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IBM's Answer To Windows 7 Is Ubuntu Linux
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore. Today IBM announced an extension of its Microsoft-Free PC effort together with Canonical Ubuntu Linux. This is the same thing that was announced a few weeks back for Africa (a program that began a year ago), and now it's available in the US. The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper."
I wonder how IBM arrived at the result of $2000. Because I'm pretty sure that out of the 150k people that I work with that 3/4 of them will take months to adjust to Linux and be completely pissed off the entire time. At an internal rate of $100-$150 per person per hour... uh... lol, right.
This is what most of the company uses: Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Project. File shares. Blackberry/Phone. Online web conferences. PDF. That's about it. Everything else is either a back-end system specific to the business or a program (i.e, drafting, manufacturing, etc) for the specific business at hand.
And don't give me crap about open office solutions. It took most of these people 10 or 20 years to just get by with Office, you really think they are going to want to essentially re-learn everything? $2000 is only relevant if the people are actually fairly computer savy, which pretty much everyone everywhere is not nor do they care to bother.
Why would I apologize that Apache talks about their issues and the IIS team hides them?
I think your the same guy as the one above, which does not really matter. The fact is he has been spreading FUD throughout this page and I called him out, so what?
IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore.
IBM hasn't been a big fan of MS's since MS caught IBM's fumble in the PS/2-OS/2 disaster.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If the elephant plans to back Canonical, it had better be willing to put up some serious development money in the process. Ubuntu is nowhere near ready for prime time, and I don't care what its' fans try and say. Go and spend 24 hours or so on Ubuntu's forums before you try and tell me it is stable.
Sometimes I wonder how IBM has managed to stay in business for 110 years; they really don't display sound intuition where identifying/backing winners in the marketplace is concerned.
Instead of Windows, they went with OS/2, which bombed, at least in mainstream terms. Now they're backing Linux, when the truly intelligent thing for them to do would be to get hold of FreeBSD and build their own offering on top of that, a la Apple. At the very least, they could go for LFS or something else with a cleaner base.
Ubuntu is the proverbial dog with fleas, of Linux distributions. Before all its' freetard fans start baying at me about how popular it is, my refutation for that is simple; Windows is very popular too. Your point? ;)
Linux in mainstream terms is a lost cause. Canonical might not be smart enough to have figured that out yet, but I would have expected IBM to be.
Thank god I started by making my business an all Linux / open source shop from the start. It is hard to put real numbers to it, but I suspect it has saved me an easy $30,000 a year in IT cost for a small shop of around 6 employees (it will scale to around 12-24 easily without much investment). Perhaps something around $100,000 is a fair number to date in savings over the last 4 years. A case could be made for saving a whole lot more, if you add up the cost of all the propitiatory equivalents we use in terms of databases, hosting, mail servers, open source web packages, and so on ( three linux servers of various sorts). Even the routers use open firmware. My total IT budget is around $2,000 a year ($4,000 for everything including bandwidth and phone lines).
I might add, I am not including my own labor in this number. Just the cost of the hardware and software. Honestly, I remember spending a whole lot more time screwing with viruse infested crashing messes at my last job that was all windows network (and that was not even my job), then I ever do maintaining my linux systems.
Because I run Linux, I have been able to run old computers in to the ground that I would have needed to replace at least once or twice by now, plus figure a copy of xp, vista, and now windows 7 in the time we have been open. The only reason I replace a PC is because the hardware fails. In fact, that is really the way it should be. Not because the software is more bloated. My oldest system still in everyday use is a PIII IBM T-22 notebook with 500 mb of ram, and half the office is still running single core Semprons just fine. The only thing making me considering upgrading currently is the possibility of energy savings with mini systems that use less juice and still get the job done. I am looking to downgrade basically. I am waiting for the industry to sort out the linux smart phone situation a bit more, and I will deploy linux phones to all my staff. Hell if that goes well, I will get rid of the cost of the frigen office all together. There, I found $2000 in cost conversion to linux. What it will cost me to break my office lease and sell the furniture.
Living in Chile
Not quite. Bone up on your operating system history a bit and you'll make fewer ridiculous statements like that one. Start here: OS/2. At that time, there were lots of people at lots of companies who had experience making and supporting evolving operating systems. Almost none of those people worked for Microsoft, as they were a fledgling wannabe that had experience making a really killer business deal, and then milking DOS for all it was worth. The disaster that the evolving Windows product would become had only just begun. That disaster was almost entirely due to the fact that Microsoft didn't have a corporate culture that led to the reliable production of successive generations of increasingly better operating systems. They were insular. They preferred to hire inexperienced people who wouldn't tell them how to do things better, and brainwashed them into thinking they were the best. Should I go on?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I can see missing Visio, but sharepoint access? I can only dream of the day I cant access sharepoint, what a mess that software is. I think people get to believing MS is the only way to do things because they have trained themselves to believe that overly complicated software that isnt the right tool for the job as long as its "industry standard" is the way to go.
In any case, every now and then I visit here: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/ because Dave is open and honest with the struggles and success of implementing his own reality using FOSS and saving tons of money while he's at it..
Pay attention that he has time to act on his users needs, rather then re-act to software breakages, outages, support and vendor issues only.
Oh, lots of Microserfs have mod points. I'm used to it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."