Unless you are in the military - where you always wear the same color/outfit, weight and how much you carry needs to be kept at a minimum as well as there being a great need to commicate and for others to know where you are. This actually goes along with the Star Trek analogy a bit too because they were, arguably, military personnel.
But there is no money in selling things to the miltary right?
You are right about small buisiness not needing a dedicated full-time admin but are missing the most widely-used alternative - outsoursing the IT operations to a specialist. My company provides support for small to medium sized buisinesses. We come in and build the server and desktops and set up the whole environment and then provide ongoing support for it including 24/7 helpdesk who have remote access/control of the desktops, SCOM monitoring to alert us to issues, and onsite service whenever they require it all at an hourly rate. They only tend to use 1-2 hours a week at most once things are running and all-up it works out to much much less than a fulltime admin.
For what it is worth, one of the buisinesses that I have been looking after introduced a few Macs into their SBS 2008 environment for their artists recently - I joined them to AD and am using Entourage 2008 to connect to their Exchange server. Most of the calls I get are not about the PCs, which we have running great, but the Macs which seem to have all kinds of issues relating to dropping network share drives and Entourage playing up. Granted it can be argued the issue is with the Macs interacting with the MS environment, in some cases using MS tools, but their SBS server is not going anywhere and the Mac really needs to play better in what is really an MS world to acheive inroads in the enterprise. Particularly when I could have gotten them an HP workstation-class PC running the same Creative Suite for nearly 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of those Mac Pros...
I work with both MS and Linux servers and, when setting up my own home server, I had a choice between the platforms. Seeing as how I have a TechNet subscription for work/testing purposes Server 2008 is basically free for me so the choice was not one on price but on ease of use and applicability to my needs.
I ended up installing Server 2008 with Linux running under a VM for the occasional usage mostly because of how great Terminal Services is. It gives me a remote desktop through a fast, secure, and very functional protocol which is widely supported. If I get disconnected I have it set up where it will maintain all of my apps just as I left them for days. It maps my local clipboard, printer and local drives wherever I am and there are clients on every windows PC, for the Mac, for Linux and even for my iPhone.
Microsoft is making a move in this space releasing features for Terminal Services 2008 that used to be limited to Citrix - secure https gateway, load balancing between servers and accessing individual applications through a web interface. And since you always had to buy Terminal Services CALs in order to use Citrix anyway (you have to love that - make your customers buy our product to use your product and we'll let you survive) it makes the MS solution much cheaper than a terminal server used to cost with Citrix.
I just find it funny that there is another area - thin clients and remote workers - where MS is trying to assert their dominanace, albiet with a great product, and Google happens to come along and release a free alternative.
I call BS on these figures to a large extent. I currently work as an IT consultant to the small/medium business space including many your size. I'll preface this by saying I am an RHCE and really love linux personally and part of me wants to try to sell it (in the from of the free CentOS) as a solution more often. Even with a openldap/samba/zimbra solution it just doesn't measure up with MS SBS which is a great product though...
My first problem with your story is how much of your time did you spend on this? Would your average small buisines owner have that time or required interest/skill? If you had to pay somebody to set up the Linux solution your costs would have blown out considerably. My second is that you don't have to use all pay software on Windows - Open Office and GIMP run on Windows just fine...
SBS 2008 standard which includes Server 2008 (with the requisite AD/Group Policy goodnesss), IIS7, Sharepoint and Exchange 2007 is $779 including 5 CALs/licenses. Dell/HP servers it might even work out cheaper because it is bundled. It then costs ~$70/user in additional CALs beyond the 5
I usually drop in an high-speced HP ML350 server with 4 cores of Xeon, 8GB ECC RAM, 4-5 10k SAS disks in a RAID5, LTO3/4 tape drive, redundant power supplies and integrated lights out management (lets me reboot/work on things remotely) since they'll be running one server - in most cases for organizations of this size one really great server is better than a few mediocre ones anyway.
New PCs are quite affordable these days and come bundled with windows (I still get them with XP for the most part) and you can get Office 2007 small buisiness for $239/copy.
I'd say all told this costs them $15,000 for the server including all license costs, hardware and setup and then $1500/desktop for the all hardware/software/setup costs including XP and Office 2007 (many still exercise downgrade rights to 2003). Exchange/Outlook/ActiveSync is the current gold-standard for messaging/collaboration and hooking their iPhones up takes moments and has been an easy sell.
Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 are surprisingly great products and now that I have mastered powershell I can manage/script almost everything from the command line - who'd have thought on MS? I stop in for a couple afternoons a month to do desktop/user support and perform ongoing server maintenance. The maintenance is mostly chasing up the backups and making sure they don't run out of space - I have yet to have a major issue with SBS 2008 and had very few with SBS 2003...
So for ~$60,000 total including all licensing and setup costs they have the full MS solution in an organization of your size. Wack on another $2000-$2500/month for my visits and there is the bulk of their IT costs. I have yet to have any complaints with it and since it is a standard solution built to MS best practices and well documented I am sure they can find a guy to take over from me without any problem if I leave too...
This is exactly right. Everything ties together so tightly that once you get one piece you might as well take the whole. You buy Office, which runs only on Windows and which comes with Outlook. You want to use that for email so that means Exchange. Exchange depends on MS Active Directory so that means storing all your user accounts on the MS server and authenticating against that. As long as you have these MS servers for authentication you might as well do your file/print sharing there. As long as you are doing your file sharing there you might as well use DFS replication and put another server in the branch office. Once you are running Exchange you might as well run Outlook Web Access and that means IIS. Once you are already hosting that on IIS you might as well host your other web pages there. Since you are hosting your web pages there you might as well use MS SQL as the backend as well as Sharepoint for the intranet page - etc etc.
