Hell, I even have this trouble on the home front. My SO gets upset when I don't answer my mobile phone; doesn't comprehend that I don't ever answer it when I'm in the car, in the toilet, in the shower (or all 3 at once), or in some other place where it's inconvenient. If it's urgent, they'll call back; if not, I'll check voicemail later. Not a complex system...
If we're e.g. deeply involved in some DVD movie at home of an evening, she thinks nothing of answering the home phone, then chatting for 30 minutes if it's something "important" (like her niece winning a race at school). Meanwhile, I'm left looking at a paused TV till I lose patience, wander off and do something else. She returns, I'm not there, she hunts me down and asks if I'm still interested in watching the movie.
Actually, the solution is a whole lot simpler - change companies.
If your work environment is such that you need to find "dirt" on people to get your work done, then nothing good's going to come from working there. Think in terms of "What will my resume look like?", "Who here is going to give me a reference for another job?",..., then think again about why you're staying there.
If your IT dept relies on catastrophic failure in order to get funds necessary to do its job, then you really need to move on and find somewhere where that isn't tolerated.
I disagree - the whole "rehash old movies, release yet another sequel, pile on the CGI and screw the scriptwriters" approach has now reached its logical conclusion. Until that uber-cynical approach to movie making disappears, I won't bother going back again.
2-3 times since Xmas, my SO and I have scoured what's on at the movies, only to find nothing of any interest. That's the problem right there. We are (or should be) dead centre of the demographic that the entertainment industry should be targetting - early 40s, with teenagers plus pre-teens, with money and time on our hands and all with a desire to get out of the house. Instead of going to the movies, we've gone to the park instead.
Better yet: when my 9yo sees ads for Narnia, Zathura, etc. and says he doesn't want to see them because he's sick of seeing bad movies, THAT'S the problem. These movies are made for him and heavily marketed at him, but he's already so sick of the hype around crap movies that he's decided he can't be bothered with them any more. He's happy to watch them on DVD when they come out, but won't be disappointed if he never sees them at all. A few years ago, if someone had told me there were no movies around that a 9yo would want to see, I wouldn't have believed them.
Issues such as noisy/annoying fellow patrons have always been there - sure cell phones are a relatively new issue, but an annoying person will always be annoying when you're confined in close proximity.
I appreciate your background and the points you make, but is it really that simple?
Over the past ~5 years, there's been a massive surge to release new versions of old movies - "The Pink Panther", "When a Stranger calls" - or movie versions of old TV shows - "Dukes of Hazzard", "Lost in Space",... There's a zillion more in each category. Genuinely new ideas, or even interesting variants on old ideas, now only appear in very tiny numbers.
In general, the originals being remade fall into two categories: - really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap - really bad and/or cult movies/shows, where there's some chunk of a (predominantly) baby boomer audience that's virtually guaranteed to go along (e.g. Dukes of Hazzard, Mission Impossible). They rely almost solely on two comedy devices: (a) repeating the exact comedy lines that were most remembered in the original, (b) putting the "old" character/s in the present day (e.g. Brady Bunch), so the audience can laugh at their clothes, speech, etc.
What happened for things to get to this point? To some extent, I can understand remakes like "Dukes of Hazzard", because you've got a guaranteed audience, but why "Pink Panther"? It would have been obvious on day 1 that you can't hope to top the original scripts, and Steve Martin wasn't going to top Peter Sellers as Clouseau.
Are there any writers (as distinct from "re-interpreters") actually left, and if so, what are they doing? They can't all be doing stand-up; they don't all have their own TV shows; there's just not that many jobs as waiters in LA. Where are they?
Bring them back, put together plots that might actually push a 5yo mentality, line up and shoot the likes of Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff for crimes against humanity, and you'll get your audience back again. It's really that simple. Baby boomers have all the cash, increasingly have time on their hands to spend it, but the movie industry (actually, make that the entire entertainment industry) seems to target only 13-30 year olds; wise up, there's not that many of them around, the average age of the population in the US is now 44 (and increasing by 1 year for every 2 years that pass at present), and 13-30 year olds don't have anything like the disposable loot that their parents have.
It's not like every movie has to cost $200m and have some hopeless bimbo in it to get an audience; Blair Witch and Michael Moore proved that convincingly. Sure it's probably not easy to make another Blair Witch, but the trail has been blazed for others to follow. Where are the movies being made for (say) $100k-$1m, which are amounts that could be raised without Hollywood-type "creative input" being imposed? I can see a few of them in arthouse cinemas, but why aren't they getting promoted more widely?
