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."

Comments

One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Re:One reason:

[sql*kitten]

Yeah but lots of companies went out of business for doing it (one of my former included)

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

Re:One reason:

[debrain]

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

A company's choice of server OS, web server, and database may, in my experience, significantly contribute to their untimely demise.

To follow this thread, up to your argument:
1. (original thread) Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.
2. (my reply) Companies have gone bankrupt for buying Microsoft.
3. (your reply) Companies don't go bankrupt for buying MS Word.

Do you not see any logical fallacy here? That being, your implication that the only software Microsoft offers that may possibly contribute to a company's demise is the choise of word processor. This is most certainly not the case.

What's more, your assertion that MS Word would not contribute to a company's demise is unsatisfied; I find it fairly likely that MS Word would cost more than any other word processing solution given the plethora of bugs, crashes, worms and viri targeting it. In a competitive scenario, a company not hindered by these costs would have a strategic, and hence competitive, advantage over one that is, and hence have greater survivability. Most (All?) Federal Banks use Lotus Notes for a damned fine reason (it's not a big target).

Cheers.

Re:One reason:

[neuroticia]

Err. That seems more like a story of professional incompetence than it does of crap software. MS software (aside from putting their settings in half a freaking million places) is fairly easy to use when you know which buttons to press. It's just a bad idea for other reasons. Take your "points" where you can score them, and don't try to bash every single aspect of MS--it just makes you seem like a lunatic zealot, and makes people less likely to believe anything positive about whatever platform you do advocate.

The proper way of going about it is to say "yeah, MS software does some cool stuff, and has some cool features. BUT it's unstable and insecure--and those are the two primary concerns when you're running a server." That's something people can't really argue with (although they try. ;) ) and it makes them think rather than chalking you up as a nutcase dirty-hippie Linux/BSD/OS X freak.

It also gives you more weight in the tech world. I mean. "Moron A can't set up a Windows server and make it work" isn't really a news-breaking story. I mean. Moron A probably can't set up any other server and have it work, either. In fact, Moron A probably can't tie his shoes or walk in a straight line--that doesn't mean the shoes he's wearing are a bad product, it merely means he's an idiot. The shoes might be a bad product in ADDITION to his being an idiot, but.. Err. It's much more impressive when someone who's bright and intelligent and wonderful can't set up the OS. Really.

-Sara

Re:One reason:

[bluGill]

Ahh, but did they do it RIGHT? Now did they do it right by design, or accident? Do they even know the difference? Novice admins should never be left loose on a production network. Therefore you choice of target users is incorrect and any results you draw from them are inapplicable. Your target users for configuring DHCP are expirenced admins, who mostly have done it before on this server and need to update something. I don't want a novice messing with my dhcp server configuration, I want one of the few guys I work with who know our particular network's configuration.

DHCP is simple at first, it didn't take me an hour to set it up at my home. (I don't count time to download and install, since I just did "cd /usr/ports/network/ ; ls *dhcp* ; cd dhcp-foo, make install, and then went to lunch) I'm sure I could have done my simple home network in less time in windows. I don't think I could have done a complex corporate network in that time. In the real world you have to enter each non-dhcp configed machine manually (and we had plenty of them).

I should also point out that in my hour of configuring dhcp I saw lots of options that I could provide. How many of them could have dhcp return which font server to use, just to point out one? (Note, picked because it is X11 specific and therefore windows only sites don't need it) I doupt windows provides that option easially.

And DHCP is simple to configure compared to some things I've worked with.

Start picking the right users for your focus group and I'll pay more attention to your results.

MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two reasons we're staying with MS. First off is the consistency across the board. It's not just a glib overgeneralisation to say that it helps admin, and from what I've seen of OSX server it has much the same advantages. To Admin one system is to admin another. To update, run, install and fix a service is consistent, and the need to retrain when a service is added just isn't there. We DO use Linux and BSD in some of our systems, and while the people exist who can administer those, the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other. Just an observation.

The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients.

Those are two features of "going MS" that are important to us. Some people will not find they need both, or even either. I won't comment on their business practices, but suffice it to say that's their choice.

Re:MS consistency

[timotten]

I'll bite! :)

To update, run, install and fix a service is consistent ... the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other.

That's an illusion. A good deployment requires a firm understanding of what is being deployed, and that requires the same amount of work for Apache or IIS. Your employee just feels more secure about configuring IIS with a GUI because it seems to require less creative input, and it allows him to deflect creative mistakes onto Microsoft rather than accept them himself.

Re:MS consistency

[JohnFluxx]

This reminds me of databases.

When I started off in the database field, I developed a few databases for about 4-5 companies, using MS-Access. It was all gui, click and play..

Then I went to university, and learnt database theory, and use oracle. At first I thought it was a step back, since it wasn't as easy any more to produce a database. Then I realised that far more of the effort goes into designing the database than implementing it, and that the GUI almost discourages designing first.

67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot

[Michael's a Jerk!]

xxx% are planning to upgrade to linux anytime soon

This should be taken with a grain of salt. 'Planning' and doing are 2 entirely seperate things. The fact is, (ans I'm going to be modded down by the linux crowd) is that windows is cheap. Why?

You don't have to train your users over again. You don't need expensive unix/linux admins (MCSE's are a dime a dozen - and most are good, too. Don't let elitism clud your jusgement). More software works on windows (WINE is not always the answer).

Linux is nice, but it isn't ready for the desktop quite yet.

Why buy Microsoft ?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

One reason :

unmount /dev/hdd /cdrom

I love everything Linux, but seriously, what will my secretary do when her CD is stuck in the drive despite hitting the eject button furiously, and she doesn't know how to get it out ? And yes, I know you can learn Linux and it's not that hard and yada yada, but she's already taken months to leave her typewritter and get going under Windows. You think my secretary is an old thing from another generation that has become rare ? think again.

So, yeepee-doo for Linux, let Linux take over the world, but please leave my secretary under Windows so she can do her work.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[tortap-0]

"unmount /dev/hdd /cdrom"

Oh, so your "secretary" would have problems with Linux... Right.

Hee hee, looks more like _you_ couldn't figure it out. With the cdrom in fstab you would just need /cdrom not the dev-part and btw, the command is 'umount' :P

Human Resources

[locarecords.com]

Regardless of the wishes of the open source community to write off Microsoft, it is one thing having every part of their product range being available and usable o/s... it is quite another to have the status and prestige of a multinational to implement them.

Corporate buyers and technologists are notoriously conservative and things like long term longevity of the company, market capitalisation, project history, locked in technologies and pure tradition (ie we have always bought from Microsoft) have a massive impact on buying decisions.

As someone once remarked to me, "No-one gets sacked for buying Microsoft software"...

So I think they'll be around mighty longer than anyone anticipates (providing they don't make a huge technological miscalculation). And judging by their past aggressiveness and competitiveness I would say they can't be written off yet.

When pricing a firm there is much much more to it than saying that someone else sells everything they do.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[KDan]

Hey, the logitech MX700 just kicks the ass of my old Intellieye explorer. It's really good looking, rechargeable, wireless, optical, high-frequency (good for games), works fine under both windows and linux (linux with a couple of buttons missing but I've got a mail logitech support sent me which explains how to get them working under linux - not something I'd expect from M$ - but haven't had time to go through it yet), etc. It's just perfect in every respect.

Daniel

Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Billly Gates]

Thank Microsoft for inventing the idea of Visual Basic and obstructions to the c++ standard that make it difficult if not impossible to port apps. This was done on purpose to force bussinesses to be dependant on Windows. Fact of the matter is during the 90's they viewed Microsoft as the good guys needed to set standards. Now its payback.

I remember the old saying "Don't code it include it!". The point is that your apps are really just wrappers for some ms specific code.

If it took 30 years to replace cobal/IBM 370 code then it will take 30 years to get the com/.net/Windows back out again. I predict Windows to be used for 30 or 40 years thanks to the proprietariness of the whole environment.

Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc.

Sadly many companies today are ready to jump on the .net train even though they are critizing Microsoft's licensing practices. They will surely be locked in. Infact according to the Gartner group %50 of all companies are looking at .net migration! They just do not get it. Today its mostly Unix based but they are afraid that java might die under the almighty Microsoft view .net as a safe way to avoid risk managment.

On another note Microsoft does make the best Office suites around. Not to mention I found no ide that approaches VC++. Vi is cool as a great text editor for many different langauges but it does not have autoword completion, autoclass completetion, class browsing extra that VC++ has. Kdevelop sucks goatballs and only eclipse is close. Unfortunatly its for java development.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[evilpenguin]

Sadly many companies today are ready to jump on the .net train even though they are critizing Microsoft's licensing practices. They will surely be locked in. Infact according to the Gartner group %50 of all companies are looking at .net migration! They just do not get it. Today its mostly Unix based but they are afraid that java might die under the almighty Microsoft view .net as a safe way to avoid risk managment.