They even are nice enough to bundle all of this into one (relatively by MS standards) inexpensive product called SBS Premium. The big catch is that you have to run all of it on one server. As the buisiness expands, and they have already got you depending on it all, they really sting you with the licensing increases involved in buying the full versions of all the various software and their associated Client Access Licenes (CALs) so that you can seperate into multiple servers. When you get bigger still and need clustering and redundancy you need to throw still more servers and more licensing fees at the problem (usually for "Enterprise" products then as well) and that is when they really get you.
I am an RHCE as well as having the full spread of MS certifications - I love Linux and run that and a Mac on the desktop at home. I rarely get to use my Linux knowledge/certifications these days because of all the MS lockin/ubiquity. There are a few places that I would have liked to use CentOS or RHEL for some things but was forced to use the MS product by their insistance on Exchange - and once you have the infrastructure for that there then is no place/need for Linux any more. That is why I submitted this story and have been looking for this solution - the hope that I might actually have something I could sell a buisiness on that would allow me to actually get some Linux out there!
Trust me though when I say that Office/Outlook/Exchange is the #1 reason for half of MS's dominance in the server space. We need something to counter it. I am just really hoping that IBM, with all of its resources and its relative presence in this space, can give it to me...
I have studied a bit of history at the University level and I am not sure whether the digital age will make that job easier or harder in the future. With the overwhelming amount of online content in blogs and such it will be easier to find accounts of events but harder to seperate opinion from fact. It will be easier to search through being electronic but harder to sort through due to the overwhelming quantity of information on the current internet. It is also much easier to alter unless things like electronic hashes are stored along with the content. And that is with HTTP which is easily readable and not proprietary - I wonder how formats like MS Word docs are going to far with the test of time.
Are there even organizations out there archiving the wider internet for posterity? With published books they tend to be edited and distributed to libraries and preserved in a physical form where you can find them on the shelves 50 years from now. I don't know of any libraries storing/preserving electroic materials in the same way...
I understand that the entries involved are for all users and thus I understand why I am being prompted for what is a system-wide change. What I don't understand is why I need to answer three seperate dialogs to move one shortcut between folders there. One surely would do...
I think there is going to be quite a bit of criticism of MS for this but basically you see UAC prompts where you would have to do a su or sudo to get the job done as a starndard user in Linux/Unix. The reason you don't have to do those all the time in Linux is that the application writers do not write their apps to require constant root priviledge escalations. There is one app that I couldn't get working properly in Fedora 8 without running it with a sudo - Nero Linux - and it annoyed me quite a bit.
MS needs to drag both its users and those who write windows applications along to the limited security model we all need each other to be using for the good of the internet. It was always going to be painful.
The one criticism that I have of the system/model in practice is the start menu - and that is all MS! I try to organize my start menu and I see several dialogs. I would be much more on-board with only one Cancel or Allow for an operation like that...
I am an American who has been living in Australia the last few years. All Cable/DSL services here have usage caps and you pay for faster speeds / more downloads. When I first moved here the idea of the usage caps pissed me off but I have warmed to them. I pay ~US$60/month for 8 megabit down and 384 kbit up DSL with a static IP. I get 24 gigabytes per month and any downloads I do from 1am to 8am are counted at half so it is really more like 30 to me most months. They have a usage meter website that is updated about once per hour and is quite accurate telling me how I am using. If I go over I pay $4/gigabyte.
This is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, everybody has a motivation to do their non-essential torrents etc overnight which improves gaming/voip performance during the day and peak evening hours. Secondly, I have an agreement with my provider where I get such and such amount of data at such and such speed and we are both on the same page - I will never get an email saying to use less and hassling me like I received from Adelphia (now Time Warner I believe) before I left. It doesn't serve as a huge deterrent but it is enough to ensure that you don't waste a precious resource (bandwidth) as readily. If you bought electricity, water, or natural gas on an "unlimited" basis don't you think that would lead to waste as well?
I think that the current "unlimited" system does a disservice to many on a shared-bandwidth medium like cable as well. A few teenagers on a street who saturate their connections 24/7 downloading things like the entirely of the Simpsons etc they may never actually watch make the rest of the neighboorhood slow for things like telecommuting and voip that are much more essential and time-critical. There is no reason/incentive for them to stop or to try to do their larger torrents overnight etc. It is also the shadyness of what the limit really is on the "unlimited" service questions. All in all we can argue about where the pricing and the cap are set but I think the idea is sound and reasonable. They will always let you do what you want but you may have to pay more for a service where you can download 100GB/month than granny pays to do 1-2% of that - as you should.
Not that I necessarily agree with your sentiment, but it reminded me of a joke I heard while watching the election coverage up there during the last election (I was living in Western New York at the time and got Canadian stations).
"What the Canadian people really want are two Liberal parties - one to vote into office when the other becomes too corrupt to governern."
I am not sure about that. Comparing their 64 bit performances aside (where it is still equal if not ahead), if you compiled those linux binaries for 32 bit instead of 64 bit on your Core2Duo how much of a difference would you see versus 64 bit running on a AMD? Unless you were addressing large amounts of memory or doing something rather out of the ordinary I doubt that you really need 64 bit for anything but stroking your ego to know that you are more leet because you compiled it with that flag. If you are running XP or Vista than 64 bit is even worse - a bunch of driver and compatability issues with no real performance benefit.
I remember during the Pentium IV days all the AMD fans were constantly talking about how AMD owned the price to performance crown and that Intel was overpriced, ran hot (energy inefficient), and was just all around not as good an architecture. They were right - and I bought an Athlon 64 instead of a P4.