Hell, I'll make it even simpler. Here's how to get baby boomers back to the movies: - stop thinking in terms of using stars and making huge profit, and make a movie with unknowns that will evoke some sort of emotion in the audience. Sorry, Vin Diesel, Tom Cruise et al; you had a good run... - employ script writers who write scripts from scratch, rather than rehash old ones - have more than 1 thread of plot going on; movies don't all have to be linear as some of us have attention spans greater than 30 seconds - look at the age of the people around you, then forget targetting 15-30year olds as your prime demographic - don't bother using bimbos to sell movies; boomers would rather watch a real actor than a clothes horse. If we want porn, we rent it. Bring back women who can act, and who aren't trying to look 30 years younger than they are - stop making bad guys be really really bad, and good guys be really really good. Treat them as shades of grey rather than ridiculous stereotypes - try making a film without CGI. It can be done, really - as per the previous point, not every mov
The real issue is that Microsoft's biggest competitor for Office 2003 isn't OOo; it's Office 97 and Office 2000. It's those users that these ads are targetting.
Many/most users using Office 97 find it absolutely meets their past, present and forseeable future requirements. Why would they upgrade?
As MS' business model largely relies on users buying the next version of Windows and Office every few years, these holdout users are really bad news for MS. There's far far more Office 97 users than OOo users, and not enough of them need or want to upgrade to keep MS happy.
You have to wonder how MS plans on dealing with this issue in (say) 5 years' time, when it's trying to convert Office 2003 users to Office 2008. After all, Office 2003 is it-and-a-bit, if you believe the advertising (although Office 2006 is obviously it-and-a-bit-more!). IMO an obvious solution for MS would be to make Office 2008's file formats incompatible with Office 2003s, thus mandating changes for users who have to be able to read and edit docs created with Office 2008. If you accept that's a reasonable approach to expect MS to take (i.e. planned obsolescence, which forces upgrades through incompatibility), why would you buy Office 2003 today?
Don't worry, lots of people don't think I'm level headed...
The reason I'm suggesting the OP looks outside the J2EE/.NET duopoly is that he's been burned once, and may be at the start of a cycle where he'll be burned again in a few years' time. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".
I suggested running a pilot migration to 2.0 so he can ascertain the true costs of jumping from 1.1 to 2.0. If, as others have said, it's not a trivial step, then he'll find out during this migration; if it is trivial, then of course you'd use that as your "default" process for other apps as well. Either way, he needs to establish what it's going to cost (time, resources and $$$) to get from where he is to where he wants to be.
You say that testing is trivial, but I bet the true costs of testing a bunch of apps that have just been recompiled are a lot higher than you might think. Unit testing, provided the code structure supports it, could be straightforward; user acceptance, functional and load testing could be a lot more expensive as you tend to get a lot less re-use out of your previous work with these testing streams. Depends on the app itself, of course... Deployment in a well-managed enterprise is always expensive; outage windows, change management, etc all cost $$$.
On a broader level, I think we're actually approaching a tipping point, where the traditional approach of spending loads of money on developers, loads more on testing, then loads more on maintenance/operations, then finally throwing away everything to develop a new/replacement app that's 20% different using the latest/greatest toolset is going to go away. It's been several years since Java came out, and, while it was relatively state of the art at that point, there's now more productive approaches to application lifecycle management available. I've watched JVM1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3... migrations going on, and the costs of what always appears at the outset to be a simple exercise are extremely high - I think there's now a generation of IT management that wants a better answer than "we need to migrate to the latest version of X, because if we don't then Y won't support us any more".
C#/.NET is very Java-like in its approach to development, so I lump the two together. Certainly MS is very aware that it needs its customers to keep buying and using the latest generation of product; the OP is in that position now, and a key factor to consider is that there are other ways to go forward from where he is.
As others have said, MS has put you in the position of having to migrate your production apps possibly well before you've recovered your costs. You might do well to ponder that, and make sure you're not setting yourself up to do it all over again in a couple of years' time.
On the other hand, if it's job security you're after, you can always blame it on MS while taking your pay cheque for redoing work with which you'll quickly become expert.
The only sensible approach IMHO is to run a pilot migration of a single app/server, and see what resources are required, what problems crop up and how you can remove them for other migrations that follow, and how long it actually takes. I'd expect 90%+ of your code to cleanly migrate to.NET 2.0 (if you decide to go that way), but that other 10% might be a real pain to deal with. Get all the MS expertise you can afford for the pilot, because they'll act as conduits for exchanging info between yourselves and other MS customers who are going through the same thing.
Once you've done a pilot and gotten that data out of it, you can estimate what's required to migrate your other apps.
