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Intuit Finally Offers Some Support For Linux
walterbyrd sends us to the ZDNet blog, where Dan Farber & Larry Dignan write: "Intuit said Wednesday it will allow QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions to operate on Linux servers. For Intuit, the move is a bit of a milestone — QuickBooks is the first of its products [to] work on open source software."
I'm just hoping this effect builds more momentum till the day when Adobe released a 100% compatible version of Photoshop and Premiere for Linux.
I taught there several times back in the 90's. I was told by several ppl that they had the client running on Linux. Problem was that the marketing ppl were fighting it being there (as well as on the mac). They felt that MS would treat them right and that they had to be ONLY on windows. Marketing ppl are so short-sighted.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I know it's a dream but heh ...
Not many business people are willing to work in Linux desktops. But at a site I manage, we can't back up QB from the server becuase it runs on one of the PCs and never seems to let go of its database files. Everything else runs on a Debian server machine where we can monitor it and back it up, but QB is always a thorn in our sides.
However small, at least it's a step in Linux's direction, maybe it'll catch another company's eye and help them decide to support Linux. The more proprietary support Linux has the better and one day Linux will run anything you could want, which is what an OS should strive to do.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
This is a problem with the Windows/Linux mindset in general. They use either Windows or Linux in some attempt to avoid spending money. They think either platform will be some silver bullet that means they don't have to pay for real servers, real storage, software, competent admins. If these shops are already Windows based then nothing about their mentality is really going to change.
The big difference is between old-school Unix shops and Linux or Windows.
Even SqlServer can be respectable if you treat it like a Unix application.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Amen, brutha.
I sold my sould to Intuit years ago with Quicken, and I've been using Turbo Tax since 1993 (still have the 5 1/4" floppies), and they've made it harder and harder to be a loyal customer. The final straw was when they EOL'd online downloads for Quicken 2003 in 2006. Previously, they blamed it on format changes, better security, etc. But bow it is just party line - replace your software every 3 years, or features you and your bank paid for get disabled.
The next day, I vowed never to pay Intuit for their software ever again.
The Windows version of Quicken is far superior to the Mac version; so much so that I bought Parallels for my Mac for he sole purpose of being able to run the Windows version of Quicken.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
because eventually the client app will probably be replaced with AJAX or Flash or something anyway.
So we ported one of our applications to see what the viability would be and offered a free version and a pro version for a fee. I think we maybe sold around a 100 pro copies for Linux out of 6200 downloads, but we ran into a lot of problems. Tech support was a bitch. Now things have improved, but at the time we developed for RH and SuSE, but we got emails with: "This won't work on Slackware, or Debian, or pick your version here." Trying to explain we only supported RH and SuSE only tended to make people mad. That's not to mention the amount of email we got lecturing us why everything should be "free". Now, sure we had clients that paid
The windows version had 11,000 versions and about 3500 users that upgraded to the full version. To put it mildly, the Linux market was too small to make it viable because it consumed at least as much time to answer tech support questions as it did for Windows and the user base was 35x's larger. Eventually someone did develop a small application that did about the same thing as ours for free/oss and we ceased development on linux before the company was bought out and disbanded. We had a better product, but what we found when reading what customers told us (when they did) was they'd take second rate free for Linux over paying for something of quality.
Sorry, that was just the first hand experience I had. Personally I got tired of it and bought a Mac in 2002 and have been on OSX ever sense at home and work. One of my reasonings was, "Hell I can run GIMP and my fav. *iux apss and get Microsoft Office and other commerical software." Now there are folks like you, and me (I'll spend the money if it's worth it), but those numbers in the Linux desktop market are very few and unless it's something special, aren't enough to make it a viable market for many appliactions. Again it's chicken and the egg. More people won't develop Linux until there are more desktop users. And people won't use Linux until theirs more applications for it. That was how it was 5 years ago and it's still that way.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Ok, the title was probably a little more flamebait than intended. I generally agree that there is a mindset that you describe, but also that it tends to be short-lived in many or even most deployments (at least in terms of Linux).
My experience is that a lot of people start out going to Linux because they think they won't have to spend money, but once they realize what is possible, they start spending it and adopt much more of a UNIX mentality.
I have said many times that Linux is the only OS that can fit any budget. However, unlike Windows, the possibilities tend to be sufficiently open that budgets tend to grow to allow people to cut costs elsewhere. This means, eventually, purchasing real servers (such as Power 5/6-based servers), real storage (or building this in-house using lower-end but still real servers), and the like.
Flexibility has a financial price, but also a higher ROI.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP