Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove

An anonymous reader writes "XYZ has an interview with Tony Bove, author of the upcoming book, "Just Say No to Microsoft". From the article: 'With this book Bove intends to help readers rid Microsoft from their life- this is easier said that done, but it is certainly possible. The book goes on to list alternatives to the Microsoft programs on which people have become dependent and probably think they cannot give up.'"

Comments

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[Neil Blender]

From experience, any thing more than 11 steps is not worth it!

And from the average user's perspective, anything more than 0 steps is too many.

the one thing you won't find in his review

[everphilski]

...a replacement for Microsoft Exchange. His only mention is how "...Microsoft designs its software products -- especially Outlook and Exchange -- to lock people into using it...". Until a good replacement is found for Exchange you will have a hard time prying it from the cold, dead hands of thousands of businesses worldwide...

(And I work in a shop where most of us do dev work on linux boxes... but we all have windows partitions for Exchange. So damn handy for scheduling meetings, knowing who is in and who is out of town...)

-everphilski-

2 Problems

[b0r1s]

1) It assumes there's a good reason for people to abandon MS. Security is close, but as we've seen with recent holes in Firefox/Mozilla, as other tools get popular, their security will come under attack, too. The price, perhaps, but 'free' versions of anything lack meaningful support, which kills it for a significant number of end users. Therefore, if there were a convincing reason for everyone to change (other than personal bias), this would be much more meaningful.

2) It assumes that it's the MS programs holding people back, when many desktops are tied because of third party software. For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation. Yes, you can find replacement photo editors, but not really replacement video editors that are on par with After Effects, or replacements for Flash that have 95%+ installation base.

Re:2 Problems

[stlhawkeye]

2) It assumes that it's the MS programs holding people back, when many desktops are tied because of third party software. For example, in my every-day job, I support dozens of workstations with Macromedia and Adobe software installed - neither of these run natively under Linux, and they run horribly under emulation. Yes, you can find replacement photo editors, but not really replacement video editors that are on par with After Effects, or replacements for Flash that have 95%+ installation base.

Exactly. Ever try to hire a graphics artist and tell him, "by the way, you'll be using GIMP on our Fedora Core 3 installation"? It's harder than it sounds. Yes, you can all rain down here with THOUSANDS of examples of YOU and YOUR FRIENDS and people YOU KNOW who not only can use GIMP but PREFER it to expensive alternatives. If the sample of Slashdot and its immediate social clique were the norm, we'd live in a pseudosocialist utopia in which all of us are gainfully employed and paid a hundred thousand dollars to work 30 hour weeks developing beautiful open source software that we give away and nobody buys, and all music and entertainment is produced through the honest labor of talented people upon whom we benevolently bestow voluntary payments for their work, and whose labors of love are distributed for free through the software channels that we were paid lots of money to develop. Oh, and Bush isn't president. And global warming stopped. And we all ride bikes to our jobs. And there's no McDonald's or suburbs. And soda is free. So is beer. I could go on, but I moved into the TrollZone about 5 minutes ago.

Re:2 Problems

[cbiffle]

Security is close, but as we've seen with recent holes in Firefox/Mozilla, as other tools get popular, their security will come under attack, too.

I'm not particularly anti-Microsoft, though I choose not to use it for myself. However, I had to take issue with this, as I've been hearing this statement more and more lately.

There is such a thing as designing for security. Postfix is an excellent example of this; whatever your feelings on DJB, djbdns and qmail are also good examples. These three packages are rapidly growing in popularity, without showing the same security problems as the tools they replace (namely, sendmail and BIND). This is because (filesystem hierarchy restrictions aside) they are quite simply designed better.

Firefox, and Mozilla in general, was not designed with security in mind in the same way as Postfix. So, yes, it will show some correlation between popularity and exploits. However, even if IE and Firefox achieve equal popularity, I doubt Firefox will show the same consistently poor long-term track record as IE, for three main reasons.

