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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."
Maybe they should !
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
We polled 4 CIOs and 1 of them said they're replacing Microsoft with Linux.
I always love when they quote figures from a survey that was conducted, but don't give any details such as size or region (US only or world wide?).
And keyboards! Until recently, I had always used Microsoft mice but that IBM optical mouse (with the blue wheel) finally won me over.
Come to think of it, Microsoft releases some damn fun games too. I can't wait until they realize that they should start porting them to *nix to prop up their profits.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
"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."
Yes, but who supplies your support? If it was Microsoft there would be no market for the likes of CSC and EDS who make a fortune out of support contracts because Microsoft support is not adequate.
If you have to pay someone for 24x7 support you may as well pay them for support no a reliable platform that is far better suited for 24x7 operations.
The fact that OSS has worse support is a myth - OSS comes with a good developer base that you (or your support contractor) can tap into, and Windows comes with the somewhat inferior MSDN _and that's about it_. Everything else you have to pay for one way or another.
Beep beep.
Buy the poor woman a Mac. You know it makes sense. My wife runs an all-woman business, the office is full of Macs (Linux servers) and, you know what? Support is virtually nil. When she had PCs, we had constant training issues. I don't fully understand it myself, it just seems to happen.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I'm an analyst for IBM Global sevices and I work out of the RTP main campus site... A few weeks ago on break, I decided to take a walk around the hardware labs, and to my suprirse I found about 10 new Mac OS X workstations being configured... I talked with one of the techs who said they were using them because they are unix and therefore can run many of the apps they use right out of the box... I asked them if it had anything to do with the 970 development and he said he could not commment... It was ironic to say the least to see that the computers in the lab that actually had the *most* IBM hardware in it (logicboard, harddrive, cpus) had an apple logo on the front... Who needs micosoft? Obviously not us...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Which is why RedHat is Oracle's choice of a database OS.
Linux covers a wide variety of distributions, you can't tell me that Debian or Slackware aren't stable reliable Linux distros.
What's all this maintainence you are referring to? sounds like biased FUD to me.
I find the unix configuration far more logical than that in Windows.
Finding a Windows setting is, to me, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Webserver settings may be spread across a dozen modules in various parts of the OS
For apache, it's almost all in httpd.conf (or your local flavours version).
That theme is spread across the entirety of Windows. It's like options are sprayed around the OS like dogshit. Text files in UNIX systems are generally local to their own area, and that makes more sense to me.
Yes, Microsoft gives you consistently gray-and-blue dialog boxes. Lots of them. You can click around in them for hours trying to get anything done. But it's consistent.
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.
And you think that the configuration of different Windows utilities is consistent just because you see them all through dialog boxes? Underneath that "consistent" veneer of Windows is the same variety of configuration semantics as exists for Linux. But, hey, it appears consistent.
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.
Support costs money. If you pay enough for Windows support, you get "impeccable" Windows support. If you pay enough for Linux support, you get "impeccable" Linux support. However, if you are any reasonably sized business, you are big enough to have enough Linux expertise in-house so that you don't need any outside support.
I won't comment on their business practices, but suffice it to say that's their choice.
I won't comment on your business practices. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of companies like yours that have way too much money and don't know what they are doing.
eh?
Go ask the guy that replaced some of the servers in one of the branch offices of my company. Guess what I did to him for replacing the mail servers with win2000 because of ease of maintenance. Guess what happened after almost a week of no mail and numerous calls to M$ with "please try rebooting" answers.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
...
Yeah but lots of companies went out of business for doing it (one of my former included)
Actually .NET is where I think Microsoft is going right for once. For the first time we have a truely open standard (ECMA standardized), well the CLR parts of it, which people can develop for. You won't find their Windowing code in their or ASP.NET but these are the area's that are going to generate revenue for MS. There are now ports for FreeBSD, MacOSX and the Mono guys are working a version for Linux. True platform cross compatibility, plus a typed runtime that was actually designed to provide support for somewhat seemless byte code compilation from multiple languages. Unlike the JVM which really was designed for Java only to run on different platforms.
.NET for a few yrs now, actually with the open source release Rotor designing a functional langauge and have found it rather a joy to use. Plus MS Research is now supporting quite a few research oriented open source initiatives that will hopefully provide rather novel enhancements in the coming years.