Personally, if I was in your spot, I'd take a close look at what your apps do and see if there isn't a better/more agile solution than just shifting to.NET 2.0. Having worked for years in large enterprises, I know there's "enterprise apps" and "department/workgroup/... apps" - I'd be inclined to treat the latter as a separate category of deliverable, and look outside.NET and J2EE for your development. For smaller Web-based apps, tools like Ruby on Rails look particularly compelling - agility and speed of development are key, and the technology isn't going to "go away" as with.NET 1.1 because it's open source and you can use it as long as you want.
If you're e.g. going with a SOA approach to your development, it shouldn't matter what toolsets you use; just use what gets the job done best. That's not always going to be.NET or J2EE, particularly for smaller/less critical apps.
He wanted to know why all these "bad Muslim people" were going around killing everybody. I told him that there's good people and bad people, and just because they believe in different Gods, or don't believe in God at all, that doesn't make them any better or worse than the rest of us.
I told him that, in one country, they elected a President who sent soldiers with huge big guns to kill people in another country, because he thought people in the other country had huge big guns of their own. When the President couldn't find the huge big guns in the other country, he said "That's OK. What I really meant was that they MIGHT ONE DAY get huge big guns, and we have to stop them doing that". Then he kept his soldiers in that country, killing people with huge big guns, because the people he was killing might one day get huge big guns of their own.
He also put people in jail in his own country, because he thought they might be bad people, but decided it was better if they didn't get to go to court in case he was wrong and they weren't bad people after all.
My son said "There's bad boys at school that bully the little kids. Why doesn't the teacher just lock them up too?". I explained to him that this isn't the way things work, and eventually bullies pick on an even bigger bully and get beaten up themselves. That way, bullies learn to stop being bullies. My son asked "What if this bully is the biggest bully in the whole world? There won't be anybody around to beat him up"
I also told my son that I know a lot of people in this President's country, and they're really nice people, but because they made a silly man President, lots of people in the world thought that everyone from that President's country was a bad person.
My son asked "Why did the nice people make a silly man President, and let him do all sorts of bad things to people in other countries? Once they found out the President was a bad person, why didn't they make someone else President instead?"
I told him I didn't know, and maybe he should be President instead.
You say "any business needs money" like it's a "people need air to breathe"-type fact.
I'm in the process of starting my 3rd Australian business now and none of them have required any significant money. Computers are close to free these days, or free if you can use a 3yo one that someone's throwing out; FOSS is free (and, yes, you can develop in.NET with FOSS); hosting services are nearly free. What isn't free is your own time, and that's the tradeoff you make.
Some suggestions: - live off your savings. If you don't have any, then get some. If you can't save any money, then you won't be in business long anyway so you may as well get a job - spend as little money as you possibly can. Really. If you need particular expertise, scour your personal network to see who's got that expertise; once you find someone, offer your skills in exchange for theirs. Work from your own house, and live on coffee and sandwiches if you have to. If you eventually have to go to a VC for money, they'll want/expect to see that you're tight with your money before they give you some of theirs - call in favours from friends and family. Visit your parents at mealtimes, if you have to. Track down that teenage cousin who wants to build Web sites for a living, and have him build yours; if you can't pay him, tell him he can put it in his portfolio and you'll refer people to him later. Pick the brains of people you know who've run their own businesses; in particular, find those who've *failed* because they'll probably have insights into how they went wrong, and you can learn from their mistakes - when opportunity permits, seed the idea of what your business is with people who have money, but *don't ask for their money* and *don't* give them enough info so they could get someone else to build it for them. Go to networking seminars, if you don't know these sort of people and want to track them down. Show them your business plan, but don't go with your hand held out for cash. At some point, you may want to sell your business to these people, but you want them to be coming to you begging to buy, not you going to them begging for cash
There's free versions of it that you can download; it produces small EXE files;you can link in everything so all you've got to distribute is a single EXE file.
I've been writing command line stuff in Delphi for years for these 3 reasons. For at least the past several years, for me GUI == Web, so I haven't done any Win32 GUI programming for a long time now.
As a contractor/consultant, I'd say self-training is quite definitely the norm. Although I'm regularly offered training by the customers I work for, it's almost always in niche areas that are probably only relevant to very few customers, or to meet some customer corporate mandate that "Everyone working here must complete these training courses". I'd say that you should expect to be paying for your own training if you're contracting.
As an employee, I think you've got every right to expect training, particularly in your situation where you've been dumped in a job that you didn't apply for. An organisation that doesn't value training doesn't value its employees; it's really that simple, and you should regard lack of training as a pretty sure sign that you're in a dead-end and/or undervalued role. That said, if you're working for a small company, funds for (expensive) IT courses might be tough to come by.
There may be a middle ground you could work within. Catching the train to work gives me an hour or so each day that's otherwise idle; I generally use that time to read books to keep my skills up to date. If you commute by public transport, you might suggest to your employer that they could buy you all the books you request that are relevant to your job, in lieu of classroom training; you'll then train yourself in your spare time. That strikes me as a potential win-win.
What you've said pretty much mirrors my understanding of where Sparkle is aimed.
One thing I'm curious about is whether it will be possible/practical to migrate Sparkle-generated XAML code to XUL (Mozilla's pseudo-equivalent to XAML). If this can be done easily, then Sparkle may become the XUL IDE of choice - there's no robust IDE for XUL at the moment, and I suspect the lack of an IDE is possibly the main thing holding XUL back.
Imagine being able to author your XAML app using Sparkle, then e.g. run it through XSLT to generate a XUL UI that would run on Mozilla, Firefox etc. I'd buy such a tool without a second thought, although I'm highly unlikely to buy Sparkle unless it can do such a thing - I'm just not seeing XAML as a winning technology at this stage, whereas XUL is already installed for the ~10% of people using Firefox browsers.
I'll vouch for the Linksys NSLU2 solution as well. It's simple, elegant, and does exactly what you're asking. Additionally, it runs Linux and can be tweaked - mine runs a DAAP music server, for example - quite extensively.
As far as backup goes, you could either simply backup from one disc to the other, or maybe (haven't tried this) install cron and tar/zip/ftp files to some other server.
iTunes (the version that runs on your own PC, not the download shop) uses the DAAP protocol to act as a music server. Fire up iTunes with your music collection on one PC, then fire up iTunes on another PC on the same network and you can see and play each other's music across the network from within iTunes.
Better yet, there's DAAP servers available that mean you don't need a GUI based tool such as iTunes to share the music around. I run mt-daapd on a cheapy Linksys NSLU2 disc server (which runs Linux under the covers), and it works perfectly - every PC in the house can see every piece of music in the house, by running either iTunes or another DAAP client such as GetItTogether. Next purchase is a Roku SoundBridge, which is a hardware box that can attach to the main stereo system to play DAAP-sourced music. All up, it's a simple, powerful, elegant solution that's been rock solid in my experience.
Unlike a lot of other household IT projects, this definitely merits the Spousal Seal of Approval - all the household music CDs (~700 at present, give or take) get ripped once, copied to the NSLU2, then filed away in crates under the house. No clutter, no empty CD cases or orphaned CDs left out to get scratched, no furniture needed to store purchased CDs beyond 1 x $5 plastic crate per ~100 CDs. The NSLU2 and attached 2 disc drives actually sit on top of a kitchen cupboard, and is shown off by my SO as a tribute to my "IT genius" to both her friends and my geek buddies - you can't top that!!!
My guess is you're an American, and that you've been told by the NRA and its affiliates that Australia was up in arms about the introduction of gun control laws. I've been to the US several times, so I've seen the propoganda for myself and I know it can be convincing.
I'm Australian; nobody I know could care less about "losing their rights" to bear guns. Aside from farmers, we don't need them, and farmers simply had to register their guns in order to keep them. The one guy I know who had a gun at home handed it over quite happily; it hadn't been used for years, and he was slightly concerned that it might get stolen one day.
Unlike the US, our country wasn't founded after a war of independence against a "mother state"; England happily participated in transitioning us from being a colony to a country. *Nobody* feels the need to keep guns at home to protect themselves, unless they happen to part of a crime syndicate; *nobody* feels we're likely to have to defend our homes from invasions from e.g. Tasmania or Queensland, so there's no state militia. We're mildly concerned about terrorist attacks, but the reality is that Osama's guys aren't likely to invade my house in such a way that me possessing a really big gun would make a lot of difference.
As far as arming our homes go, the situation here is very similar to Canada, England, most of Western Europe, most of Asia,...; here, it's absolutely normal that people don't have or want guns in their houses, and anyone who did would be very much the exception. We do have a gun lobby, but unlike the NRA which has some pull in government, the gun lobby here has none and is generally regarded as a bunch of clowns.
Here endeth the lesson.
Feel free to choose to believe the US NRA and anyone else who may tell you about the ongoing community outrage here about us losing our gun rights, but I'll tell you as a simple fact that it isn't so. Even in small country towns, which I visit a few times a year, nobody gives a stuff about it. In fact, come over and see for yourself if you doubt I'm telling the truth, and you're prepared to question what the NRA tells you as fact.
