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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...
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.
^^ forgot to format it - double posting is a /. tradition anyway.
... to be continued.
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]
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?).
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/
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.
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.
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.
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?