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Microsoft Asks Open Source Not to Focus On Price
Microsoft's supposed open-source guru Sam Ramji has asked open-source vendors to focus on "value" instead of "cost" with respect to competition with Microsoft products. This is especially funny given the Redmond giant's recent "Apple Tax" message. "While I'm sure Ramji meant well, I'm equally certain that Microsoft would like nothing more than to not be reminded of how expensive its products can be compared with open-source solutions. After all, Microsoft was the company that turned the software industry on its head by introducing lower-cost solutions years ago to undermine the Unix businesses of IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the database businesses of Oracle and IBM."
So he's asking people to get a recent Ubuntu build instead of Vista?
and indicative of Microsoft's sense of entitlement.
...are more important. As is leveraging a new paradigm
This is Lauren. She told us she wanted a stable OS with an Office Suite and some photo editing software for $0. We told her, you find it, you keep it.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
and for open source, the price point is zero.
Not always. Especially if you factor in support contracts or the average salary of someone who actually knows how to administer the software in an effective manner. Open Source does not equal free beer. Just ask Stallman. However, if you write a good open source program I may buy you a free beer.
You can tell that most Microsoft apologists haven't had any sort of role in supporting or managing IT in business.
Been there. Done that. Have the faded t-shirts to prove it.
Although this isn't just about the fabled "business case".
This is also about the bargain conscious consumer that might
see various bits of commercial software and get a sudden case
of sticker shock or try something that claims to be free but
is really just an open door to malware and spam.
This is about taking Microsoft's own marketing approach and turning it on them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Open source software is often the better option both on cost and quality. As a consultant, I've found that when you stand up open source and proprietary solutions side by side for a customer, the open source solution wins most of the time. Now ISV's prefer the kickbacks, training and marketing support they get from proprietary vendors, so the customer has to ask for the open solution to be compared, but when they do the results are significant.
Microsoft: Please compete with us on our terms??!?! Pretty please?!
Open-source: No.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
> Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
I'll go you one better: businesses, or more accurately, managers in charge of making major spending decisions, don't often understand the difference between value and cost.
If a typical empty-suit gotta-wrap-this-by-2-so-I-can-get-to-the-golf-course middle manager looks at open source software (priced at $0) and then Microsoft software (priced in the thousands or tens of thousands, for company-wide use), he's probably going to make the decision in favor of Microsoft because if it doesn't cost anything, it must not be worth anything.
Small business owners have always dealt with this mindset. If they want contracts from big companies they usually have to inflate their prices (even beyond what they would consider a fair profit margin) in order to even be considered as a potential vendor. This is especially true when trying to do work for governments or Universities.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Since the article mentions Microsoft's attempts to undermine competing businesses, here's an interesting link to the Eupean Committee for Interoperable Systems' (ECIS) article "Microsoft: A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm" (PDF): http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf Published on 2009-03-31. Required reading. :-)
OSS software is a total boon to developers. I'm a developer, and we use OSS everywhere possible. Since we can easily support our software when something goes awry, we jump quickly and confidently.
But not every company has their own staff of developers. Companies that don't produce software have little incentive to hire developers if they don't contribute significantly to the bottom line. And for companies in this boat, OSS does, indeed, have costs that far outstrip the purchase price.
Windows Server licenses for needed servers might cost a grand or three. If this is sufficient to avoid the cost of hiring a developer (at around $100k/year) or an admin, (at ~ $60k/year) it's money very well spent!
Sure, I use OSS because it lets me sleep very soundly at night, with perhaps 1 significant unplanned incident per year in our hosting cluster of 14 servers. But part of that is that we already have paid the price of having developers on hand to maintain and understand our OSS-based servers.
And don't think that just because it's Microsoft, you can assume it's safe to laugh. I remember when MS Word was laughable. I remember when Windows was laughable. I remember when Excel was a toy compared to the "meat and potatoes" competition.
As a corporate culture, Microsoft learns how to dominate markets. They're losing right now, and maybe they won't turn things around in time. But they have massive assetts, they still have a monopoly in the desktop computing marketplace, and with Vista, they've shown a willingness to take risks if they are necessary to improve their software.
I know this is unpopular to state here on Slashdot, but many (most?) of the problems with Vista have been centered around making the changes necessary to more properly secure Windows. Software that was badly built that did bad things broke on Vista, and that's a necessary step to take in order to preserve their long term market share.