Now, porn filters, on the other hand - it'd be a concern if it wasn't laughable. Those of us who know how the Internet functions know it can't happen, so we don't bother to speak up against a bunch of conservative politicians who are trying to make their voters' consciences clear. Note that they aren't calling to shut down all brothels, which would be a logical adjunct to filtering Internet porn; that's because they know it's technically feasible, and would actually attract concern from those interested.
An option that nobody seems to have come up with yet is to use Mono. Yep, it's reverse-engineered "MS crap", but it's actually really good. C# is a nice language to develop in.
Assuming you *can* switch to Mono (and that's a really big "if" there), you could supply instructions for how to install Mono at your Web site for the common distros - it's simple for all Debian-based distros and for Gentoo, and probably RedHat/Mandriva/etc. as well. Alternately, you could (possibly|probably) ship Mono with your code, in something broadly similar to a statically-linked binary.
A big advantage of using Mono would be if you decide you want to ship to Windows users as well - it could be as simple as changing your UI code.
Not guaranteeing that it's a good solution for you, but it might be.
Ubuntu is very nice - no doubt about it. I've got it on my main desktop at home, and have been very happy with it since the first release.
I've also had a lot of joy with Mepis; a particularly nice feature is that you can boot off the CD, then install off the same CD. Ubuntu has separate discs for "live CD" and "install". I know it's a minor point to experienced Linux people, but having a single CD to boot and/or install from is pretty mindblowing for someone who's had to install Windows...
That said, being able to install a complete desktop with a full set of desktop apps from a single CD is pretty wonderful, compared to Windows. I know my parents were pretty impressed with that when I moved them off Windows; from past experience reinstalling Windows, I think they thought it'd take several hours rather than about 30 minutes.
You've got your in-laws about to move in with you, and you think your computer network is the biggest problem???
Seriously, I'd grab a junker PC from somewhere and turn it into a dedicated firewall/router. Have one LAN card connect to your broadband, one to your gear and a third to your in-laws' gear. If you want to play games as well, have a 4th LAN card connecting to your gaming stuff - you want to keep that separate if possible.
Once you've got that working, with all LAN cards on distinct subnets, you can think about the following: - if you open up the firewall appropriately, you can connect from your subnet to the in-laws' subnet, but not back the other way. Might be handy if you need to constantly fix their PC/s, but make sure they can't connect back to your subnet or you could be in trouble - bandwidth throttling. If your in-laws' PCs are going to be spewing junk to the world courtesy of malware, you might want to throttle back how much bandwidth their systems get - reporting. As per the previous point, you might want to regularly check how much traffic is being generated from the in-laws' subnet, and use it as a "nasty stuff" warning system - port blocking and content checking. You might want to only allow specific ports (e.g. 80, 443, 25) to connect out from the in-laws' network, and block/alert when other connections are attempted - spam filtering. If you suck down all their traffic onto your own mail server, clean it using e.g. SpamAssassin, and only then let the inlaws see it, you might save yourself a world of hurt later on. If nothing else, allowing only your mail server to connect outwards on port 25 (i.e. disallowing outgoing port 25 connections from other systems) might let you restrict the systems in your house from being used as spam relays
On another tack, now you've got all the opportunities in the world to convert the in-laws to Linux (or Macs), and the wonders of virus- and spam-free computing! After the 957th bout of Windows viruses here, I'm about to forcefully convert my kids to Linux on the grounds that I don't have the time to continually fix their PCs and they're not interested in learning how to do it themselves.
Good luck - it sounds like a potentially ugly situation
*If* he's holding out on assisting the search for a cure (and there seems to be considerable doubt about that), maybe it's that he's demanding that the details of all research concerning his bod are released to the world immediately. Maybe he's actually not interested in lining the pockets of a drug company with patent-generated money for a cure to something that's killing all his mates. Maybe he wants there to be a generic, low-cost cure that can be given to large numbers of people in Africa, and is leaning on drug companies in such a way to make this happen.
I could well imagine a drug company saying "No buddy, we want it all for ourselves", then spreading the story that he's a prick simply as a way of applying pressure to get him to comply with their wishes.
>For example, Microsoft search can be adless (or charge less for ads) and hyperfast thanks a server farm > 100x Google's size. Hell, they can throw in prizes for prominent users, whatever.
Several problems with this suggestion: - Google's ads are virtually invisible unless you choose to look for them, so MS being ad-less really doesn't constitute a benefit - Google's done a load of research about how to run a big server farm. I'm yet to see evidence that MS has got anything like Google's expertise in this area; they could throw loads of servers at a problem, and still not get the throughput Google gets. To my mind, Google's server farm expertise is a major part of the value of the company, not just an expense item on a balance sheet - prizes, schmizes; when I'm looking for something, I want the answer now! I don't want to be told "Congratulations, you've won a prize. Please enter your name, address, email, phone,... in order to collect". "No, just give me the bloody answer, and piss off". Of course, there's a certain monetary value of these prizes that would tip me over the edge, but unless MS plans to give me a *sizeable* amount of money in return for my personal info, forget it. This *is* MS we're talking about, a company that I have *significant* concerns about sharing my personal info with...