First, let me let you know my prejudices. I am a Linux advocate. I like Linux. I've developed software for Unix systems professionally for 14 years now. I have also become a Free Software advocate. This took a fair amount of time. I thought the right way to make money with software was to keep it closed and secret. I now think this is the right way for a small number of investors to make the largest possible amount of money out of skilled people who are not so well compensated. In a Free Software economy, programmers become like lawyers, doctors, and architects: professionals compensated for the quality of their practice.

So much for background. Even as an advocate, I think we must recognize the validty of the argument quoted above. When you have choices between propretary platforms, you must manage the risk. You must try to choose the winner. And it is difficult to find a market Microsoft has chosen to move into where it has not become the winner (most often by leveraging their OS monopoly, but we've had that fight already).

The only products that have gained ground against Microsoft in a market Microsoft dominates are Free Software products. Why? The corollary to the above argument. Microsoft can't destroy a Free product. Sun should GPL or BSD license their Java VM and SDK as soon as possible (given my view, I'd prefer the GPL, but I would welcome any license that meets the Debian Free Software Guidelines). They should invite public development. I think everyone in the open deveopment community would welcome their sitting as benevolent dictator over the project, a la Thorvalds, and it would guarantee that whatever happened to Sun, Java would go on.

Sure, businesses are careful, and belief in the Free Software model is ony slowly winning acceptance (with Linux, Apache, and Samba leading that), but one of the reasons people accept those products is the confidence in knowing those projects will go on. No risk of vendor disappearence. Sun's best bet to keep Java in front and on top is to open it up. They already give it away, now they need to let go.

As for the general topic of Microsoft vs. Free, obviously I believe Free can do the job and will eventually (I think) completely replace all closed commodity market niches, leaving only specialty vertical markets as potential closed markets. But this will take quite a while. It will take a generation or two, simply because the generation of programmers raised on Free Software has to become the generation of technical people making the decisions. People do not make choices on a rational basis, they rationalize their prejudices. They come up with evidence for what they already believe (me too -- objectivity is extremely difficult to attain) and reject evidence to the contrary.

Money is the thing that drives what little rationality there is in this debate.

One of the reasons I think the Free Software will ultimately win is simply that Free Software is always free, whereas Microsoft gets its developer mindshare on the pusher model (first few hits are free). Universities and Technical Colleges are using and teaching with Free Software more and more. The current high price of Linux people is due to the last decade of Microsoft pushing. The people who know *nix are the older, more experienced folks -- the more expensive folks. But the next generation is going to have broader background and skills. The cheap folks will know *nix AND Windows.

Those who accuse the Free Software camp of

Oh come off it.

[Lochin Rabbar]

What possible reason could there be for a technophobic secretary to need to mount a CD in the works machine. If she's not capable of coming to terms with the mount command then she shouldn't be installing software.

Linux is not a threat...

[Thanatiel]

People usually needs a (strong) motivation to move, even if it leads to a better state.
Linux is not a threat to Windows. The general behaviour of MS against it's custommers is.

Facts: (AFAIK)

_ Windows XP has been out for a while now.
_ With such an amount of time, there likely more hardware update needed (and applied) for a lot of computers.
_ A set of 3 changes triggers the mandatory registration process.

_ To have a locked computer on sunday morning because you just installed a RAM upgrade is really a pain. (*)
_ To have a very unpleasant MS guy on the phone Monday morning really improves your general bad feeling about MS and Windows. (**)

I know a few people who experienced that kind of story those last six months. Most were MS tolerant. Some are now planning to give a try to a Linux distribution (SuSE).

Since this kind of trouble is going to happen more and more, I think that MS is more a threat to itself than Linux.

(*) real story
(**) part 2 of the real story

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yeah, the activation centers here in the US are automated, also. But...

My company standardized on Office 2000 and upgraded all our machines from Office 97. The first few installs went flawlessly. We have an "always on" shared internet connection. The first few installs of Office 2000 hooked up, automagically registered and ran. Then, just about the time M$ released Office XP (odd timing that, eh? and less than 3 mos after we made major purchases to upgrade all of our systems to O2K), brand-new, just-out-of-the-box Office 2000 installs would NOT register automagically. I also could NOT use their Web-site based registration. No, the only way I could get registration numbers was to phone in and request one from a real person, a process that always takes at least 1/2 hour to an hour.

During upgrades to systems, I noticed that, even tho M$ says you should have the first 1 or 2 re-registrations automatically thru the Internet, I have always had to call starting with the 2nd activation!

