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

Survey size?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?).

Re:MS consistency

[Realistic_Dragon]

"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.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[panurge]

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.

Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Thaidog]

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...

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:One reason:

[debrain]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

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

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Kumkwat]

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.

I've been workin on .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.

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[TummyX]

_ 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.

Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

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:

1. Manageability. With tools like SMS, software distribution, policy compliance management, and enterprise inventory are a breeze. Sure there's a new MS patch all the time, but with minimal administrative effort, I can test and deploy a patch in no time. Our SLA on turn-around to deployment of a critical patch is 24 business hours. Three days after release of a patch or other software update, our entire 20,000+ client network is 85% or more patched. With about 20 man hours of work across three staff. Linux absolutely can not touch that. Also, Active Directory is the bomb. We can integrate our email system with our help desk system with SMS with enterprise apps and others, while creating and maintaining user data once, in one place. Sure you can do that with OSS stuff (using LDAP etc.) but AD works almost out of the box. Turn it on, migrate, boom done.
2. Accountability. Senior management has somebody (outside the organization) to blame when there's a critical failure. It sounds like a cop-out, but hey, that's how it works. I dunno about anybody else, but I like getting a paycheck. And therefore, I like having the ability to point the finger at someone else when they screw up. So do senior managers, because it mitigates their liability and the liability of the organization as a whole. In any situation, we have the ability to say "Sorry, Microsoft screwed up." In a Linux environment, what could we say? "Sorry, a community of people that I'm likely an active member of screwed up, and ultimately the screw up is as much my fault as anyone else's in that community. So can I have a box with handles for my personal belongings? Thanks."
3. It's cheaper. Period. Sure OSS stuff is free, sure Microsoft's licensing is pricey. But anyone who takes an honest look at total TCO will see that MS/Intel's price point can't be beat. Administration is cheaper. Hardware is cheaper. Development is cheaper. Users are already trained and therefore cheaper. User and administrative efficiencies are pre-built because people are already Windows/MS familiar before they login to a corporate PC. And you can talk about OSS superiority in certain areas all day, but the fact is, to a business, cheaper is always better.

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.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Zeinfeld]

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.

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.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[fongsaiyuk]

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...

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

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!

Re:I like my job

[aallan]

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.

MS and the economy

[Idou]

"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.

PROPRIETARY software impoverishes MORE programmers

[Idou]

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.

Re:One reason:

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Frankly, when I hire a Windows or a Unix sysadmin, I ask if they have done it before.

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

/etc/rc.d/init.d/dhcpd start

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.

Re:One reason:

[_Bucktooth_]

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.