On the other hand, I agree hat MS could tweak their browser and other OS tools to use MS Search, and that would take market share away from Google. On the other other hand, MS still has antitrust police on its back, and I don't think a move to "lock-in" users to MS Search would be treated lightly. Google has enough money to pursue MS through the courts, unlike a lot of the other small companies who've been hurt by MS' anti-competitive behaviour.
Finally, MS also now has a stock price that is basically stable, not doubling every year or so. If they decided to try to operate at a loss in order to drive Google out of business, I doubt their shareholders and the FCC would let them do so for very long.
Build a Linux Terminal Server box, get a bunch of crappy old PCs that everyone throws out, fill them with your RAM - every one (or every room!) in the house gets a PC.
I dream of the day I have a toilet PC, but there's still a few logistical challenges to work out (e.g. mounting the screen behind the door, storing the optical mouse somewhere, choice of keyboard), as well as the all important "Can I find a printer that prints on a roll of toilet paper?". You may laugh, but once I've got mine, everyone's gonna want one!
The combination of Outlook/Exchange is one that blocks a lot of sites from replacing Windows with *nix, both on the server and (potentially) the desktop.
In any moderately sized organization, you'll have a big bunch of people whose only computing requirements will be: - Web browser (for Internet and/or intranet sites) - email - scheduling (i.e. Outlook)
In theory, after the geeks, these should be the easiest people to migrate to a non-Windows desktop. Their requirements are minimal, and the retraining required should also be minimal.
The problem has always been, for these people, in replacing Outlook. Outlook is a key tool for many sites, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been a true drop-in replacement in the FOSS world that has allowed users to ditch Outlook as part of a migration away from Windows. Tools like Evolution are great, but they mandate a switch to Gnome, and that means moving away from Windows at the same time in a big-bang approach. Lots of cost-sensitive IT shops want to migrate away from Windows, but aren't prepared to take the risk of that big-bang changeover - they'd rather put in an alternative to Outlook, bed it in, then at some later date move off Windows once they're sure all their requirements are covered.
If Zimbra has a decent Web-based client (can't tell - site is./ed), then *in theory* those email+browser+scheduler people will only need a Web browser to do their entire job. A Web browser can run on any platform, so they're now independent of Windows and can migrate to a lower cost platform once Zimbra has been bedded in.
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Hell, I even have this trouble on the home front. My SO gets upset when I don't answer my mobile phone; doesn't comprehend that I don't ever answer it when I'm in the car, in the toilet, in the shower (or all 3 at once), or in some other place where it's inconvenient. If it's urgent, they'll call back; if not, I'll check voicemail later. Not a complex system...
If we're e.g. deeply involved in some DVD movie at home of an evening, she thinks nothing of answering the home phone, then chatting for 30 minutes if it's something "important" (like her niece winning a race at school). Meanwhile, I'm left looking at a paused TV till I lose patience, wander off and do something else. She returns, I'm not there, she hunts me down and asks if I'm still interested in watching the movie.
...they're too busy ensuring the security of US citizens to worry about minor details like ... the security of US citizens.
Actually, the solution is a whole lot simpler - change companies.
..., then think again about why you're staying there.
If your work environment is such that you need to find "dirt" on people to get your work done, then nothing good's going to come from working there. Think in terms of "What will my resume look like?", "Who here is going to give me a reference for another job?",
If your IT dept relies on catastrophic failure in order to get funds necessary to do its job, then you really need to move on and find somewhere where that isn't tolerated.
I disagree - the whole "rehash old movies, release yet another sequel, pile on the CGI and screw the scriptwriters" approach has now reached its logical conclusion. Until that uber-cynical approach to movie making disappears, I won't bother going back again.
2-3 times since Xmas, my SO and I have scoured what's on at the movies, only to find nothing of any interest. That's the problem right there. We are (or should be) dead centre of the demographic that the entertainment industry should be targetting - early 40s, with teenagers plus pre-teens, with money and time on our hands and all with a desire to get out of the house. Instead of going to the movies, we've gone to the park instead.
Better yet: when my 9yo sees ads for Narnia, Zathura, etc. and says he doesn't want to see them because he's sick of seeing bad movies, THAT'S the problem. These movies are made for him and heavily marketed at him, but he's already so sick of the hype around crap movies that he's decided he can't be bothered with them any more. He's happy to watch them on DVD when they come out, but won't be disappointed if he never sees them at all. A few years ago, if someone had told me there were no movies around that a 9yo would want to see, I wouldn't have believed them.