This is an easy way for M$ to force product obsolescence. They make enough of a PITA that you upgrade just so you don't have to waste an hour on the phone every time you upgrade or replace major components in a system.

After about the 4th time, I located a pirated copy of their corporate version that did not require activation. We still have valid Office licenses and I have maintained enough documentation to survive an M$ audit.

We are legal, valid Office users but we were forced to locate a pirated copy of Office software in order to reduce the hassle associated with their (supposedly) anti-piracy measures.

As you said: not a very nice way to treat your customers.

Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[evil_roy]

Reasons MS works in corporate environments:

1. Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users

2. So many corporate apps that can be run on a variety of databases/servers, yet demand MS desktop OS's for their client app that is required. Many of these setups have no intention of moving to anything other than windows for the client side of things.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a troll. But some people may be fooled by these stupid statements. ext2fs can lose data, sure. It doesn't happen often. Soft updates are *not* the cure. With soft updates, things written to disk can occur over a minute after the application thinks they were written. Which means if you crash after saving your long document, it may be lost forever. Sure, soft updates maintain consistency, but it may be consistent with a few minutes ago, rather than right now. I'm not knocking BSD. I use it as well as Linux, and it's great, but it's not perfect.

The rest of the post is just more BS, of course. I merely wanted to clear up the soft updates issue, since lots of people actually think it's a perfect solution.

Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per client

[grolschie]

Many organizationss have Win2K clients that log into a Domain provided by a Linux box running SAMBA. Once set up properly, it can be a Domain Controller and also replaces many of the other tasks that a 2K Server does, and without the huge license fee for the server (based on the number of clients connecting).

Re:All in One.

[commodoresloat]

I thought that's what everybody said about Apple?

Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[danielrm26]

Because people who have businesses care very much whether or not they succeed or fail. Microsoft has succeeded, in most cases, to convince those that matter that if they go with the alternative, they are taking a risk with their business.

Microsoft, to most businesses, is the "safe bet". It's considered the superior choice only because it's mainstream.

The real threat will come to Microsoft not via some certain tech advance - it will come in the form of a slow penetration of anti-MS and pro-Linux gossip being spread throughout the business community. Once this happens the game will be over and MS will have to *totally* re-invent themselves - another product release won't save them.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[clonebarkins]

Once this happens the game will be over and MS will have to *totally* re-invent themselves - another product release won't save them.

Right, just like the MPAA re-invented themselves when people wanted to play DVDs on their linux boxen; or like the RIAA re-invented themselves when people wanted to download music.

Unfortunately, monopolies don't see new technology and an smaller customer base as a chance to redefine their strategies. Rather, they use it as a chance to flex their muscle--both market and political--to force the public to do what they want. Microsoft's involvement in the TCPA shows that they already know the threat of their demise and are taking preemptive steps to demolish that threat (cf. Bush's preemptive steps to demolish the "threat" of Iraq).

Reasons

[briancnorton]

Integration Support Cheap Admins 3rd party software That's really enough reasons, but the arguement is useless. Nothing will offer a mid to large businesses what they want at a reasonable price except running BOTH. It dosent suprise me that 25% of businesses are switching, but it dosent say they are jumping off the deck of the SS Microsoft. It just turns out to be more cost effective to offload some of the work onto cheaper Linux machines.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[subzerohen]

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. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.

Alpha support for ext2fs was added in 1993. So the FreeBSD fs from 2003 blows Ext2fs out of the water? No shit Sherlock.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).

Hmm the kernel help text doesn't say that ReiserFS support is experimental. But of course as an AC on /. you are a much more credible source

The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'.

Yeah, the only drawback they removed was the non journaling nature of EXT2FS.

Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. 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".

Yep, having full controll of the hardware platform and documentation will do that...

The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.

Lets compare it to Unix as you did above. I'd say the learning curve is almost non-existant. If a sheep farmer from Victoria Australia who used to use Windows (We actually have one in the Gentoo forums) can teach himself Linux so can a Unix sysadmin.

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.

That has not been my experience. If you find something that irritates you file a bug report.

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.

Yep, my Linux prinserver contains bad language. Better get rid of it.

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.

What is clear is that you have a chip on your shoulder concerning Linux. Considering that there are lots of companies currently using Linux it clearly is an option for some.

In the end...

[Realistic_Dragon]

Windows really has to change to be able to compete.

Open Source software offers you the advantage of a propritary in house solution (customisability, flexibility) without having to go away and autally write all the code yourself - just change the bits you want changed.

Windows solutions (shared source being something of a joke) offer you very little more support or indemnification (read the EULA and see what's covered!) yet take away your flexibility.