Now those same people are trying to argue that the less expensive, cooler and more efficient Core2Duo are still not as good as their beloved AMD. They will point to 64 bit performance or performance over 4GB of ram - or a myraid of little things that are not relevant to the vast majority for at least the next couple years to support their bias.
The processor wars, just like the video wars, will go back and forth. Nobody stays on top forever. Intel, after many years trailing, had their leap ahead for a generation or two. The people who are the most rational go with the best architecture or company at the time. I bought an ATI 9600 instead of a Nvidia 5600, even though I had always owned Nvidia and loved the drivers, because it was the better value for the money at that time.
The bigger person, the more rational person, is the one who can be objective about these things. Which CPU company you "love" is a very strange thing to have an irrational passion about...
The University I work for uses Exchange for staff and about 1/3 of our staff use Entourage on a mac to connect to it. I use it on my PowerBook while using Outlook on my Windows Desktop and they both work fine.
The interface is a bit different and it chokes a bit if you have tons of delegated mailboxes/calenders compared to Outlook but, for most situations, they have it to the point where it is very usable.
Actually I have found that, at least on their desktop OS, things like file sharing/web serving and such have wonderful easy seemless configuration.
If they can, as you say, bring the simplicity of their GUIs to the more complex options needed in a server environment - if they can make it so with a few clicks out of the box it is good to go - then they will have a real winner on their hands and a real threat to Microsoft and the Linux distributions. If your defaults are such that they meet the needs of the majority with little change then that is half of the problem as well - and I have faith that Apple can do it...
The one thing that has really helped MS in the enterprise has been that the sell an entire solution that all works together. Windows desktops sign into Windows Active Directory run by Windows Servers. Outlook connects to Exchange running on Windows servers with Kerberos AD logins. Office and Sharepoint getting along to create and maintain intranet content.
Apple has made huge inroads with solving the desktop issues of running Unix on the desktop. For the most part though I have seen either Linux or MS solutions on the server for file sharing and web serving and NIS/NFS and such. Even on the mac I would imagine that Entourage connecting to an Exchange server makes up a large portion of the Enterprise mail community.
If Apple can provide a cheaper end-to-end solution from the server to the desktop with LDAP directories, email, calendering, intranet etc - all preloaded on their server hardware and ready to go - then they have a real winner. Hell the cheaper licencing costs they can offer from basing on open-source can help subsidize their higher hardware margins to make this a comparable, if not cheaper, solution compared to something MS from the likes of Dell or HP.
If they really wanted to twist the knife in they should release some client software/drivers for Windows that make it just as easy to connect that to their servers and services as Macs to accomodate the need for having some PCs in a newly mac office.
Now is the time to do this as companies are faced with upgrading to Vista on the desktop, a new version of Office, and soon a new server platform. Most of this means new hardware purchases anyway. They might be able to just swoop in and offer a complete solution the likes of which linux has been unable to - all bundled with and guaranteed/supported on their own hardare as well.
The only way for this to be a realistic option would be to limit the possibilities as far as hardware and software to something manageable/supportable. Imagine a division of Dell, or some other company like IBM or HP, that would create a nicely configured version of Linux with less configurations/options but really slick defaults where everything worked well out of the box. They could then guarantee that this group of machines and these peripherals would work with their distro - which they could do by controlling the hardware and software. They could even set it up so that the distro can be transferred to/boot on any of those machines ala OSX on Apple Hardware (pre-Intel anyway).
Linux as it is now without any restriction on its possibilities or options is not feasible support-wise. While many startups have failed in making Linux computers Dell, for example, certainly has the resources to make this work. If not an instant success in the consumer market, you would think such a creation would win them some corporate and government business and give them complete control over their own platform. I know many that would pay for a drop-in Linux solution with guarantees that it will work together perfectly as expected - especially with big-business support options. And while you could never be vendor locked in with Linux such a situation might be their best shot at providing enough value to justify their hardware and software over the rest.
I was having the same problem and I solved it with two changes to my Mac. 1.) Add "large readwrite=no" to the [global] section of/etc/smb.conf 2.) create a/etc/sysctl.conf with the following inside it net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536 net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 net.inet.udp.recvspace=73728
The most important thing seems to be the net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 - on UNIX systems and Macs they will hold off on sending ACKs to save Network/CPU usage and it is a good thing. Windows however seems to wait on things until it gets ACKs with SMB and so it kills performance. After making these settings changes my SMB connection speed to my Vista box is unbelievably improved - things that were taking almost an hour before are done in like 5 minutes.
Not sure why Apple would ship with so anti-MS defaults considering how many of their users would be doing Samba stuff with Windows boxes though...
I am an American currently living in Australia and attending University here (University of Sydney). I can second the fact that about half of the laptops that I see here are Apple. I find this particularly amazing given just how ridiculously more expensive Apples are down here compared with in the US or with their cheap PC counterparts in retail. Not sure how much is due to a markup or how much is due to GST but I saw PowerBook G4 12" selling here, after the Intel tranisition, for still about $2500AU and the Mac Mini at about $1000AU.
How much of a margin are the resellers getting? How much is the markup? It can't all be currency exchange and the GST...
This fortells a huge shift that is coming in the PC industry and internals. Basically, huge and fast multicore processors will be the only major component of a PC aside from the chipset. It will run mostly software-based drivers for things such as the LAN/WLAN, Sound and Video. The reason we needed daugher cards for these things in the past is that the CPU was not fast enough or well-situated to run all these things in parallel without abysmal performance. But with the advent of multi-core processors one core can do graphics, one can do sound/network and one or two can run your app and it will all just fly. As the movement in the industry is already towards smaller, less components, less power and less heat this centralization was only a matter of time. The CPU manufacturers would love making processor performance truly the be-all and must have of performance again in this way. The video card manufacturers will be wounded with this increased emphasis on the CPU so the CPU manufacturers will merge with them and/or buy them.
