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Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pretty-certificates-and-nifty-joysticks dept.

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."

6 of 612 comments (clear)

  1. Survey size? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?).

  2. Interesting developments at IBM maincampus... by Thaidog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:One reason: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:One reason: by debrain · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

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

  5. Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps by Kumkwat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Still no MS enterprise desktop competition. by reverendslappy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.