In the long run, support costs with someone like CSC being similar for Windows or Linux (unfairly IMO, they must be raking it in even more than normal on Linux contracts, but there you go) a business needs to work out if the costs of customising an OSS app to make it perfect are more than the costs of licensing Windows. Factor in the cost of lock in to a Microsoft format and the loss of control in the figures, and you have a basis of comparison for your company.

-And of course if you contribute your changes back to the commnity (which you don't _have_ to do with the BSDL or under the GPL if you do not distribute outside the company) you will suddenly find yourself with Karma:Excellent in the geek community, which may or may not be good for your business.

dissrespect is the core problem.

[twitter]

The turning point is here. Savour the moment and celebrate, but remember the mistakes others have made. This is a wonderful thing to see, equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crowd is running at the wall now and it will be demolished before the makers of propriatory software know what hit them. You should be careful of your own attitude and be kind to those still suffering under non free software.

Everyone should use free software, free software should be used for everything and no one should write software that is not free. Only free software truely respects the user in one very important sense: Free software understands that if you hide the source from the user, the user will do it themselves. All other software is built on the assummption that the author is so clever that no one else can do what they do. The users have rewritten everything and the day of propriatory closed source software is over. It was not easy for the authors or the users of free software to get here, but now it seems obvious that it's the easiest way to go.

This does not mean that people will not make a living coding. Free software is just as valuable as the closed source stuff it's replacing. Society has and will continue to find ways to support people who know how to make and use it. In fact, free software lowers the barriers of entry so that more people than ever will be able to use their tallents. The losers in this transition will be those who have made lots of money screwing people around with upgrade trains, broken file formats, broken 3rd party software and other forms of intentional waste built on dissrespect.

There are many people unfortunate enough to have started with non free software. The comercial software world was created along with the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reasonable reaction to that was the creation of free software movements, BSD and GNU being prominent. It has taken a long time to get from there to here and in the mean time, M$ provided a path of least resistance that many followed. It was a false path because of the core values of the comercial software world, but once emeshed in that trap it's difficult to get out. A friend gave me his 1987 copy of the Emacs manual. There is no doubt in my mind that had I installed emacs on the XT clone I bought in 1987 and learned it instead of Word Perfect 4.1, I would be better off today. As it is, I took a long trip down the M$ path through Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and through work 2000 and countless applications on top of those platforms. The effort put into learning the differences between those versions of software is much greater than the effort I've had to put into the free software I've learned since because free software does not impose useless changes on it's users. Those of you who are just comming into the world of computing are very lucky.

You can keep free software alive and give something better to the next generation of users if you remember to have respect for them. Those of you who lack respect for your neighbors will only repeat the mistakes others have made since the 1980s. All it takes is the wrong attitude for the walls to start going up again.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[smittyoneeach]

A moderate position might be that business should prefer a platform-agnostic approach to the greatest possible extent.
BillG and RMS are both bent on world domination, starting from different ends.
I thoroughly enjoy using free software. I haven't yet developed sufficient skill to contribute to a project (couldn't figure out how to link libraries in KDevelop, couldn't make sense of autoconf/automake until I found autoproject), and I've only contributed financially through the bookstore. Apparently, www.gnu.org is doing well enough.
I don't think that the walls against free software can ever go up again. The US can try to buttress the Monopoly Show ( or MS can expand its butt rest from the DOJ to the rest of the gubmint ) but the world at large is facing Redmond and yawning. How will, say, scientists doing genomics research collaborate if they can't use free tools, but spend their time dealing with the various exploits and incompatibilities?
No, paying an optional tax to a shadow government in Redmond will continue to lose appeal.
Of course, if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go? In all honesty, concern over economic turbulence has got to be running through some senior heads...

Red Flag.

[twitter]

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

It's an indicator. A company that wastes money on bad softare is probably wasting it elswhere too. The only places that will be running M$ junk soon are those so emeshed in red tape that they can't change a lightbulb without having a meeing, publishing a report and getting the proceedure authorized by upper management. It all adds up.

your secretary?

[twitter]

She's still crying for Word Perfect, which let her see codes in her documents and correct them the few times the program made mistakes or did not understand what she wanted. Chances are she will like being able to fix things under Linux better than pushing the reset button under Windoze. Oh yeah, she can get version 8 of Word Perfect as a native Linux binary. It works well, though I'd prefer they make a newer version.

You should have more respect for the secretary and let her make up her own mind. Tell her she can have Word Perfect back and see if you can stop her from figuring it out. Ha!