1. IE has at least one designed-in security hole, ActiveX. Signed code is not a security mechanism, it's an authentication mechanism, and a user-driven one at that; sandboxing would be better.

2. Members (past and present) of the IE team have acknowleged that the IE codebase has grown to the point that it's difficult to maintain and patch. This suggests a poor initial design (compare Postfix's heavily compartmentalized code), but also explains some of the security problems of late.

3. IE is not written with Least-Privileges in mind. I can drop Firefox on the desktop without admin rights and use it, confident that an exploit in Firefox cannot nuke my machine (assuming the underlying OS is not also exploited). I cannot be so confident about IE, tied into the OS as it is. Too many IE bugs have allowed SYSTEM-level privilege escalation on NT.

Now, Firefox may well grow into problem #2, but I think #1 and #3 are unlikely.

End rant.

Not more political motivations!

[ficken]

I really wish that the Linux community wouldn't sink down to the level that Microsoft has reached. Releasing subjective papers on what works and what doesn't will not do anything for people except cause political arguments. Since most TCO and benchmark data is skewed one way or another, releasing whitepapers and books becomes irrelevant. Most budget managers and IT managers realize this. The people in charge (given that they know what they are doing) researches data from other companies. They ask questions like it worked for Company A so could it work for us? They do not look at opinions and unreliable sources. IMHO, this is one reason why Linux has not made it to the desktop - many companies are scared to move their user base over to a radically different interface. Not many companies have made the move, so everyone else is scared to jump first. They are not scared to move their servers over, since only a small handful of people interface with it - provided the services retain a high level of reliability.

Re:adbsurd

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

>Most of us can't...

I think you'll find the point is that most of us CAN. "Most people" use Word to write lists, and if the list needs 2 columns they use Excel. It doesn't have to be that way.

And it's not just about linux, his favourite OS is Mac OS X.

If you *need* MS, you probably made a poor decision somewhere along the line. If you have a free choice but choose to stick with MS that's fair enough. There's nothing about being a doctor or lawyer that intrinsically requires a MS operating system or software.

Re:the War...

[truthsearch]

They act like drug dealers. They let people copy their software "illegally" for years until it became almost ubiquitous. Then they cracked down after everyone was already "addicted" to make huge profits.

What about Microsoft Project?

[tyates]

Microsoft Project is the most widely used project management software that corporations use, and it's only available for one platform: Microsoft Windows. Not OSX, Not Linux, Not BSD, Not Sun, Not Palm, Not Amiga, etc. This means that anybody who manages work in a company *has* to use Windows. And yes, I know that Microsoft Project actually sucks for complex project management, and that there are better Project Management packages out there, but most of them only work for Windows also and they don't have the base or support that Microsoft has. Until that lock is broken, its going to be very hard for companies to switch.

Of course there isn't

[brunes69]

There isn't a "drop-in" replacement for exchange because the protocols are binary and not documented.

If you will be a little less lazy, there are Outlook plugins for both Kolab and OpenExchange that will let your users use the same client while you replace the server, they should not notice anything different at all.

But there is no way you are ever going to just replace the server and do nothing else. It is impossible - that is why the Outlook/Exchange combo is so horrible, it is not compatible with anything.

Re:sub-title: how to spend more money

[mcrbids]

If someone's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be a Windows application.

I disagree. Look further up the food chain - if somebody's going to do a new application, it's much more likely to be in an environment where the OS is irrelevant.

Who wants to limit their marketplace to the Windows desktop, when there are so many mobile devices out there now?

Or, put it like this: What OMFG killer appz have you seen in the last 5-10 years that have been Windows only? Games are moving to gaming consoles, Word Processing is moving with surprising rapidity to OpenDocument, and most all the new cool stuff (Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, etc) is web-based! (or, at least, is open-protocol)

If someone's going to offer technical support services, they're much more likely to focus on Windows support.

Hmmm. Partly because it needs so *much* support just to stay functional? Obviously, that's where the money is...