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Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?
zymano writes "This yahoo article says that almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices and that in a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about 25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux."
This isn't my experience at all. I maintain two servers. One is a Windows 2000 server, the other runs the standard RedHat offering (not the enterprise version.)
The Redhat server just works. I never have any downtime, it's never crashed, I've never lost any data -- the thing just sits there, ticking away in the background, doing what it's supposed to do.
The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse. Administration isn't at all transparent -- you fill in a few tick boxes, and pray that it's going to do what the manual says it will do. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things just stop working, with no apparent reason. (File replication was the last thing that just 'broke'.)
With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.
The last big problem is interoperability. With the linux server, connectivity just works. With the Windows server, it's forever disappearing from view.
Both OSes do have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I don't see that Windows has any advantage in either stability or ease of maintenance.
Yes, the configuration of Apache is quite different to many other programs ('wildly different' is somewhat over the top - at heart, configuring almost all Unix programs invloves editing text files).
But is the configuration process for IIS really that similar to Exchange? Not really - they're very different tasks, so in many ways this isn't really surprising.
As for support, IBM and many others will be happy to offer 24-hour help at the right-price - Free software might not cost anything to get, but it's certainly not free to run. Of course, you don't get 24-hour help for Windows by default either.
The major difference between Microsoft solutions and Open Source solutions is in terms of flexibility - instead of getting a 'black box' which you can do little to change, you can adapt the software to your business. There's no way Microsoft can compete with this under the terms of their current licensing, and ultimately this is why Open Souce software will come to dominate computing.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
It cracks me up when I read people complaining about mounting and unmounting disks. I haven't had to do any of this for a very long time: the last few Mandrake installs (at least!) came with automount or supermount or whatever it's called, and it just works.
And don't think that the disk won't get "stuck" in Windows: it just means that the only alternative is to reboot the machine to unstick it, not type a oneliner into a command line. Just make a link to a shell script, and everyone should be happy.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
I don't have experience running any truly important systems, but the boxes I have administered have required almost zero maintenance. Unless I go and screw something up, I have found in my experience that it'll keep on chugging along. Besides the occassional ssh upgrade, I havn't had to touch anything on my NAT box since I installed it three years ago. It Just Works.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
References please. If you are going to make statements this damning you are obligated to provide data backing you up.
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Of all of the computers I have owned in the past seven years, all ran linux and one of them crashed once for a reason not attributed to hardware failure. This bug was reported to the kernel developers and was fixed within a few hours.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
Given a little work by the admin, linux can be dumbed down as much as you need it to be (corporate environment assumed). Oh, you ever installed one of the BSDs? I assure you, linux is nothing. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against the BSDs, they are damn fine operating systems in their own right)
The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
And would you like to tell us precicely what tools you are speaking of, as well as what your major beef is with them? Or how about one step better: go file some bug reports!
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
Attacking the people you are setting your case against is a sure sign of a weak argument. Also see last paragraph.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
So what are you reccomending for us to use? I beg of thee, please share your infinite knowledge.
E pluribus unum
Microsoft products require licensing, for example Windows 2000 Server requires a "Client Access License" for each connection, where as Linux does not have such a scheme, making Linux servers handle an unlimited amount of connections or you can set the maximum number connections. Making Linux Servers better then Microsoft Servers.
You can configure a Linux Server once and leave, it contune to run for a very long time, where Microsoft Server requires more frequently changing configurations.
Microsoft systems have hidden cost unlike Linux.
Where did you get that information? I went to nyse.com and did a "Symbol Lookup" for Microsoft, which sent me to this page showing that Microsoft is a NASDAQ company.
So obviously it's not "now traded on the NYSE." Is it going to be?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.