Slashdot Mirror
Energy Company Refutes Windows TCO Claims
apt-get writes "Computerworld Australia has a gem of a case study on Country Energy with comments from an IT manager that shoot down Microsoft's 'objective' Windows TCO claims. My favourite; 'we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all'. Interestingly, in almost every area of its critical IT infrastructure, open source and commercial software work in peace together. The IT manager even says not having MS Office on Linux is a hindrance to its desktop take up."
I would hope that reading such as this is sought out by IT managers looking at a migration to any other platform. Real world results are what count. Trusting studies paid for by $COMPANY is just plain ignorant.
Trolling is a art,
To repeat a popular statistician's aphorism:This has been a public service announcement.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"Also, it is easy to find Oracle admins for support."
And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?
tim
They probably want to acquire more machines for Windows. Hence they are advertising their liking for open source stuff so that Steve Ballmer will visit them soon and offer to shave off 90% of the price + free training.
Product L is free, widely available from a variety of sources who compete purely on technical quality, and designed principally by its own users to be portable, reliable, and as efficient as possible.
... duh.
Product W (its primary competitor) is sold at quite a high price, by a single vendor who relies on marketing, market position, and features to sell the product. The product's users have little to say about the evolution of the product and nothing at all to say about its internal design.
The vendor of product W releases studies which it pays for proving that W is cheaper to own than L. Later, a large field trial proves that product L is, actually cheaper than product W.
Who is kidding who here? There is a very good reason that small businesses with any technical savvy at all jump onto the Linux/OSS bandwagon as soon as they possibly can. It saves money.
Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
- Experience of personnel
- Age of the system and its knowledge base
- Number of inherent maintenance problems
- Cost of expertise
- Severity of maintenance issues
- Perceived impact of issues
and so on, and so on...Too often, the people making decisions based on marketing numbers like TCO fail to realize just how many issues are involved in these measurements. The buzzword TCO becomes another name for just one of the measurable items (e.g. Number of inherent problems).
What's needed are top-level executives that weren't churned out by a college and hired because of thier good-old boy connections. CIOs, CTOs and other executives in power need to be from one school, the school of hard knocks, so that they can make INFORMED decisions instead of blindly relying on the marketing fodder that are handed.
After reading several TCO reports and even writing one myself, I've come to the conclusion that TCO is not something that one can make a sweeping generalization about.
Cost is one thing and convenience and time are another thing. Windows costs more than GNU/Linux is most cases, but no doubt someone somewhere can twist the numbers to make it look otherwise. Windows is less secure than GNU/Linux, but again -- someone, somewhere will come up with bullshit numbers or statistics or outright lies (Steve Ballmer!) to "prove" differently.
Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that. If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows.
Everyone has their own take on TCO and TBO (Total Benefit of Ownership) and anyone can make either "side" look like it "wins." Licensing costs and rights are undeniable though; that's one area that is not up for debate. What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...
-JemHaving MS Office on Linux isn't the problem, users who believe they HAVE to have MS Office is. That bit of software your business needs, just needs to be rewritten to open standards and if enough clients start to leave SoftwareCompanyX, believe me, they'll write it. Or find the same integreation with Evolution.
Question - since MSJVM isn't available for distribution (from MS, I know what I can find with google) why hasn't that piece of software been rewritten to work better with Sun VM? You need to demand more from your vendors, or if you're going to drink the MS punch, don't make comments about migrating to Linux. I've migrating companies to linux and all were estatic with the final results. They were quite suprised how easy it was.
In fairness, they are migrating from UNIX. In such a situation, I'm not surprised that Linux is a better fit for them.
The truth is, what is better for you will depend on your situation, existing applications, existing in-house skills, etc. I don't believe Microsoft's funded propaganda, but there can be situations in which Windows is an appropriate choice. Look at what you are running and then make a decision. In this case it is obviously Linux.
One advantage of OpenOffice is that it runs on windows and linux. If I was an admin planning to switch to linux then I would install openoffice and get people used to it before the switch took place.
Best quote from the article (at least for me):
:-)
I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that.
There you have it, in a nutshell...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This is in fact what MS is saying. That if your company does not have significant unix skills but instead is windows based then switching to linux will be more expensive. Sure they mess around with it but that claim is pretty valid. It is always more expensive in the short term, and tco is short term roi would be long term, to switch.
So yes he does say the lack of MS Office is keeping the linux desktop down. True or not this is hardly likely to ever change. Hell MS is even backing down on MS office of the apple.
Nice headline, pity it doesn't seem related to the story.
