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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."
to give us someone to look down on
What would Brian Boitano do?
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Yes, buy their products to support them. Where else can you get such decent mice?
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Bill: Our market share is falling, what can we do? Ballmer: [Sweating]Improve our products?[Still Sweating] Bill: Don't be ridiculous, if Windows was secure then we wouldn't be able to charge for bug fixes, [not that our software is buggy of course] Ballmer: [Shirt now navy blue]We could take the old standby[Shirt now very dark navy blue] Bill: Aha - [to voice activated Windows box]Bring in the lawyers![Windows BSODs] [To voice activated Linux box] Bring in the lawyers! [Lawyers arrive] Bill: I want Linux to be made illegal Ballmer: [Shirt now dissolving in acidic sweat] Developers! Developers! Developers! Bill: Not now Steve! Lawyers: This will cost you Bill, bribery is very expensive these days. Bill: Nah! - I ran an audit check on the US govt. they haven't complied with the MS Windows Server 2003 EULA clause 0203432448 (You hereby agree that All your base are belong to MS) Lawyers: It shall be done oh fabulously wealthy one! [US Govt. declares Finland a terrorist state, wages violent war, Linus Torvolds writes a quick kernel update then goes into hiding] ... to be continued.
This isn't my experience at all. I maintain two servers. One is a Windows 2000 server, the other runs the standard RedHat offering (not the enterprise version.)
The Redhat server just works. I never have any downtime, it's never crashed, I've never lost any data -- the thing just sits there, ticking away in the background, doing what it's supposed to do.
The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse. Administration isn't at all transparent -- you fill in a few tick boxes, and pray that it's going to do what the manual says it will do. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things just stop working, with no apparent reason. (File replication was the last thing that just 'broke'.)
With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.
The last big problem is interoperability. With the linux server, connectivity just works. With the Windows server, it's forever disappearing from view.
Both OSes do have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I don't see that Windows has any advantage in either stability or ease of maintenance.
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?).
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.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Clippit, the cute and loveable Office assistant. Let's see Linux' answer to that.
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.
.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.
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
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.
http://saveie6.com/
"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.
supported flawlessly by Microsoft software.
:P
.
And now I wonder if I get modded down for this as Troll or up as Funny
how about getting modded imaginary:-2
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.
Yes, the configuration of Apache is quite different to many other programs ('wildly different' is somewhat over the top - at heart, configuring almost all Unix programs invloves editing text files).
But is the configuration process for IIS really that similar to Exchange? Not really - they're very different tasks, so in many ways this isn't really surprising.
As for support, IBM and many others will be happy to offer 24-hour help at the right-price - Free software might not cost anything to get, but it's certainly not free to run. Of course, you don't get 24-hour help for Windows by default either.
The major difference between Microsoft solutions and Open Source solutions is in terms of flexibility - instead of getting a 'black box' which you can do little to change, you can adapt the software to your business. There's no way Microsoft can compete with this under the terms of their current licensing, and ultimately this is why Open Souce software will come to dominate computing.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
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
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
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.
I'll bite! :)
... the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other.
To update, run, install and fix a service is consistent
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.
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).
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.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
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.
/. you are a much more credible source
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
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.
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.
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...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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/
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?
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.
No reason to lie.
Quoth the AC:
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:
Some of the other more telling quotes from the article follow.
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.
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.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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)
"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!