after I said I would hook the DSL up to my win2k box.

Interesting.

[tshak]

Are you sure it's their programmers? I just read a big writeup on how they saved tons of money on servers since they've upraded to the .NET platform.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[jc42]

> You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

Not necessarily. What these folks were building was some fancy-schmancy high-quality sound-studio software. One of the problems with running such stuff on Windows now is that they all come with MS Media Player. When you run any of its components, any "non-approved" sound software simply dies and needs to be re-installed before it can be used again. If you want to be on Media Player's non-hit list, you need to license it to Microsoft. This means that you effectively lose the rights to your software, and Microsoft controls what you can do with it.

I wasn't privy to their talks with MS's licensing people, but I know the result was a minor bout of depression. This had a lot to do with their looking seriously at OSX and Linux. I also got the impression that, after they talked to a few professional sound people, they were even more comfortable with ignoring Windows and going with the other two platforms.

Anyone else have comments to add to this? Maybe it should be a new topic? Maybe it can all get rates flamebait?

From a (former) Verizon programmer

[cporter]

I worked at Verizon on the east coast '96 - '98 when they were Bell Atlantic.

While I had a P133 at home, we had 40Mhz sparcstations on our desk. 256MB RAM, 320MB HDD. Had to run most of our apps off of the UE10K in the data center if we wanted decent performance. Got busted for doing so, occasionally. Nobody had anything near top-of-the-line. Not even the admins.

It was actually a great environment to work in. The application architecture had been designed by Bellcore, the now-non-existant technology company for the Baby Bells.

The endian-ness cited in the article is mainly due to legacy sources. On the software front-end side, we never had to deal with it. (And I learned a whole hell of a lot about Motif) On the data side, though, we had to deal with endian-ness and EBCDIC-to-ASCII nastiness via a stupid gateway that just injected null into any byte stream that contained non-printable characters. Zero-terminated C strings don't like nulls. At least I got to do some Java.