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Unisys: We No Longer Have A Way Out
rbochan writes "Some of you may recall a couple of years back when Microsoft and Unisys decided that a multi-million dollar ad campaign against *nix was in order, dubbed 'We Have A Way Out.' The results weren't what they'd hoped. ZDNet is now reporting that Unisys has done an about face and is now touting Linux as 'a mature technology and the right cost-effective option for many companies.'"
This is why running a smear campaigain is a bad idea. Every now and then, it works, but it more often than not comes back to bite you in the ass. You're much better off to say nothing, or to say something that just casts yourself in a positive light.
Think about it -- you're interviewing two guys for an important job. One talks about all the good things he's done at his last job. The other talks about how screwed up things were and how he 'fixed' them. Who are you going to hire?
OT: People do this, too; there was an individual (name and gender withheld) at a previous place of employment with a resume filled with things like "Took a mis-managed department and brought it to productivity." Not only was this one of the worst employees we ever hired, but said employee got canned after six months because they did *nothing* but complain about how other departments were stopping them from doing their job.
The replacement had a more positive mindset, and caught up on the backlog within two months. Needless to say, he got promoted a couple of times.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
You said it, but I don't think you understood it -
The tech people say it's time to ditch Microsoft.
The business people don't necessarily get it. I talked to a guy yesterday who owns a group of companies such as an ISP, a computer repair shop, computer retail sales shop, web design firm, and business tech consulting company. He was showing me a home-grown web application that was quite impressive... until I asked him if it worked on Firefox. He laughed, looked at me and said, "No. Why would I support a browser with less than 1% of the market share?" I corrected him - 11% according to recent articles and as high as 40% on many of my clients' websites. His response was something along the lines of "when it gets to 40% across the board, I'll consider supporting it."
The point is, he's a business owner in our industry. He's a smart tech guy, but he's fully adopted Microsoft and defends its use. He can make a strong case for them to his clients, which are many. Business people don't see the world the same way that the tech folks do.
As much as many are devoted to Linux here, isn't this a case of Microsoft has not had a real OS refresh in years while, during that period, Linux has been constantly improving?
As much as it appears Unisys was in it for the money, it could just be they have reached some kind of tipping point where they believe that Linux now is a viable alternative to MS where they didn't previously. You know, opinions changing when the facts do . . .
A disclaimer: I am a Unisys employee.
Unisys is definitely making a move towards widespread adoption of Linux (Red Hat and SuSE) as a development platform, and various other open source development tools (eg, Maven, Eclipse, various parts of Apache Commons, etc). Regardless of current marketing hype from Blackmore and McGrath (the CEO), this is very much a bottom-up driven initiative. Open source software is finding itself in an increasing number of Unisys solutions, to the occasional consternation of management. So what you're hearing from the Unisys management publicly now is "hooray, Open Source," but what you would have heard a few years ago was... well, nothing, unless you worked for Unisys, in which case you probably would heard "stay the hell away."
Note: when I say "finding my way into," I don't mean "being stolen." Unisys is being extremely careful as to what the various license requirements are for the things it's using, so developers and architects are cognizant of the implications of the GPL and other similar "sharealike" licenses where their efforts are concerned. My experience with the developers here has been that they are pretty agnostic about everything except efficacy - they just want the stuff to work, and they want to get it done right for as little money as they can spend. I find that to be a healthy attitude.
For a guy like me whose roots are pretty heavily in open software, there's more than a little irony here. You may recall Unisys' spat with the Free Software Foundation, or... well, really a whole bunch of people, including Accuweather, over software patent issues.
One last thing: Peter Blackmore has identified outsourcing as a major component of the Unisys strategy. He's not kidding. Tons of Unisys developers have been axed over the last few years, and much of the development activity has been given to Caritor employees, based either locally at Unisys offices, or in India. The ones I've worked with are good guys, but there's more than a little discomfort between the two groups. Many Unisys folks see his biggest impact on the company as having been the guy who sent Unisys jobs to India.