By the way, the next time your CD get's stuck try right clicking the little picture of a CD on your desktop and chose "unmount" or "eject". If that does not work try using the command, "umount" or making an alias for "unmount".

At a reasonable company the secretary would not need a CD drive. She should be able to ftp her pictures from home to the company picture share or get her music from the company music share. Under those cirumstances, I can imagine someone forgetting how to unmount a CD. There should be someone around who would sooth your furry and panic. Next time, just ask the secretary.

History....

[hugesmile]

The reason people will buy or recommend Microsoft may stem from being burned in the past. Your age may determine how many times you were burned...

Real world examples:

"We need to recommend Mac's. Apple was THE FIRST SERIOUS PC, and Mac was the first GUI. It is far superior to anything running on the PC." (1987)

"Novell has 80% of the Network Operating System market. Go with the defacto standard; the industry leader." (1992)

"The Netscape team INVENTED browsing. Deploy Netscape Communicator to the desktop. Their browser and mail client will continue to dominate the desktop." (1996)

"The ONLY serious competitor in palmtop computing is the Palm Pilot. Why consider anything else?" (1998)

You can say it again and again for Apache (market leader, practically invented the market), Java (re-invented the concept of write-once-run-anywhere), home gaming systems, and forty other technologies.

The bottom line is that you better have a GREAT reason to bet against "Dollar Bill". He knows that there's more to the market than superior products (in fact, product superiority is probably low on Microsoft's strategic list, behind good marketing, product interoperability, and spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

I think Microsoft's here to stay as long as Bill's driving the ship. Why bet my business by betting AGAINST Gates?

Re:History....

[sheldon]

Actually spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seems to be the hallmark of the Open Source world these days... :(

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[the eric conspiracy]

I think an important counter argument can be made against each of your points:

1. Manageability. If you think that Windows is unique and UNIX/Linux doesn't have comparable tools, it's because you have not worked with a comparable sized UNIX installation. Rdist and LDAP can do everything and more that SMS and Active Directory can. Furthermore they do it cross platform using open standards that are interoperable across a wide range of platforms.

2. Accountability. Baloney. Microsoft isn't accountable to ANYONE, including the Department of Justice. Sure, you can BLAME them, but that is not the same thing as accountability. What you are talking about is the old 'Nobody got fired for buying IBM' which is of course a dead letter these days. Accountability means that you can recover damages from somebody when it breaks, or you can switch to a different supplier. The former is impossible, and the latter is only possible if you are using open standards (i.e. Linux).

3. It's cheaper. Microsoft is cheaper? Have you factored in the costs associated with license compliance, the poor stability of Microsoft platforms compared to Linux, the forced site licensing that requires you to buy TWO licenses per employee for every software package? And hardware is cheaper? Since when? Linux uses the same hardware. The only real advantage Microsoft has with cost is due to vendor lock-in of their user base. And you know what? You PAY and PAY and PAY for that because Microsoft has you by the short hairs. License 6.0 is the shot across the bow. Microsoft got away with a major price increase in the middle of a recession, and they KNOW it. Wait 'till you see License 7.0.

People are not switching to Linux for fun. They are doing so because it gives them an advantage.

I like my job

[bigman2003]

If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?

I like getting paid to write software. If nobody bought software, I guess that programming would be a 'hobby' and not a 'profession'.

I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'.

I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer.

So why the hell do you want to give your work away for free? That's some crack that I ain't smokin'.

At this rate programmers will be like artists- all underpaid and 'struggling'.

Who the hell came up with the idea that my time, effort, and labor is not worth any money? Please don't offer my employer to replace me with something that is free. You may be on your moral high-horse, but what you are really doing is killing one more tech job.

Re:I like my job

[HalfFlat]

Almost all the software I get paid to write is written to allow my employer to do their work better, faster, or at all. Only a small portion is for distribution outside the company. Even if the distributed code were to be given away free of cost, the other code I write - which again, is by far the majority - would keep me employed and valuable to the company.

I would go so far as to say that most code written is written to perform some task for the people employing the programmer, rather than for resale.

That said, note that free (as in GPL) software does not mean that a company producing it gets no revenue. For starters, it need not be given to customers for free; while the customers can then create derivatives, redistribute source and so forth, they still need to buy the program in the first place. Given a choice of buying it with support from the vendor, or compiling it themselves from source gained from a 3rd party, many would (and do!) buy it from the vendor.

Further in products which contain a mixture of code and other material (for example, computer games, databases with data, etc.) the code component can be free-in-GPL and free-in-cost, while still generating revenue for the creators as part of a product which is very much not free.