To those impatient to see when Linux will overthrow MS windows look back at history and ask how long it took MS to go from nobody to somebody. There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Movie production tools
Really? I cant find ANYTHING for linux... even something I could buy that can do movie production..
kino and the other early alpha video editing software and tools cant even touch a 10 year old version of Premiere (Premiere version 4.x) I have tried Cinderella (sucks, cant use DV2 files and crashes alot!) I bought Main Actor... it also can't edit DV2 files or anything standard for movie production that is for anything but low quality web release and it also crashes like a madman..
Finally there is absolutely nothing available for linux that can do anything that After Effects can do. and there is nothing available for DVD creation that is even useable.. DVDlab is desperately needed to be ported to linux...
I desperately want to be able to do my video editing on linux, it can not be done right now. I tried, wasted 6 months trying my hardest. Main Actor has been all but abandoned on the linux side, Cinderella is not interested in performance/stability but is on a "ooooh Shiney! New features!" kick for the past 2 years and is still only early alpha quality.
I would be 100% microsoft free if I could do my video editing and full DVD creation under linux..
but it can not be done right now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How much is it costing when M$ releases a patch for IE (last week) and it erases all of your IE passwords? Imagine the call centers and helpdesks getting slammed for password resets because people don't know what their account info is.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?
Never.
Lotus has announced repeatedly that they are never going to port Notes 5+ to the linux/unix desktop. And now that WINE is capable of running Notes 5 they have even less incentive.
In 1999 IBM Server Group was literally only two days away from receiving the source code to the Notes 4.6 client and they were going to port it to linux for internal use. The Lotus higher-level managers cancelled the deal. (Even though the 4.5 client for AIX had been ported to linux, then re-ported again to AIX with better stability and performance.) With the 5.0 release they dropped support for AIX and OS/2.
Inside IBM, Lotus still behaves like a separate company and basically never give out their code to other IBM groups. I don't know who precisely is sleeping with who, but clearly there's some bad mojo at work here.
To reiterate: we will NEVER see a native Notes client for linux. Support the Evolution folks instead. Their client is very similar, and if it ever supports the Domino server natively that will be our Notes client.
I think you have perfectly described what I consider to be MS Office's greatest weakness. To most Office users it is single app. It is a spreadsheet or a word processor or a presentation creator, it is seldom all things to the user. That Microsoft has managed to bundle all these apps together and sell them all to every user is the greatest marketing achievement ever. Yes, I do know that Office is capable of a high level of integration, the fact is that few users go there. Most Office users would be fine with just the single app they focus on.
Disclaimer - I have loathed word processors for twenty years now. MS Word is at the top of that list. So I am certainly biased. To be fair, I don't like Open Office either.
Why should I knock myself out with Crossover Office trying to get Photoshop to run on Linux when I can just doubleclick on a shortcut and get it to run now? I can go to Best Buy, pick up a game and just know it will work.
As for all the supposed problems with Windows, they're non-starters for me. I run a firewall and a pop-up blocker. I install the updates. XP hasn't crashed since I got it 2 years ago. I've never had a problem.
In short, what's in Linux for someone like me other than headaches?
I'm not saying I never would switch but this has to be addressed by the Linux community. You need to come up with something that is obviously better and not for reasons that only geeks are interested in. Something so good that I am compelled to switch. I'd even pay money for it. The free thing that Linux nuts love to harp on is not important to the average user.
I'm only trying to help.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Peters, Country Energy's information systems manager, wanted to leverage the large amount of inhouse Unix skills within the IT department by choosing Linux as the operating system platform for front end applications.
Of course it's going to be cheaper to run Linux in their environment; they have a large in-house staff that already knows Unix. This is not rocket science and I myself would tell them to go the Linux route. However, if your a Windows-only shop like our little cranny of the world then moving to Linux doesn't make a lot of sense because their is no internal knowledge base. Moral of the story: Use what's best for you because if you don't have the resources then the alternative most times will be more expensive.
The "I _NEED_ Office" mentality is quite well hammered into average users. When I used to work at a certain office supply big box store (I was young, and needed the money!), at least four times a week someone would come in and ask for a full out copy of office. They would then freak out at the price and ask things like "why is this so expensive?!". Most of these people honestly didn't need all of office. A basic word processor, spreadsheet and email program were all they'd really need. I'd usually mention openoffice, and scrawl down a url for them to take home. Maybe that's why I didn't last long working in that dive :) MS seems to have done an exceedingly good job at promoting the idea that your pc is useless without having a copy of office running on it.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
>OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea
>while its chart-making is so poor, for example.
Uhm, OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academia because everybody uses LaTeX and GnuPlot
Which happens to be an open source product, and existed way before Linux.
--Blerik
To those impatient to see when Linux will overthrow MS windows look back at history and ask how long it took MS to go from nobody to somebody. There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!
