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Maine To Skip Vista, Go Directly To Windows 7
Preedit writes "The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft. An internal state document (dated September 15) uncovered by Infoweek reveals that Maine will not be upgrading its more than 11,000 personal computing devices from XP to Vista — ever. Instead, it's going to wait until Windows 7 ships in 2010 and hope for the best. The news is in line with a survey that shows only 4% of businesses in the UK have upgraded to Vista, the story notes. So much for that $300 million Seinfeld campaign." A commenter on the article makes the point that Maine's signing an enterprise software license with Microsoft means that Redmond doesn't really lose out on this deal; it simply allows the state to upgrade its equipment and software on its own time.
There's nothing M$ has to offer that free software competitors don't do better.
Active Directory and Exchange. Nobody in the open source world really comes close. There are good open source programs out there to do most of it, but the integration with other layers of the software stack is fairly shitty.
Horizontal integration really means very little, contrary to what people would like you to believe in order to gain purchase for their pet office suite; vertical integration--easy vertical integration--is key.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."