The problem for open-source lies in the fact that a good portion of the actual video "card" product will lie in drivers and that they will not want to share the internals of their design in an open way to their competitors. Everything will be binary and everything will be closed. Linux desperatly needs to have a framework ready in the kernel/OS to accomodate this binary and closed driver reality or the manufacturers will not bother to support much of the community out of a few key distros at best.
The market MS is after is no the people who currently are running Linux/Sun clusters. It is those in the buisiness world who don't have them, or any applications written for them, yet. They will come out with a.Net-type framework for clusters that does over 1/2 the work for you and is much simpler to use and program for in a way that any Visual Studio programmers will be able to quickly learn. The cost of the licences will be made up by the easier administration and programming of using it. I wouldn't put it past them to make it a big target for software makers of high-CPU apps to write/develop against it and introduce a plug-and-play cluster to speed up their computation etc...
The best MS product is Visual Studio and they will leverage that to make this interesting...
When I bought my 12" PowerBook awhile back I went into the Apple store thinking I was going to get the cheaper 12" iBook. However the much weaker and toy-like feel of the plastic case vs the aluminium and, especially, how far FAR superior the PB's keyboard was made me spend quite a bit more getting it instead. I remember playing with both side to side and thinking "I could never type on this crappy iBook keyboard all day..." It just felt awful to type on and was very noisy in comparison to the PB. I will have to wait and actually hold one and type on one to see whether it is going to work for me physically.
The graphics is not a huge deal for me as I have a desktop PC for games.
I hope that they improved it over the iBook in these respects because the smaller form factor is also deal-breaker for me.
I definetly agree. I have a 12" PowerBook myself and it has worked out beautifully for me - the best of both worlds. I have a beautiful 19" LCD and a keyboard/mouse/speakers set up on a desk at home to make up for the size when I need it. When I am in class and on the go I have my nice, small, light and incredibly sturdy feeling laptop with great battery life. When I come home I plug it in and I have an even bigger LCD than the 17" projected with a gorgeous DVI picture. I also have a Dell Inspiron 8600 which is roughly the size of the 15" MacBook Pro and I don't think I could go back to carrying that large of a laptop with me.
Please Apple give us something of the same quality and form factor as the 12" PowerBook with some Core Duo love! Then again, maybe you shouldn't as I think that I can still get a couple years out of this 12" PB at this rate and nothing else would tempt me to upgrade...
I am 24 and spent several years in IT working for a major multinational bank. More and more of the jobs there were getting outsourced to India - though I am not sure you could call it outsourcing since they had a presence there so it was more just moving the responsibility to that country/division. I thought long and hard about it and decided to go back to school for Education - one of the few jobs that you can be assured lifetime employement in an industry that will still be around in much the same form for the rest of my career and that can't be outsourced. The hours are good, the pay is improving, the time off is great and it is stable - all things you can't say to nearly the same extent for IT.
A few things became very clear to me. First, that most of the end-user relation / helpdesk jobs for firms of any size will be outsorced to a third-party company whether they make use of offshoring or not. Those that are left will not be very highly paid. Second, to compete with the likes of Linux and open-source software the commercial software vendors will make their software easier to set up and manage, almost to the sense of self-managing in many cases, and what set up and management they require will be provided by the hardware vendor bundled with the purchase. For example, the likes of IBM, HP, Dell and Sun will come into an organization and set up the hardware and the software as they metamorphize into solution providers instead of hardware providers. There will be jobs working for them in such a situation but I have a feeling there will be many more qualified IT people around than there will be such jobs. I can certainly imagine a Microsoft ad campaign to management for Sever 2010 that goes "Upgrade to Microsoft Server 2010 and you will need 1/2 of the IT staff" and so forth - it will be their way of convincing buisiness to shell out money for the next big upgrade and it will be a damn effective one as it will pay for itself.
All in all, it makes total sense that the software will get smarter to justify the cost and that these solution providers will be able to do much of the current IT work more cheaply than an in-house staff for most organizations in the future. It is definetly not a career that I could be sure I would still have a well-paying and stable job in for the next 40-50 years and so I needed to find something that I could be sure of that while I still could. I would suggest you do the same...
I am back at University at 24 because after 4 years in IT I really started to believe it was a dead end. Now I am studying secondary humanities education - teaching can't be outsourced and provides much greater stability and benefits in the long run. It is a career that will still be there in 40 years and I couldn't be sure of that with IT.
The way I see it the field is being attacked from two directions. I think that the software is going to get good enough where most of the mundane management tasks will be automated away. It will require a skilled engineer or two to come in and set it up and then it will practically run itself. I think that MS will compete with linux/unix on the server side with a OS that is smarter and easier to manage - and with their resources I think they will succeed at least to the point of needing fewer human resrouces in IT in many oranizations. Their advertising to managment will be something like buy Server 2010 and you will need less than half the IT people. Even that initial setup of this new infrastructure may well be done by the services arm of an IBM, HP, Sun or the like bundled with the purchase of the software/hardware. The lower level end-user support over the phone for larger organizations will be offshored (I worked for a large international bank and that had already happened to their Helpdesk. It was in the process of working its way up from there) and the smaller ones won't pay much for local helpdesk staff.
There will be a few niche jobs where buisinesses either prefer or are required to have somebody local and onsite - like law firms, government or the defense contractors - but in the end I think there are too many competant people out there and will not be enough jobs for them all to remain in the field in 10-15 years time as things progress down their current road.
I hope that I am wrong but I felt not making the change now while I can would be gambling with my career and my future. You can say what you want about teaching but it is much less of a gamble...