Issues such as noisy/annoying fellow patrons have always been there - sure cell phones are a relatively new issue, but an annoying person will always be annoying when you're confined in close proximity.
I appreciate your background and the points you make, but is it really that simple?
... There's a zillion more in each category. Genuinely new ideas, or even interesting variants on old ideas, now only appear in very tiny numbers.
Over the past ~5 years, there's been a massive surge to release new versions of old movies - "The Pink Panther", "When a Stranger calls" - or movie versions of old TV shows - "Dukes of Hazzard", "Lost in Space",
In general, the originals being remade fall into two categories:
- really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap
- really bad and/or cult movies/shows, where there's some chunk of a (predominantly) baby boomer audience that's virtually guaranteed to go along (e.g. Dukes of Hazzard, Mission Impossible). They rely almost solely on two comedy devices: (a) repeating the exact comedy lines that were most remembered in the original, (b) putting the "old" character/s in the present day (e.g. Brady Bunch), so the audience can laugh at their clothes, speech, etc.
What happened for things to get to this point? To some extent, I can understand remakes like "Dukes of Hazzard", because you've got a guaranteed audience, but why "Pink Panther"? It would have been obvious on day 1 that you can't hope to top the original scripts, and Steve Martin wasn't going to top Peter Sellers as Clouseau.
Are there any writers (as distinct from "re-interpreters") actually left, and if so, what are they doing? They can't all be doing stand-up; they don't all have their own TV shows; there's just not that many jobs as waiters in LA. Where are they?
Bring them back, put together plots that might actually push a 5yo mentality, line up and shoot the likes of Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff for crimes against humanity, and you'll get your audience back again. It's really that simple. Baby boomers have all the cash, increasingly have time on their hands to spend it, but the movie industry (actually, make that the entire entertainment industry) seems to target only 13-30 year olds; wise up, there's not that many of them around, the average age of the population in the US is now 44 (and increasing by 1 year for every 2 years that pass at present), and 13-30 year olds don't have anything like the disposable loot that their parents have.
It's not like every movie has to cost $200m and have some hopeless bimbo in it to get an audience; Blair Witch and Michael Moore proved that convincingly. Sure it's probably not easy to make another Blair Witch, but the trail has been blazed for others to follow. Where are the movies being made for (say) $100k-$1m, which are amounts that could be raised without Hollywood-type "creative input" being imposed? I can see a few of them in arthouse cinemas, but why aren't they getting promoted more widely?
Hell, I'll make it even simpler. Here's how to get baby boomers back to the movies:
- stop thinking in terms of using stars and making huge profit, and make a movie with unknowns that will evoke some sort of emotion in the audience. Sorry, Vin Diesel, Tom Cruise et al; you had a good run...
- employ script writers who write scripts from scratch, rather than rehash old ones
- have more than 1 thread of plot going on; movies don't all have to be linear as some of us have attention spans greater than 30 seconds
- look at the age of the people around you, then forget targetting 15-30year olds as your prime demographic
- don't bother using bimbos to sell movies; boomers would rather watch a real actor than a clothes horse. If we want porn, we rent it. Bring back women who can act, and who aren't trying to look 30 years younger than they are
- stop making bad guys be really really bad, and good guys be really really good. Treat them as shades of grey rather than ridiculous stereotypes
- try making a film without CGI. It can be done, really
- as per the previous point, not every mov
The real issue is that Microsoft's biggest competitor for Office 2003 isn't OOo; it's Office 97 and Office 2000. It's those users that these ads are targetting.
Many/most users using Office 97 find it absolutely meets their past, present and forseeable future requirements. Why would they upgrade?
As MS' business model largely relies on users buying the next version of Windows and Office every few years, these holdout users are really bad news for MS. There's far far more Office 97 users than OOo users, and not enough of them need or want to upgrade to keep MS happy.
You have to wonder how MS plans on dealing with this issue in (say) 5 years' time, when it's trying to convert Office 2003 users to Office 2008. After all, Office 2003 is it-and-a-bit, if you believe the advertising (although Office 2006 is obviously it-and-a-bit-more!). IMO an obvious solution for MS would be to make Office 2008's file formats incompatible with Office 2003s, thus mandating changes for users who have to be able to read and edit docs created with Office 2008. If you accept that's a reasonable approach to expect MS to take (i.e. planned obsolescence, which forces upgrades through incompatibility), why would you buy Office 2003 today?
Don't worry, lots of people don't think I'm level headed...