MS-DOS was release at around 1981, and 15 years later they had a monopoly with Windows 95. Linux is already about 10 years old. Should we expect great things from Linux in 5 years? I believe that is a reasonable expectation.
-- Kircle
Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that. If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows. ... ...What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...
..... Nah. :-)
OK, I feel this way too sometimes. But I have to look at it realistically too. Businesses - yeah, they have to consider TCO and licensing terms. Home users? No consideration whatsoever. I understand that *technically* Microsoft could audit everyone for license compliance, but it is not feasable that they would do so. Licensing of Windows sucks, if you care about it at all. Ask any home user of Windows what their major beef with it is, and I'll bet nobody says anything about Freedom. Hell, most people don't even like computers, let alone have a philosophy regarding them. That is why Microsoft has such a huge marketshare - they cater to the lowest common denominator. Not that the LCD is bad, just that the majority of people aren't tech-heads. People don't get it, nor do they WANT to get it. They don't care. Virus hits, they can't do email for a few days, they get over it. As Homer would shrug and say "Hmm, whadaya gonna do?"
If there is any kind of "Linux Revolution" it won't start in the U.S. All of a sudden, U.S. companies will look around and realize that the rest of the world has embraced this "new" technology and we'll have to play catch-up. Fine by me, maybe then I can get a job doing something I like - but I feel sorry for all the MCSEs.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I've used both OO and Office. I have Office at my day job and on my wife's home computer and OO on my home computer. OO is much slower. The interface isn't as nice, i.e. it's not as easy to get things done. The startup time is abysmal (P4 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM)...open a spreadsheet, go get a cup of coffee while it opens (ok, it's not that bad but it feels like it). My demands on an office suite are not great - I use a spreadsheet for time tracking mostly (sometimes I'll work with data) and I use the word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label.
The large company I work for during the day has a deal with Microsoft where I can get the full version of the latest Office for $20. I'm going to be ordering that and dumping OO, because even for my modest needs I find OO cumbersome and annoying.
While one advantage of OO is it runs on multiple platforms, the big downside is it is a hinderance to productivity. Labor is expensive - the cost of Office for the office is less than the time spent wrestling with an immature product.
>The interface isn't as nice, i.e. it's not as easy to get things done.
depends on what you use it for....depends on who you ask..etc...
>The startup time is abysmal
try loading it into memory right after boot....and leave it there mister 512mb RAM.
>I use a spreadsheet for time tracking mostly
there are other programs besides OO, you know?
>The large company I work for during the day has a deal with Microsoft where I can get the full version of the latest Office for $20.
Sounds great...not many other people have such a great deal, and many people are trying to get away from being locked-in to MS products. Oh yeah, and MS doesnt like to play with all the other boys and girls, rather they try to break them. Take, say, Corel WordPerfect. It took many hours trying to diagnose problems with it only to find out that Office INTENTIONALLY tried to crash it. So if OO doesnt seem great on a Win machine, perhaps you should compare it to that running on linux...just to calibrate how correct a feel you are getting in terms of speed, memory, and stability.
> the big downside is it is a hinderance to productivity.
depends on what you use it for....depends on who uses it...depends on who you ask..etc...
Throwing good money after bad isn't always the smartest option. If you're vendor is truly responsive to your needs, by all means, stick it out. If they're not however, don't be afraid to make the threat of dumping them. Because they're obviously not looking out for you, their customer.
I do understand what you're going through. I'm having similar problems as well with a particular vendor who seems to think MS SQL Server, IE 6 and Windows 2000 are all that exist in the world.
It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. When I show up for work if the boss says I am working in Maya this week, I work in maya. If it's Studio Max that next week, I work in Max. (Hell, I had to work in TrueSpace once, not so bad once you learn it.) Yeah, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but the important thing is that I am still able to get the job done, regardless of the renderer/3d engine. If I am able to handle working in different 3d platforms, why is it that 'normal' office users can't do the stupid TPS report in whatever is placed in front of them. It really pisses me off. I have to take college level physics and learn some fundamental AI as an artist, but some business guy can't even learn OO? It's truly a shame.
I am glad I am not the boss of someone who can't handle a different software package. I would be forced to fire them because they are clearly not able to 'grow' on the job. It's my opinion that the first priority is that the job gets done, how it gets done falls in second.
With all due respect, how hard could it be to do "word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label"? It's not rocket science, and doesn't require a huge amount of macros to do. If you can't work in multiple/different softwares, I am sure there is a new-comer college grad who would love your job for less that CAN do it, and will get a kick out of using something that is not the norm.
Signed, 24-bit Voxel
The IBM guy has most likely NEVER seen the Lotus Notes codebase. I have. There are definitely challenges in working with a codebase that's probably three or four times the size of Mozilla (and this was in 1997!), and besides that was evolved from original code written for Windows 2.1 and OS/2 1.3. Nevertheless the codebase was very well designed with an abstraction layer for porting the GUI and many features that were WAY ahead of their time (i.e. complete support for cross platform i18n years before UNICODE) The code was indeed ported to Macintosh, Solaris, HP/UX. (they did not port Notes 5+).
Porting to UNIX or LINUX today is technically feasible. Working with WineLib I am sure they could get a port up and running in a matter of weeks or months. The problem is one of support. Once a port is built, IBM has to QA it. Package it. Sell it. Support it for years. The costs are enormous. Measure that against the projected user base and it just wasn't cost effective. They'd rather spend the money on a web client.
Given that IBM is pushing for Linux desktops internally, the prospect of a Notes client port is more likely. On the other hand, IBM is now pushing new Java based groupware technologies that will naturally run on Linux. Who knows how it'll turn out.
Anyway Notes 5 runs splendidly under Wine and I think support for Notes 6 is on Codeweavers' todo list.
There are branches of academia other than CompSci, Maths and Physics.
I'm asking this as a legitimate question, not trying to troll...
Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?
Because I can tell you that's the primary thing that would keep my company (and the vast majority of the companies we deal with) from moving away from Office. I'd also be willing to bet we're not unusual in that regard.
Not so much because we already have tons of complex macros written that we wouldn't want to convert, but simply because it IS so powerful and relatively simple. We do some truly sick shit with VBA.
Note also that I'm NOT talking about simple macros to recalculate cell values and such. I'm talking about the ability to pop open a form on top of a spreadsheet with a bunch of buttons on it, each that execute hundreds or even thousands lines of complex code, some of which upload and download files via FTP, some of which make use of other Office apps via automation to do various things, and then export out the resultant data as a Viso document with an Excel spreadsheet embedded and links to a presentation that was generated and uploaded to a web site at the same time. Yes, we have some that do most of that, and some that do more. Let's not get into the debate about whether that was the right way to do things, because it's a much larger discussion, and the bottom line is that if the people in charge say do it using those tools, you either do so or look for another job, so it is what it is, and that's that.
If another office suite could match that capability, I doubt we'd have much incentive to stay with Office, but it truly would have to match or exceed that capability, and to the best of my knowledge, no other suite can do that.
Am I mistaken?
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I'm not sure, I mainly use the word processor and spreadsheet, and only in their most basic ways. A good place to start checking out what OpenOffice can do would be here Also, remember that it is a free download. You could grab a copy, and poke around to see if it does what you want, all without having to resort to warez.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
I was expecting something with more hard numbers. The MS TCO site is full of pretty graphs and charts showing how MS software is cheaper in the long run than "free" software. This article had none of that.
.com" site which has case studies that show linux is cheaper in the long run than Windows based solutions.
What I'd like to see is a linux biased company come out with a similar "get the real truth
The story makes it very clear that there are no real Windows platform strengths while Linux has many that were particularly important to the energy company including better performance and better reliability. Even on the desktop, the only real advantage given for Windows was that it ran MS Office. If Windows is going to survive in the long term, Microsoft will have to develop some compelling technical advantages for Windows. The MS Office support is not going to carry it forever.
As a junior, I worked in the Oracle IT department, and MS Access was forbidden in any computer in there. I found it really weird, because at the time I thought Access was a pretty useful tool. It still is, at home, I mean.
Later I understood the reasons for forbidding Access. I worked for many customers who had their backoffices full of really shitty applications built on top of Access, Excel and VBA. I mean, they had their whole business built on that! More than a couple times I had to debug horrible stuff made by the local programmer wannabe, usually a financial or sales guy with no knowledge whatsoever of computer engineering, who learned a little bit of VBA and started coding away, turning his office in an intricate mess of redundant data, scattered files, and very shitty VB code.
Even worse is when some company has its customer database in Access, and each employee in the sales department has a local copy that they update regularly until nobody can track accurate information about anything anymore. Then every guy starts giving the others his password so they can read his files! Help!
And when we tell the manager their stuff is completely unsupportable and propose that they buy a suitable application or have a custom one built, the guy starts crying like a baby about the price of it. Sooner or later they will have to make that decision, but only after spending thousands in support, calling us every week to customise a little shit here or solve a little bug there. Not trying to put you down, though. If you work with VBA, and it works, my congratulations. You must be a pro.
I am sure it takes more qualified man hours to run and support linux but I look at it this way, pay rent to M$ or put equity into a mortgage with Linux. They cost about the same, but when you're done you have the ability to knock out a few walls and paint the place any color you like.