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Unless you are in the military - where you always wear the same color/outfit, weight and how much you carry needs to be kept at a minimum as well as there being a great need to commicate and for others to know where you are. This actually goes along with the Star Trek analogy a bit too because they were, arguably, military personnel.
But there is no money in selling things to the miltary right?
You are right about small buisiness not needing a dedicated full-time admin but are missing the most widely-used alternative - outsoursing the IT operations to a specialist. My company provides support for small to medium sized buisinesses. We come in and build the server and desktops and set up the whole environment and then provide ongoing support for it including 24/7 helpdesk who have remote access/control of the desktops, SCOM monitoring to alert us to issues, and onsite service whenever they require it all at an hourly rate. They only tend to use 1-2 hours a week at most once things are running and all-up it works out to much much less than a fulltime admin.
For what it is worth, one of the buisinesses that I have been looking after introduced a few Macs into their SBS 2008 environment for their artists recently - I joined them to AD and am using Entourage 2008 to connect to their Exchange server. Most of the calls I get are not about the PCs, which we have running great, but the Macs which seem to have all kinds of issues relating to dropping network share drives and Entourage playing up. Granted it can be argued the issue is with the Macs interacting with the MS environment, in some cases using MS tools, but their SBS server is not going anywhere and the Mac really needs to play better in what is really an MS world to acheive inroads in the enterprise. Particularly when I could have gotten them an HP workstation-class PC running the same Creative Suite for nearly 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of those Mac Pros...
I work with both MS and Linux servers and, when setting up my own home server, I had a choice between the platforms. Seeing as how I have a TechNet subscription for work/testing purposes Server 2008 is basically free for me so the choice was not one on price but on ease of use and applicability to my needs.
I ended up installing Server 2008 with Linux running under a VM for the occasional usage mostly because of how great Terminal Services is. It gives me a remote desktop through a fast, secure, and very functional protocol which is widely supported. If I get disconnected I have it set up where it will maintain all of my apps just as I left them for days. It maps my local clipboard, printer and local drives wherever I am and there are clients on every windows PC, for the Mac, for Linux and even for my iPhone.
Microsoft is making a move in this space releasing features for Terminal Services 2008 that used to be limited to Citrix - secure https gateway, load balancing between servers and accessing individual applications through a web interface. And since you always had to buy Terminal Services CALs in order to use Citrix anyway (you have to love that - make your customers buy our product to use your product and we'll let you survive) it makes the MS solution much cheaper than a terminal server used to cost with Citrix.
I just find it funny that there is another area - thin clients and remote workers - where MS is trying to assert their dominanace, albiet with a great product, and Google happens to come along and release a free alternative.
I call BS on these figures to a large extent. I currently work as an IT consultant to the small/medium business space including many your size. I'll preface this by saying I am an RHCE and really love linux personally and part of me wants to try to sell it (in the from of the free CentOS) as a solution more often. Even with a openldap/samba/zimbra solution it just doesn't measure up with MS SBS which is a great product though...
My first problem with your story is how much of your time did you spend on this? Would your average small buisines owner have that time or required interest/skill? If you had to pay somebody to set up the Linux solution your costs would have blown out considerably. My second is that you don't have to use all pay software on Windows - Open Office and GIMP run on Windows just fine...
SBS 2008 standard which includes Server 2008 (with the requisite AD/Group Policy goodnesss), IIS7, Sharepoint and Exchange 2007 is $779 including 5 CALs/licenses. Dell/HP servers it might even work out cheaper because it is bundled.
It then costs ~$70/user in additional CALs beyond the 5
I usually drop in an high-speced HP ML350 server with 4 cores of Xeon, 8GB ECC RAM, 4-5 10k SAS disks in a RAID5, LTO3/4 tape drive, redundant power supplies and integrated lights out management (lets me reboot/work on things remotely) since they'll be running one server - in most cases for organizations of this size one really great server is better than a few mediocre ones anyway.
New PCs are quite affordable these days and come bundled with windows (I still get them with XP for the most part) and you can get Office 2007 small buisiness for $239/copy.
I'd say all told this costs them $15,000 for the server including all license costs, hardware and setup and then $1500/desktop for the all hardware/software/setup costs including XP and Office 2007 (many still exercise downgrade rights to 2003). Exchange/Outlook/ActiveSync is the current gold-standard for messaging/collaboration and hooking their iPhones up takes moments and has been an easy sell.
Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 are surprisingly great products and now that I have mastered powershell I can manage/script almost everything from the command line - who'd have thought on MS? I stop in for a couple afternoons a month to do desktop/user support and perform ongoing server maintenance. The maintenance is mostly chasing up the backups and making sure they don't run out of space - I have yet to have a major issue with SBS 2008 and had very few with SBS 2003...
So for ~$60,000 total including all licensing and setup costs they have the full MS solution in an organization of your size. Wack on another $2000-$2500/month for my visits and there is the bulk of their IT costs. I have yet to have any complaints with it and since it is a standard solution built to MS best practices and well documented I am sure they can find a guy to take over from me without any problem if I leave too...
This is exactly right. Everything ties together so tightly that once you get one piece you might as well take the whole. You buy Office, which runs only on Windows and which comes with Outlook. You want to use that for email so that means Exchange. Exchange depends on MS Active Directory so that means storing all your user accounts on the MS server and authenticating against that. As long as you have these MS servers for authentication you might as well do your file/print sharing there. As long as you are doing your file sharing there you might as well use DFS replication and put another server in the branch office. Once you are running Exchange you might as well run Outlook Web Access and that means IIS. Once you are already hosting that on IIS you might as well host your other web pages there. Since you are hosting your web pages there you might as well use MS SQL as the backend as well as Sharepoint for the intranet page - etc etc.