I've been workin on
_ To have a locked computer on sunday morning because you just installed a RAM upgrade is really a pain. (*)
Hmm. The activation centres here in NZ are automated (unless you've changed too much hardware). I had managed to activate at 3am in the morning.
_ To have a very unpleasant MS guy on the phone Monday morning really improves your general bad feeling about MS and Windows. (**)
Yes. I was unfortunate enough to have to need to talk to a human operator once. They're suspicious and treat you as *guilty* until you prove otherwise. I had a most unpleasent conversation with one of their operators. I tried explaining to them that I was reinstalling XP cause I had just upgraded my motherboard and cpu. They treated me like an idiot and asked me if I was sure that I wasn't installing it on a second machine. When I said "yes", there was a pause (obviously they were looking at the hardware ID changes) and they said "are you sure?".
It wasn't until I got very pissed off with them that they let me activate.
Not a very nice way to treat your customers.
However, bad as it is, this troll usually gets a few good rebuttals. Therefore, here's my tip for Linux companies PR: post FUD from m$ at
I use Linux (Mandrake) on my laptop, but I have yet to find any decent replacement for "Offline files" or the "Briefcase" or whatever it's called.
.haeger
When I connect my laptop to the network I want it to synchronize my files. If it can do this via ssh to any remote server, even better.
Anyone know of any such product for Linux?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc.
It should be noted that Great Plains was cross-platform (running on Macs and Windows) until Microsoft bought them and killed the Mac version. The only Windows machines in our entire office are the Finance Dept's because of this.
MS is just starting to compete in the enterprise app space, but Unix still beats it hands-down. There's no argument there. But at the desktop in a large, distributed enterprise, Microsoft is the only rational choice. Period.
For some reasons already mentioned and for some not, Linux et. al. don't make sense for an enterprise to deploy to the desktop. Here's my reasons why:
Obviously 1 and 3 are the most compelling. 2 might be something kind of specific to the financial industry (which I work IT in) or maybe my organization. Who knows. There are also a lot of more arcane 2-ish reasons (a bunch of audit and risk management stuff) that have already been touched on (Microsoft is stable, easy to build a clearly-defined business relationship with, etc.)
To be honest, I hope the OSS community is able at some point to create products that compete with MS in the ways I described above. And while Linux may be taking some market share from Microsoft in middle-tier enterprise apps, it's gonna be a long time before it can compete at the enterprise desktop. So there's plenty of reasons to still buy Microsoft, that is, of course, if you want to keep your job.
Of course this homily was coined in the day when you actually could buy Microsoft Software.
With licensing considerations including non transferability clauses, it's only a matter of time before even upper management or (may the spirits of Turing and von Neumann forgive me) the board of directors reviews an annual report and notices that the value spent of "purchasing" software does not appear on the asset register or depreciated assets.
I predict that someone will turn to the financial controller and say something along the lines of:
"So. Let me get this straight. We spent $150,000 this year buying office software and we don't own it?"
caveat IANAA (I am not an accountant).
Multimedia Multimedia Multimedia. show me ASIO and all the blinking apps for Linux/UNIX.
Example: Soundforge/Propellerhead Reason with synchronized hardware outputs; basic music production/sound engineering tools.
plain and simple.
-P
I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive.
Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck. You might think that there is no difference between Microsoft Word and an open source alternative but end users don't.
Open source is hardly immune to buggy unreliable software and many users will even use the legacy unreliable and insecure code long after there is a better alternative. No software that Microsoft makes compares with sendmail for sheer awfulness. Yet sendmail is still hands down the main Unix mailer (unless you believe Prof Bernstein's QMail propaganda). There are much better alternatives, QMail and Exim, have been for years and years but they show no sign of dislodging the obsolete sendmail.
So given this position within the open source world why expect it to be different outside? The cost of Microsoft software is irrelevant if you are paying people to use it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Speaking as someone who in the past has managed budgets of up to five million US dollars for a global investment bank (I was a line manager, and that was my project budget) Microsofts well documented Predatory Pricing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Now I'm not an anti-Microsofter; I have a complex love / hate thing going for them.
I remember CPM / DOS quite well, and wondering why I couldn't use a GUI like I had at work (SparcStations) and the absolute joy when windows 3.0 then 3.1, etc came along.
And then there are their Office applications and generally well received development tools. I like lots of things about their products - accelerator keys rock, for example! So they've done some good.
But then they've got to go and destroy all the good will towards them by simply insisting that they will own all of it.