Don't laugh. Keep your head down, keep improving the OSS software, and be wary of Microsoft - they still have everything it would take to continue to dominate.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Ah, before we start looking for the "value" in comparisons with Microsoft and Open-Source, perhaps we should look to have Microsoft justify its "value" behind the Office suite being $60 for the average student, and $360 for the average office worker...
That may be true on the workstation, though rather than pay even $150 a pop for 23 licenses for Office Home/Educational or whatever its called, I threw in OpenOffice. My manager was a little nervous about this, and even tentatively put money in the budget for the licenses, but allowed me to "experiment". There have been a few problems, to be sure, but nothing so earth-shattering that, after a month, when we discussed it, it was agreed that OpenOffice was the obvious solution for these workstations. For what they're used for, if there wasn't XP licenses to be had, I'd probably just have installed Ubuntu.
But on the server end of things, it's quite different. I see no reason to pay thousands of dollars for the operating system and CALs for a fileserver, when Samba does the job quite well. In these harsher economic times, the value of a GUI drops pretty substantially when you're talking about licensing costs. What's more, because of Microsoft's insane licensing system, it's not just costs, but making sure you've got the right kind of license. Oops, that was an OEM license, so sorry, you can't put that copy of Server 2003 on a new server, you naught boy. Buy a new one! BWAHAHAHA.
We just went through a software-licensing-review-that-wasn't-labeled-as-a-review with Microsoft (likely because, once I was on board, I stopped paying their crappy, useless and expensive Software Assurance), and it was the first time my organization had gone line by line through our licenses.
Microsoft is absurdly expensive and restrictive, and believe me, so far as I'm concerned, OpenOffice is thin edge of the wedge. Next up is Exchange. Everything is going web-based anyways, and the only real "Exchange-y" feature we use is shared calendars. I can either use one of the open source groupware packages, or as some have suggested, just look at Google's calendaring.
I'm telling my rep flat out once the review is through that with the next round of purchases, the only thing likely Microsoft on the computers will be the operating system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
and for open source, the price point is zero.
Not always. Especially if you factor in support contracts or the average salary of someone who actually knows how to administer the software in an effective manner.
But that's also true of closed-source solutions. It isn't like a Windows server miraculously runs itself. You still need someone who knows how run the thing.
Obviously there's tons of wiggle room here... It may very well be that the average salary of a Windows admin is lower than that of a *nix admin... But *nix gives you better automation tools, security, and stability - so that one admin might be able to do more real work on a *nix box than a Windows box.
You can't just look at the sticker price when determining which piece of software is going to cost more or get you more bang for your buck... But you can't ignore the sticker price either.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Open source
Pros:
1. (Generally) free up front costs
2. A multititude of versions readily available, all the way back to early alpha, and will likely always be available, accompanied by the source code
3. (generally/often) cross-platform support
4. A huge support base made up of both paid professional support and "community" support
5. If you have a nagging "must fix" bug that affects you and only you, you have the option of fixing it or hiring someone to fix it for you
6. 0% risk of violating "per-seat" licensing
7. Development might be in someone's bedroom, or backed by a big company. YMMV, batteries not included. This could be a "con" if it's the former.
Cons
1. No warranty
2. Programs are often buggy or incomplete
3. Some projects are run by arrogant BOFH/RTFM types.
4. May require administrator training, in the form of self-study or tutorial videos on youtube, or time spent on messageboards.
Proprietary/Closed Source
Pros:
1. Shrink wrapped package and professionally-replicated DVD (oooh, SHINY!)
2. Development backed by a professional company
3. Program is usually relatively complete and bug free
4. Training i$ generally available for a co$t - where your sysadmin will receive a year's worth of information in 3-5 days and will remember precisely none of it, so he'll be asking you for funding for books, time for self-study and will be spending time on messageboards and/or watching tutorials on youtube
Cons
1. High up-front costs
2. High risk of copyright/license violations if you install more seats than "allowed" by your "license"
3. Support is generally expensive
4. Only the latest version is commercially available
5. If you have a bug you and only you encounter, you're SOL. It ain't gonna be fixed. They have your money already, so why should they care?
6. You are tied to the one and only one platform the software runs on
7. Support is paid support only, and in many cases, if you need support on an older version, they will require you to upgrade prior to providing support. Some community support may be available.