You like being paid to write software. That's good, getting payed for practicing an art that (I presume) you enjoy and are skilled at. If free software became the norm, only one particular avenue of revenue for potential employers is removed, and it is one which probably does not account for more than a fraction of employed coders. There will still be many opportunities for you to practice your art. And with much free software available, you have a much greater opportunity to learn from and build upon the work of others, potentially allowing you to be a better and more efficient programmer.

Re:I like my job

[sjames]

Software still has to be written, maintained, and supported. At one time, there was little or no proprietary software. Most of it was either given away to sell mainframes, or written and maintained in-house to meet business needs. If priprietary software goes away, we'll simply return to that situation, just like waking from a nightmare.

I write Free software for a living. The biggest difference is that my license doesn't translate to 'all your base are belong to us' and I never have to reinvent my own wheel.

When Free software takes over, there will be MORE demand for programmers than ever. There are a great many proprietary apps out there that various businesses wish they could customise feature X or add feature Y. Proprietary software means that those customizations are simply out of the question, so that's one less position for a programmer. The money to pay the programmer's salary will come out of the licensing costs no longer paid out and from the administrative costs of license compliance that is no longer necessary.

The net result of Free software taking over is that a huge inefficiency in the economy will be removed. If any professions suffer because of Free software, it will be lawyers and redundant administrators.

Re:I like my job

[numark]

This brings up a common misconception. "Free" software, as the old adage goes, is "free as in speech, not free as in beer". In other words, free software manufacturers can most definitely sell their works for a profit. Think of Red Hat. They sell a boxed version of free software for $69.95, and what is the user buying? Not only the collection of free software, but also the support contracts, warranty, and other features that you can only get in a boxed version.

Another example is MySQL. One company sells support contracts for that software and makes quite a bit doing just that. But MySQL is free both in speech and beer. Yet they still make money helping people fix problems that they have with it.

Free software can make companies money, it's as simple as that. It's not that the companies are developing programs they pass around without any cost whatsoever. Programmers still earn money because their work still profits the company. In other words, the exact same thing that goes on with proprietary software, just shifting the philosophy around. The money is still there.

Re:I like my job

[An Onerous Coward]

"If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?"

You've completely missed the whole point of "free software." It's not about "giving away your hard work without compensation." It's about not placing encumbrances on those who receive the software from you.

"I like getting paid to write software. If nobody bought software, I guess that programming would be a 'hobby' and not a 'profession'."

I'm still a bit confused by your position. As long as there are things software doesn't yet do, somebody is going to have financial incentive to pay you to write it. And if there is something that software can already do, why in God's name should anyone have to pay you to re-implement it?

Or, in the instance of buggy code, people are still going to be paying people money to fix them. The only difference is, in the brave new world of free software, the person with the problem can go to any of a thousand programmers to get the fix, rather than having to go to the owner of the source code.

"I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'."

Well, I think the proprietary people are, erm...well, not really idiots. Let's just say we don't share the same values. To play with your analogy, it's the same as a plumber installing the pipes in your house, then forcing you to sign a contract stating that you cannot modify the plumbing system yourself or go to any competing plumber to fix a problem.

But the analogy you're using doesn't map very well. With plumbers and plumbing, if a person goes to one house and fixes all the leaks and adds stubs for the new bathroom the house owner is planning, that benefits only the owner of that specific house. Because code can be copied with almost zero marginal cost, making improvements to the code benefits everyone.

Unlike the plumbing scenario, this one raises the question, "How many times should a person be paid for the same work?"

"I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer."

I believe that the vast majority of software (something on the order of 80%) is written entirely for in-house needs. People are being paid to write that software, and being paid well. There will always be situations where free software widget X doesn't do quite what is needed. Unpaid developers are going to work on whatever they happen to find interesting, and his interests are seldom going to coincide with those of the company wanting the new feature. If the company wants the feature, they have to fork over some cash to get to the front of the line.

So why the hell do you want to give your work away for free? That's some crack that I ain't smokin'.

There have been a lot of surveys on precisely this question (minus the crack pipe). The important reasons, in no particular order, are:

1) To show off, and get some fame among software enthusiasts.
2) To work on something interesting and useful to them, rather than "yet another e-business solution."
3) To make the world a hippy utopia.
4) To hone skills.
5) Intellectual challenge.

Now, as a self-professed desirer of paychecks, you might be most interested in #1. A sense of community often develops around projects. People are recognized for their work. People make a name for themselves by producing code. When said highly credible people find themselves between jobs, they have a community of friends in the software industry.