They even are nice enough to bundle all of this into one (relatively by MS standards) inexpensive product called SBS Premium. The big catch is that you have to run all of it on one server. As the buisiness expands, and they have already got you depending on it all, they really sting you with the licensing increases involved in buying the full versions of all the various software and their associated Client Access Licenes (CALs) so that you can seperate into multiple servers. When you get bigger still and need clustering and redundancy you need to throw still more servers and more licensing fees at the problem (usually for "Enterprise" products then as well) and that is when they really get you.
I am an RHCE as well as having the full spread of MS certifications - I love Linux and run that and a Mac on the desktop at home. I rarely get to use my Linux knowledge/certifications these days because of all the MS lockin/ubiquity. There are a few places that I would have liked to use CentOS or RHEL for some things but was forced to use the MS product by their insistance on Exchange - and once you have the infrastructure for that there then is no place/need for Linux any more. That is why I submitted this story and have been looking for this solution - the hope that I might actually have something I could sell a buisiness on that would allow me to actually get some Linux out there!
Trust me though when I say that Office/Outlook/Exchange is the #1 reason for half of MS's dominance in the server space. We need something to counter it. I am just really hoping that IBM, with all of its resources and its relative presence in this space, can give it to me...
A review with many screenshots of the new Notes 8 interface - http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019476/
I have studied a bit of history at the University level and I am not sure whether the digital age will make that job easier or harder in the future. With the overwhelming amount of online content in blogs and such it will be easier to find accounts of events but harder to seperate opinion from fact. It will be easier to search through being electronic but harder to sort through due to the overwhelming quantity of information on the current internet. It is also much easier to alter unless things like electronic hashes are stored along with the content. And that is with HTTP which is easily readable and not proprietary - I wonder how formats like MS Word docs are going to far with the test of time.
Are there even organizations out there archiving the wider internet for posterity? With published books they tend to be edited and distributed to libraries and preserved in a physical form where you can find them on the shelves 50 years from now. I don't know of any libraries storing/preserving electroic materials in the same way...
I understand that the entries involved are for all users and thus I understand why I am being prompted for what is a system-wide change. What I don't understand is why I need to answer three seperate dialogs to move one shortcut between folders there. One surely would do...
I think there is going to be quite a bit of criticism of MS for this but basically you see UAC prompts where you would have to do a su or sudo to get the job done as a starndard user in Linux/Unix. The reason you don't have to do those all the time in Linux is that the application writers do not write their apps to require constant root priviledge escalations. There is one app that I couldn't get working properly in Fedora 8 without running it with a sudo - Nero Linux - and it annoyed me quite a bit.
MS needs to drag both its users and those who write windows applications along to the limited security model we all need each other to be using for the good of the internet. It was always going to be painful.
The one criticism that I have of the system/model in practice is the start menu - and that is all MS! I try to organize my start menu and I see several dialogs. I would be much more on-board with only one Cancel or Allow for an operation like that...
I am an American who has been living in Australia the last few years. All Cable/DSL services here have usage caps and you pay for faster speeds / more downloads. When I first moved here the idea of the usage caps pissed me off but I have warmed to them. I pay ~US$60/month for 8 megabit down and 384 kbit up DSL with a static IP. I get 24 gigabytes per month and any downloads I do from 1am to 8am are counted at half so it is really more like 30 to me most months. They have a usage meter website that is updated about once per hour and is quite accurate telling me how I am using. If I go over I pay $4/gigabyte.
This is great for a number of reasons. Firstly, everybody has a motivation to do their non-essential torrents etc overnight which improves gaming/voip performance during the day and peak evening hours. Secondly, I have an agreement with my provider where I get such and such amount of data at such and such speed and we are both on the same page - I will never get an email saying to use less and hassling me like I received from Adelphia (now Time Warner I believe) before I left. It doesn't serve as a huge deterrent but it is enough to ensure that you don't waste a precious resource (bandwidth) as readily. If you bought electricity, water, or natural gas on an "unlimited" basis don't you think that would lead to waste as well?
I think that the current "unlimited" system does a disservice to many on a shared-bandwidth medium like cable as well. A few teenagers on a street who saturate their connections 24/7 downloading things like the entirely of the Simpsons etc they may never actually watch make the rest of the neighboorhood slow for things like telecommuting and voip that are much more essential and time-critical. There is no reason/incentive for them to stop or to try to do their larger torrents overnight etc. It is also the shadyness of what the limit really is on the "unlimited" service questions. All in all we can argue about where the pricing and the cap are set but I think the idea is sound and reasonable. They will always let you do what you want but you may have to pay more for a service where you can download 100GB/month than granny pays to do 1-2% of that - as you should.
Not that I necessarily agree with your sentiment, but it reminded me of a joke I heard while watching the election coverage up there during the last election (I was living in Western New York at the time and got Canadian stations).
"What the Canadian people really want are two Liberal parties - one to vote into office when the other becomes too corrupt to governern."
I am not sure about that. Comparing their 64 bit performances aside (where it is still equal if not ahead), if you compiled those linux binaries for 32 bit instead of 64 bit on your Core2Duo how much of a difference would you see versus 64 bit running on a AMD? Unless you were addressing large amounts of memory or doing something rather out of the ordinary I doubt that you really need 64 bit for anything but stroking your ego to know that you are more leet because you compiled it with that flag. If you are running XP or Vista than 64 bit is even worse - a bunch of driver and compatability issues with no real performance benefit.
I remember during the Pentium IV days all the AMD fans were constantly talking about how AMD owned the price to performance crown and that Intel was overpriced, ran hot (energy inefficient), and was just all around not as good an architecture. They were right - and I bought an Athlon 64 instead of a P4.