So if I have a choice between Microsoft and anyone else, I'll go with the latter. The industry as a whole has been damaged enough by Redmonds behaviour.
A message from our sponsor
Many of you may have seen this, but Rob Pike has an interesting paper about systems research at www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pd Called Systems Software Research is Irrelevant Here is an excerpt: Where's the Innovation ? Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. If you claim that's not innovation, but copying, I reply that Java is to C++ as Windows is to the Macintosh: an industrial response to an interesting but technically flawed piece of systems software. If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.
Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc
Techincally, w.r.t. PeopleSoft, this statement isn't exactly true:
PeopleSoft Jumps on Linux Bandwagon
Announcements of this type are actually very big news for the business world, IMO. The biggest core application for a non-technology company, ie. Manufacturing, is it's ERP system's. Sure, Cisco can switch all desktop development off of Un*x to Linux because of the similar environment.
ERP systems moving to run wholly on Linux can be a very big insentive for bigger businesses to roll out Linux beyond simple Web servers...
The next hurdle will be trying to migrate the 100's and 1000's of little Excel spreadsheet applications over to OpenOffice/StarOffice. That is where some of the larger costs will be: training and user familiarity.
But I don't really care about that part yet. IMO, a businesses application development and ERP systems should all be running on Linux. All the front end applications that the non-IT people write can exists on MS-Office products.
Well, until OpenOffice familiarity and adoption occurs...
Interesting story: A company I work for runs usability tests on Microsoft software. These usability guys have watched Windows Server Administrators with very little experience set up a DHCP server in less than 15 minutes, and almost nobody fails to complete this task when given an hour to work on it. Even novice unix admins can set up a windows DHCP server in under an hour.
Then, they decides to try the same thing with Linux, putting users in groups, with internet access, and after more than a day's worth of man-hours (and several real hours) most of the groups still hadn't been able to configure a linux box to be a functioning DHCP server.
With the 10 hours I'm paying the linux admin to figure out how to do it in linux, I could have paid my Windows Admin to configure DHCP on a Windows box while saving enough money in time to pay for the copy of Windows too!
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.
Enitrely agree, the number of truely generic tools is fairly limitied, the number of process specific tools is much larger.
I get paid to write software, these days I slap a GPL license onto everything I ship, but a great deal of this won't ever be seen by the public because its not generally useful and nobody would actually be interested. The stuff that is generally useful will eventually make its way into the wild, but its defaintely in the minority.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
"if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go?"
Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become. However, back to the intention of your statement, since the performance of the economy is a function of the costs of capital inputs, the truth is our economy is being HURT by the MS monopoly. Consider it a "software shock" instead of a "oil shock," companies that are forced (by their own ignorance) to use MS software are less competitive because their inputs are more expensive and restricting. MS software inflates pc prices, just like expensive oil inflates all petroleum related products. This results in less consumption and less profitability and overall revenue to non-MS companies.
My company just had 10% layoffs and had we not gone with their new license plan, I am sure many of those people could have still had jobs. This is the reason that anti-trust laws exist. Not to be fair but because monopolies HURT the economy. Unfortunately, a monopoly with enough money not only adversely affects the economy but also the government.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
True platform cross compatibility...
.NET APIs are still proprietary to Microsoft. The ports to FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Linux are tokens, because they will forever be incomplete relative to the native Windows version.
.NET are still locked into Microsoft and their Windows platform. Why would Microsoft allow anything else when Windows provides nearly half of their revenue? They are in a clear position of financial conflict of interest with respect to .NET on non-Windows platforms.
.NET compliant implementations? J2EE, for example, is implemented by IBM and BEA, whose market shares dwarf that of Sun's own implementation. Microsoft would never allow themselves to be nothing other than #1. Their corporate culture and growth-oriented stock model wouldn't allow it.
.NET compliance available to anyone who wants to license it? J2EE does, which leads to third-parties, such as BEA, IBM, Silverstream, Macromedia, etc., battling it out for market share. If one J2EE company kicks the bucket, there is a way out. It isn't monkey-trivial to move to a new J2EE app server (they are complex), but it is absolutely 100% possible.
Please don't fall for the Microsoft marketing department this time around. The ECMA standardization is not sufficient, because vast
People who will want to do anything meaningful with
What other incentives would they have to allow
other companies to produce
Does Microsoft have a test suite for full
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
unless you work for MS, most programming jobs are related to customization and maintenance. With proprietary software, though, there IS no customization (unless you want to be sued) and maintenance is either done by the vendor, at usually a reckless level, and by a MSCE over at the customer side. This results in a net LOSS of programming jobs (though cheap, mindless admin jobs have increased).