6. All warranties are expressly waived/disclaimed.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
That quote from Ramji was taken completely out of context. It takes a bit of digging, because the distortion is already present in TFA, but here is the blog post to which TFA "responds". Note especially:
Due to the downturn in the economy, many business users are putting the kibosh on migrations to or from open source. [...] That's why Microsoft is advising open-source partners with whom the company is collaborating not to focus their customer pitches on costs, but instead to lead their sales pitches with "value," he said.
(Emphasis mine.)
Now this may certainly be bad and self-serving advice from Microsoft, but it is still very different from what TFA makes it out to be. Microsoft isn't begging OS vendors to change their sales pitches to something it can compete with. It's telling vendors how it thinks they should pitch in a time of economic difficulty.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Microsoft bashing.
Pay attention to the source before going off the deep end:
IT departments are not cutting their spending to zero, Ramji claimed. Instead, they are focusing on strategic projects and cutting completely those they deem to be non-critical. That's why Microsoft is advising open-source partners with whom the company is collaborating not to focus their customer pitches on costs, but instead to lead their sales pitches with "value," he said.
The message is for Microsoft's open-source allies, not RedHat. Ramji is suggesting that they fish where the fish are. It's good advice.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I own a MacBook Pro - its hardware, OS and apps work more nicely for me. It has a higher cost than many roughly comparable PC laptops. I find greater value in it.
I run a Linux server. It has the same hardware cost as if Windows were on but no issues with client access licenses, activation or any artificial limitation brought on by segmentation like Home, Pro, Ultimate etc.. It has comparable but slightly lower cost. I find greater value in it.
Do they want to continue? The value argument is a very poor one from MS. Ubiquity is the best card they've got to play.
Cheers,
Ian
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can tell most Open Source advocates have never had to make costing decisions in large businesses.
Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business.
To get ever closer you have to look at how efficient it is for people to get their work done on that platform when compared to the competition.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
1. We have anecdotal remarks, at the very least, that have found retraining costs can be surprisingly low. In any event, those costs are non-recurring, as opposed to keeping up with Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
2. On support costs between Linux and Windows, I think there is sufficient evidence available to show that the cost difference is either a wash or favourable towards Linux. Microsoft-sponsored studies claiming otherwise have been largely discredited.
3. Efficiency. True. No tool drives in a nail as efficiently as a hammer. In some cases, proprietary applications either outclass or have no Open Source competitor. However, the less specialized the task, the more likely that a Free/Open Source solution is "good enough", or even the better choice. Cases in point: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Apache, Asterisk, the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities. And one more thing, just because you *can* have lots of eye candy doesn't mean that you should.
4. Another consideration that affects how products work and attitudes of business is that many proprietary products are built assuming that the user is a thief and should not use the product. As a result, you pay Microsoft for software that can decide to downgrade your multimedia playback, for example.
Further on this point, the culture of user as probable thief spawns the BSA. As long as you use software by BSA members you risk a costly license "audit", whether your licenses are 100% compliant or not. Productivity loss during these audits has a real bottom-line cost to a business.
Support for your employees?? Might as well buy bras for your female employees and cups for your male employees as spend money on Microsoft support. They'll get much better support that way. You even get better information about FOS when you google than you do about MSOffice.
Please don't focus on quality or security either.
Please focus on... customer support! We heard Linux didn't have any of that. We tried logging on to #linux this one time but someone told us to RTFM and banned us from the channel.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think you're mostly right but it's clear you're not using AD beyond an authentication system for your workstations. Start putting group policies to use and you'll quickly see that Linux/Samba can't compete.
I don't know about you, but when someone asks for a change to one of my apps and I tell them "It's open source, make the change yourself," what I'm really saying is "**** off."
If you're business this is only possible:
- Assuming you have the budget for a development team.
- And the time to become familiar with the code base before the feature is needed.
- And a repository maintainer who is willing to accept your changes, or an even bigger team and budget to track security and bug fixes from the original developer and incorporate them into your modified code base.
- And a silver tongue, so you can convince your investors that it's totally worthwhile to spend their money improving a product that anybody can use for free with absolutely no way to profit directly from the improvements you made to the software.
Or if you're a home user, in which case you probably don't know C, and if you do you're probably too tired from writing C all day to fix someone's code for them.
The ability to make contributions is far from the main benefit of open source software. The main benefit is the fact that someone can't shut it down for selfish reasons. The code is essentially in the public domain. Apache or MySQL will never enter a "vault" like The Lion King or Sleeping Beauty; the Linux kernel will never have its "support period" expire. The real benefit is social, rather than technological.