Now those same people are trying to argue that the less expensive, cooler and more efficient Core2Duo are still not as good as their beloved AMD. They will point to 64 bit performance or performance over 4GB of ram - or a myraid of little things that are not relevant to the vast majority for at least the next couple years to support their bias.
The processor wars, just like the video wars, will go back and forth. Nobody stays on top forever. Intel, after many years trailing, had their leap ahead for a generation or two. The people who are the most rational go with the best architecture or company at the time. I bought an ATI 9600 instead of a Nvidia 5600, even though I had always owned Nvidia and loved the drivers, because it was the better value for the money at that time.
The bigger person, the more rational person, is the one who can be objective about these things. Which CPU company you "love" is a very strange thing to have an irrational passion about...
The University I work for uses Exchange for staff and about 1/3 of our staff use Entourage on a mac to connect to it. I use it on my PowerBook while using Outlook on my Windows Desktop and they both work fine.
The interface is a bit different and it chokes a bit if you have tons of delegated mailboxes/calenders compared to Outlook but, for most situations, they have it to the point where it is very usable.
Actually I have found that, at least on their desktop OS, things like file sharing/web serving and such have wonderful easy seemless configuration.
If they can, as you say, bring the simplicity of their GUIs to the more complex options needed in a server environment - if they can make it so with a few clicks out of the box it is good to go - then they will have a real winner on their hands and a real threat to Microsoft and the Linux distributions. If your defaults are such that they meet the needs of the majority with little change then that is half of the problem as well - and I have faith that Apple can do it...
The one thing that has really helped MS in the enterprise has been that the sell an entire solution that all works together. Windows desktops sign into Windows Active Directory run by Windows Servers. Outlook connects to Exchange running on Windows servers with Kerberos AD logins. Office and Sharepoint getting along to create and maintain intranet content.
Apple has made huge inroads with solving the desktop issues of running Unix on the desktop. For the most part though I have seen either Linux or MS solutions on the server for file sharing and web serving and NIS/NFS and such. Even on the mac I would imagine that Entourage connecting to an Exchange server makes up a large portion of the Enterprise mail community.
If Apple can provide a cheaper end-to-end solution from the server to the desktop with LDAP directories, email, calendering, intranet etc - all preloaded on their server hardware and ready to go - then they have a real winner. Hell the cheaper licencing costs they can offer from basing on open-source can help subsidize their higher hardware margins to make this a comparable, if not cheaper, solution compared to something MS from the likes of Dell or HP.
If they really wanted to twist the knife in they should release some client software/drivers for Windows that make it just as easy to connect that to their servers and services as Macs to accomodate the need for having some PCs in a newly mac office.
Now is the time to do this as companies are faced with upgrading to Vista on the desktop, a new version of Office, and soon a new server platform. Most of this means new hardware purchases anyway. They might be able to just swoop in and offer a complete solution the likes of which linux has been unable to - all bundled with and guaranteed/supported on their own hardare as well.
The only way for this to be a realistic option would be to limit the possibilities as far as hardware and software to something manageable/supportable. Imagine a division of Dell, or some other company like IBM or HP, that would create a nicely configured version of Linux with less configurations/options but really slick defaults where everything worked well out of the box. They could then guarantee that this group of machines and these peripherals would work with their distro - which they could do by controlling the hardware and software. They could even set it up so that the distro can be transferred to/boot on any of those machines ala OSX on Apple Hardware (pre-Intel anyway).
Linux as it is now without any restriction on its possibilities or options is not feasible support-wise. While many startups have failed in making Linux computers Dell, for example, certainly has the resources to make this work. If not an instant success in the consumer market, you would think such a creation would win them some corporate and government business and give them complete control over their own platform. I know many that would pay for a drop-in Linux solution with guarantees that it will work together perfectly as expected - especially with big-business support options. And while you could never be vendor locked in with Linux such a situation might be their best shot at providing enough value to justify their hardware and software over the rest.
I was having the same problem and I solved it with two changes to my Mac. /etc/smb.conf /etc/sysctl.conf with the following inside it
1.) Add "large readwrite=no" to the [global] section of
2.) create a
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
net.inet.udp.recvspace=73728
The most important thing seems to be the net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 - on UNIX systems and Macs they will hold off on sending ACKs to save Network/CPU usage and it is a good thing. Windows however seems to wait on things until it gets ACKs with SMB and so it kills performance. After making these settings changes my SMB connection speed to my Vista box is unbelievably improved - things that were taking almost an hour before are done in like 5 minutes.
Not sure why Apple would ship with so anti-MS defaults considering how many of their users would be doing Samba stuff with Windows boxes though...
I am an American currently living in Australia and attending University here (University of Sydney). I can second the fact that about half of the laptops that I see here are Apple. I find this particularly amazing given just how ridiculously more expensive Apples are down here compared with in the US or with their cheap PC counterparts in retail. Not sure how much is due to a markup or how much is due to GST but I saw PowerBook G4 12" selling here, after the Intel tranisition, for still about $2500AU and the Mac Mini at about $1000AU.
How much of a margin are the resellers getting? How much is the markup? It can't all be currency exchange and the GST...
This fortells a huge shift that is coming in the PC industry and internals. Basically, huge and fast multicore processors will be the only major component of a PC aside from the chipset. It will run mostly software-based drivers for things such as the LAN/WLAN, Sound and Video. The reason we needed daugher cards for these things in the past is that the CPU was not fast enough or well-situated to run all these things in parallel without abysmal performance. But with the advent of multi-core processors one core can do graphics, one can do sound/network and one or two can run your app and it will all just fly. As the movement in the industry is already towards smaller, less components, less power and less heat this centralization was only a matter of time. The CPU manufacturers would love making processor performance truly the be-all and must have of performance again in this way. The video card manufacturers will be wounded with this increased emphasis on the CPU so the CPU manufacturers will merge with them and/or buy them.
