This article was poorly researched and downright poor journalism for several reasons:
For the college-based situation, Microsoft provides educational liscences and discounts, thereby drastically reducing the Total cost of initial implementation.
The author simply makes bold assertions and provides little or no evidence eg:
A 200 station, 500 user unix system only takes one person to manage (no mention of training and provides no factual basis for such a figure or the mythical "4 person" windows one).
student access to the the Windows desktop opens everything to easy insider attack (He seems unfamiliar with the fact that Windows 2000 localizes profiles, and allows even more fine-grained access policies that *nix does. This might be a problem with Windows 9x, but he uses Widnows 2000 liscensinc for his "study")
User base would be just as happy with *Nix office applications as with MS Office and such. In fact, few non-geeks would be willing to take the time required to learn a new office system.
The cost of the computers and computer software is the only variable here. Take for instance 5000 employees (as he does) and say they are 5% more effective per year with windows. At an average salary of 50,000 per year, this has saved the company 12.5 MILLION dollars a year, which far outweighs the cost of the computer system, or supposed additional support personel as well as the cost of a massive ammout of new office software training. Sure if you have 5000 UNIX software developers, this is more efficient, but more often, developers occupy a small part of a workforce.
This article is flawed. It's tough for some people to accept that Windows is better -- gasp! for some things than Unix, just as for others, Unix is a more logical choice.
The author fails also to fully understand the operating system he was writing about making claims about Windows 2000 that simply were not true. It, in fact, was not uncommon for my work to have desktop uptimes of more than 2 months using Win2k.
What do you think of Tim O'Reilly's definiton of Freedom Zero? Roughly, "Freedom Zero for me is to offer the fruit of your work on the terms that work for you."
This freedom (which sounds so reasonable to me) often puts the other four in conflict, as the FSF always describes software as a public good.
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- For the college-based situation, Microsoft provides educational liscences and discounts, thereby drastically reducing the Total cost of initial implementation.
- The author simply makes bold assertions and provides little or no evidence eg:
- A 200 station, 500 user unix system only takes one person to manage (no mention of training and provides no factual basis for such a figure or the mythical "4 person" windows one).
- student access to the the Windows desktop opens everything to easy insider attack (He seems unfamiliar with the fact that Windows 2000 localizes profiles, and allows even more fine-grained access policies that *nix does. This might be a problem with Windows 9x, but he uses Widnows 2000 liscensinc for his "study")
- User base would be just as happy with *Nix office applications as with MS Office and such. In fact, few non-geeks would be willing to take the time required to learn a new office system.
- The cost of the computers and computer software is the only variable here. Take for instance 5000 employees (as he does) and say they are 5% more effective per year with windows. At an average salary of 50,000 per year, this has saved the company 12.5 MILLION dollars a year, which far outweighs the cost of the computer system, or supposed additional support personel as well as the cost of a massive ammout of new office software training. Sure if you have 5000 UNIX software developers, this is more efficient, but more often, developers occupy a small part of a workforce.
This article is flawed. It's tough for some people to accept that Windows is better -- gasp! for some things than Unix, just as for others, Unix is a more logical choice.The author fails also to fully understand the operating system he was writing about making claims about Windows 2000 that simply were not true. It, in fact, was not uncommon for my work to have desktop uptimes of more than 2 months using Win2k.
What do you think of Tim O'Reilly's definiton of Freedom Zero? Roughly, "Freedom Zero for me is to offer the fruit of your work on the terms that work for you."
This freedom (which sounds so reasonable to me) often puts the other four in conflict, as the FSF always describes software as a public good.