Oh, and being able to say "I built feature X into project Y" sounds

Re:Two more advantages to add.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows' general interface has been pretty much consistent from Windows 95 all the way up to Windows XP at the desktop level

You're kidding, right? It used to be that the menu options would change from version to version (my pet peeve is Internet Explorer). But then they made it a hundred times worse by changing the menu options around while you used the fucking program!.

Unmatched hardware support. Practically all the the PC-compatible hardware...

You see the problem with that statement?

Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Quoth the AC:

Yeah, because LOTS of enterprises run Office on their servers, right? Please RTFA.

If you had R'd TFA then you'd spot that a lot of it does relate to things other than the OS side of the market, and many of the claims made are general and across the board. In fact, from the original article, and citing a guy from SuSE of all places:

"The concern is the user's experience," Migliaccio noted. "The business user doesn't know much about the operating system or interact with it. The question is, do [the applications] provide the functionality they need, and can [IT] support them?"

Some of the other more telling quotes from the article follow.

Five years ago, the answer would have been easy. With the dominant development tools, client operating system and client applications, Microsoft owned a certain portion of the enterprise

That is still true, if anything more so today than it was five years ago. MS still totally dominate the desktop. In particular, their Windows development tools and office suite still completely outclass the OS equivalents. To give credit where it's due, a couple more years at this rate and OpenOffice could be a real threat. I haven't seen any open source project currently in development that's even close to Visual Studio.

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.

Because of course, open source things are immune to bugs and security problems... not. If you really think "almost everything" that was once unique to Microsoft now has a serious open source competitor, you haven't been looking very carefully.

On the desktop side, Linux is also providing viable alternatives to Windows. For example, Linux vendor SuSE recently introduced Office Desktop, a Linux product that includes a copy of Sun StarOffice 6.0, which is a competitor to the Microsoft Office suite.

It may be a competitor, but it ain't a better product. It's got a way to go before it challenges either the raw power or the ease of use of the Microsoft suite. For geeks who are happy to play with new toys, it's great, and maybe in the future it will be great for Joe Average as well, but enough with the kidding ourselves, OK? It isn't there yet.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

"[StarOffice] may be a competitor [to M$Office], but it ain't a better product."

And here's an example of how true that is (and this isn't meant as a flame, tho I'm sure some will read it that way):

I hate, loathe, despite, can't stand, and do everything I can to avoid using WinWord; the whole way the program works is an exercise in disorganization and "you can't do thats". And I don't like the rest of M$Office much either; IMO, Powerpoint's design positively stinks.

I tried StarOffice 5.x for Win32... and, well, if it were the ONLY alternative to M$Office, I'd gladly embrace WinWord and Powerpoint. StarOffice was *that* annoying and inadequate. Its word processor reminds me of nothing so much as a bad miscegenation of Wordstar 5.x and DOSWord6. And it's SLOW!! (Nothing else ran that poorly on that machine, including OfficeXP.) I gather SO 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.

Thankfully, there's still the WordPerfect suite. (For a while.. :(

Re:Quotes from the article

[rowanxmas]

You would be zippy to if you were loaded at startup and never taken out of memory, and had on OS desinged around you.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Fred_A]

The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows]

I never understood this gripe. From what I've seen (I haven't really used any version since Word 2) the MS stuff starts faster than OOo, but since I'm going to spend hours using the package after I've started it, what do I care that it takes 10 seconds more to load ? I hardly consider that a criteria to base the choice of an office suite on...

Exchange?

[Moridineas]

It seems to me that the one missing link in open source software replacements is some kind of replacement for MS exchange.

I would LOVE to be able to have some kind of solution that could do group calendaring, mail, and shared addressing. As it is now I'm using cyrus imapd, a webmail program, a different LDAP web gateway, and a different web calendaring program. We had used a trial of exchange about 4 years ago, and people still miss the features (even though we didn't stick with exchange due to cost)

What percent are replacing Linux with Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the article says that 25% of CIOs are in the process of switching from Windows to Linux, I think it would be important to know the percentage of switchers from Linux to Windows, or how many have decided that they need a Windows presence in their server farm after all.

10 and 20 years ago, you didn't need Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, you could have been running OS/2 and Corel on the desktop. Or you could have been a Mac shop. The servers ran Novell or BSD. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.

Twenty years ago, you could have been running DR-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 on the desktop. Or you could have been an Apple 2 shop. The servers ran Unix System 7 or VMS. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.

Microsoft is stronger today than it was in either of those periods.