The problem for open-source lies in the fact that a good portion of the actual video "card" product will lie in drivers and that they will not want to share the internals of their design in an open way to their competitors. Everything will be binary and everything will be closed. Linux desperatly needs to have a framework ready in the kernel/OS to accomodate this binary and closed driver reality or the manufacturers will not bother to support much of the community out of a few key distros at best.
The market MS is after is no the people who currently are running Linux/Sun clusters. It is those in the buisiness world who don't have them, or any applications written for them, yet. They will come out with a .Net-type framework for clusters that does over 1/2 the work for you and is much simpler to use and program for in a way that any Visual Studio programmers will be able to quickly learn. The cost of the licences will be made up by the easier administration and programming of using it. I wouldn't put it past them to make it a big target for software makers of high-CPU apps to write/develop against it and introduce a plug-and-play cluster to speed up their computation etc...
The best MS product is Visual Studio and they will leverage that to make this interesting...
When I bought my 12" PowerBook awhile back I went into the Apple store thinking I was going to get the cheaper 12" iBook. However the much weaker and toy-like feel of the plastic case vs the aluminium and, especially, how far FAR superior the PB's keyboard was made me spend quite a bit more getting it instead. I remember playing with both side to side and thinking "I could never type on this crappy iBook keyboard all day..." It just felt awful to type on and was very noisy in comparison to the PB. I will have to wait and actually hold one and type on one to see whether it is going to work for me physically.
The graphics is not a huge deal for me as I have a desktop PC for games.
I hope that they improved it over the iBook in these respects because the smaller form factor is also deal-breaker for me.
I definetly agree. I have a 12" PowerBook myself and it has worked out beautifully for me - the best of both worlds. I have a beautiful 19" LCD and a keyboard/mouse/speakers set up on a desk at home to make up for the size when I need it. When I am in class and on the go I have my nice, small, light and incredibly sturdy feeling laptop with great battery life. When I come home I plug it in and I have an even bigger LCD than the 17" projected with a gorgeous DVI picture. I also have a Dell Inspiron 8600 which is roughly the size of the 15" MacBook Pro and I don't think I could go back to carrying that large of a laptop with me.
Please Apple give us something of the same quality and form factor as the 12" PowerBook with some Core Duo love! Then again, maybe you shouldn't as I think that I can still get a couple years out of this 12" PB at this rate and nothing else would tempt me to upgrade...
I am 24 and spent several years in IT working for a major multinational bank. More and more of the jobs there were getting outsourced to India - though I am not sure you could call it outsourcing since they had a presence there so it was more just moving the responsibility to that country/division. I thought long and hard about it and decided to go back to school for Education - one of the few jobs that you can be assured lifetime employement in an industry that will still be around in much the same form for the rest of my career and that can't be outsourced. The hours are good, the pay is improving, the time off is great and it is stable - all things you can't say to nearly the same extent for IT.
A few things became very clear to me. First, that most of the end-user relation / helpdesk jobs for firms of any size will be outsorced to a third-party company whether they make use of offshoring or not. Those that are left will not be very highly paid. Second, to compete with the likes of Linux and open-source software the commercial software vendors will make their software easier to set up and manage, almost to the sense of self-managing in many cases, and what set up and management they require will be provided by the hardware vendor bundled with the purchase. For example, the likes of IBM, HP, Dell and Sun will come into an organization and set up the hardware and the software as they metamorphize into solution providers instead of hardware providers. There will be jobs working for them in such a situation but I have a feeling there will be many more qualified IT people around than there will be such jobs. I can certainly imagine a Microsoft ad campaign to management for Sever 2010 that goes "Upgrade to Microsoft Server 2010 and you will need 1/2 of the IT staff" and so forth - it will be their way of convincing buisiness to shell out money for the next big upgrade and it will be a damn effective one as it will pay for itself.
All in all, it makes total sense that the software will get smarter to justify the cost and that these solution providers will be able to do much of the current IT work more cheaply than an in-house staff for most organizations in the future. It is definetly not a career that I could be sure I would still have a well-paying and stable job in for the next 40-50 years and so I needed to find something that I could be sure of that while I still could. I would suggest you do the same...
I am back at University at 24 because after 4 years in IT I really started to believe it was a dead end. Now I am studying secondary humanities education - teaching can't be outsourced and provides much greater stability and benefits in the long run. It is a career that will still be there in 40 years and I couldn't be sure of that with IT.
The way I see it the field is being attacked from two directions. I think that the software is going to get good enough where most of the mundane management tasks will be automated away. It will require a skilled engineer or two to come in and set it up and then it will practically run itself. I think that MS will compete with linux/unix on the server side with a OS that is smarter and easier to manage - and with their resources I think they will succeed at least to the point of needing fewer human resrouces in IT in many oranizations. Their advertising to managment will be something like buy Server 2010 and you will need less than half the IT people. Even that initial setup of this new infrastructure may well be done by the services arm of an IBM, HP, Sun or the like bundled with the purchase of the software/hardware. The lower level end-user support over the phone for larger organizations will be offshored (I worked for a large international bank and that had already happened to their Helpdesk. It was in the process of working its way up from there) and the smaller ones won't pay much for local helpdesk staff.
There will be a few niche jobs where buisinesses either prefer or are required to have somebody local and onsite - like law firms, government or the defense contractors - but in the end I think there are too many competant people out there and will not be enough jobs for them all to remain in the field in 10-15 years time as things progress down their current road.
I hope that I am wrong but I felt not making the change now while I can would be gambling with my career and my future. You can say what you want about teaching but it is much less of a gamble...