For instance, my company was nearly a YEAR into writing financial reports for the company. All the software we were using was proprietary. Suddenly, towards the end of the project, it was discovered that the software could not combine the portrait and landscape types of sheets into one package on the company website. It would have been more cost efficient to pay a programmer 50k JUST to fix this one issue, but since it was proprietary software (and the of course the vendor didn't care), we had to switch proprietary software and start over!
The truth is EVERY software related project should employ a programmer because you never know what the limitations of the already available software will be until you are too deep into the project. The reason that every project DOESN'T employ a programmer is the company doesn't have permission to customize the code, so, in the end, their only option is to change products. So you get companies full of Admins and no programmers.
Proprietary software kills more quality tech jobs and replaces them with mindless, admin jobs.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It seems like there has been a steady stream of these articles for a while. At first I believed them. Now it seems more like wishful thinking with every new "Linux will rule the world" article. I also tried OpenOffice and it is not as stable, mature and is way more bloated (Java) than MSOffice. Mozilla is now a great browser with many new features being added. It took a few to get to this point however. So OpenOffice has still has some maturing to do. There is something to be said about easy to use tools. Believe it or not, not everybody wants to think about tweaking, installing software dependencies, configuring, etc. People also like helpful and friendly help files (PHP is a great example). Time is more valuable and costly than software. OS can cost more if it takes much longer to learn and adopt. Don't get me wrong, OSS has its place. However, Microsoft does have some serious momentum in the marketplace especially with .NET.
How do I know? Look at the job postings. Lots of .NET jobs even in this "dismal" economy.
What the other posts I have read seem to have missed is that there is actually a very good reason to buy Microsoft products. That reason is hardware compatibility. Linux is still behind in this area. For example, you cannot plug in a printer (*cough* Canon *cough*) into a computer running Linux and have it work after a quick driver installation. You can do so in Windows. Until Linux catches up in this area, it will not displace Windows.
Asking someone to do something new cold SHOULD take 10 hours. And double that to test.
That said, I spent a total of 10 minutes configuring my first Linux dhcp server.
rpm -ivh dhcp-2.0.i386.rpm
man dhcp
pico /etc/dhcpd.conf
I did this back in 1998. Since then we've gone from the NT 3.5 interface to the NT 4.0 interface, to the MMC, and now whatever monstrosity they call the thingy under XP.
Under linux, the text file is still in the same place. In fact, it's still largely in the same format.
And also, my experience setting up DHCP for my apartment did a lot more to prepare me for my present 200 node network than a point and drool interface ever would.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
A good point, which we discussed. Sadly, the problem is that some of the various pieces of software is 16-bit, and it's a pain to get it to run, even in Windows. One old Foxpro-application actually required the resolution to be exactly 800x600, 16 bpp (talk about those 18" LCDs going to waste...). Otherwise, it refused to launch. Screensaver starting? Crash and burn. Alt-tabbing out? Ditto. It even crashed due to Large fonts being selected. And of course, it was barely able to read its own database files. Talk about lock-in
Oh, to just have a suite of good, up to date medical software, running on top of mySQL, that ported to different platforms. I'm sure there is a fortune to be made.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
This is just such a stupid statement that I'm amazed it's even still trotted out. There is one significant, concrete example which competely and totally destroys this argument.
Apache.
Apache is the single most popular web server in existence. Yet, there is very rarely any worm or virus that affects it. IIS, by constrast, owns a minority and thankfully shrinking section of the market, but is the single largest spreader of virii and destructive code out there.
Quite clearly, this obliterates the argument that simply because something is used the most often it will be the least secure. It's a falsity spread by morons and marketeers.
Wow! This is such a weird story! Totally against what I experienced.
I'm no linux admin but I had to configure DHCP on linux (among other things) for my very small office because no-one else could.
I don't have a stopwatch, but using the documentation, I set it all up in what must have been less than 30 minutes. Maybe it's because I actually RTFM.
It's true I figured it out faster with Windows and I didn't have to read any documentation, but our office got really fed-up with the instability. Monthly crashes were the norm. I set up our little linux server 14 months ago, and rebooted only once, in January, because I installed a new hard disk.