... migrations going on, and the costs of what always appears at the outset to be a simple exercise are extremely high - I think there's now a generation of IT management that wants a better answer than "we need to migrate to the latest version of X, because if we don't then Y won't support us any more".
The reason I'm suggesting the OP looks outside the J2EE/.NET duopoly is that he's been burned once, and may be at the start of a cycle where he'll be burned again in a few years' time. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".
I suggested running a pilot migration to 2.0 so he can ascertain the true costs of jumping from 1.1 to 2.0. If, as others have said, it's not a trivial step, then he'll find out during this migration; if it is trivial, then of course you'd use that as your "default" process for other apps as well. Either way, he needs to establish what it's going to cost (time, resources and $$$) to get from where he is to where he wants to be.
You say that testing is trivial, but I bet the true costs of testing a bunch of apps that have just been recompiled are a lot higher than you might think. Unit testing, provided the code structure supports it, could be straightforward; user acceptance, functional and load testing could be a lot more expensive as you tend to get a lot less re-use out of your previous work with these testing streams. Depends on the app itself, of course... Deployment in a well-managed enterprise is always expensive; outage windows, change management, etc all cost $$$.
On a broader level, I think we're actually approaching a tipping point, where the traditional approach of spending loads of money on developers, loads more on testing, then loads more on maintenance/operations, then finally throwing away everything to develop a new/replacement app that's 20% different using the latest/greatest toolset is going to go away. It's been several years since Java came out, and, while it was relatively state of the art at that point, there's now more productive approaches to application lifecycle management available. I've watched JVM1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3
C#/.NET is very Java-like in its approach to development, so I lump the two together. Certainly MS is very aware that it needs its customers to keep buying and using the latest generation of product; the OP is in that position now, and a key factor to consider is that there are other ways to go forward from where he is.
As others have said, MS has put you in the position of having to migrate your production apps possibly well before you've recovered your costs. You might do well to ponder that, and make sure you're not setting yourself up to do it all over again in a couple of years' time.
.NET 2.0 (if you decide to go that way), but that other 10% might be a real pain to deal with. Get all the MS expertise you can afford for the pilot, because they'll act as conduits for exchanging info between yourselves and other MS customers who are going through the same thing.
.NET 2.0. Having worked for years in large enterprises, I know there's "enterprise apps" and "department/workgroup/... apps" - I'd be inclined to treat the latter as a separate category of deliverable, and look outside .NET and J2EE for your development. For smaller Web-based apps, tools like Ruby on Rails look particularly compelling - agility and speed of development are key, and the technology isn't going to "go away" as with .NET 1.1 because it's open source and you can use it as long as you want.
.NET or J2EE, particularly for smaller/less critical apps.
On the other hand, if it's job security you're after, you can always blame it on MS while taking your pay cheque for redoing work with which you'll quickly become expert.
The only sensible approach IMHO is to run a pilot migration of a single app/server, and see what resources are required, what problems crop up and how you can remove them for other migrations that follow, and how long it actually takes. I'd expect 90%+ of your code to cleanly migrate to
Once you've done a pilot and gotten that data out of it, you can estimate what's required to migrate your other apps.
Personally, if I was in your spot, I'd take a close look at what your apps do and see if there isn't a better/more agile solution than just shifting to
If you're e.g. going with a SOA approach to your development, it shouldn't matter what toolsets you use; just use what gets the job done best. That's not always going to be
I explained it this way to my 9 year old.
He wanted to know why all these "bad Muslim people" were going around killing everybody. I told him that there's good people and bad people, and just because they believe in different Gods, or don't believe in God at all, that doesn't make them any better or worse than the rest of us.
I told him that, in one country, they elected a President who sent soldiers with huge big guns to kill people in another country, because he thought people in the other country had huge big guns of their own. When the President couldn't find the huge big guns in the other country, he said "That's OK. What I really meant was that they MIGHT ONE DAY get huge big guns, and we have to stop them doing that". Then he kept his soldiers in that country, killing people with huge big guns, because the people he was killing might one day get huge big guns of their own.
He also put people in jail in his own country, because he thought they might be bad people, but decided it was better if they didn't get to go to court in case he was wrong and they weren't bad people after all.
My son said "There's bad boys at school that bully the little kids. Why doesn't the teacher just lock them up too?". I explained to him that this isn't the way things work, and eventually bullies pick on an even bigger bully and get beaten up themselves. That way, bullies learn to stop being bullies. My son asked "What if this bully is the biggest bully in the whole world? There won't be anybody around to beat him up"
I also told my son that I know a lot of people in this President's country, and they're really nice people, but because they made a silly man President, lots of people in the world thought that everyone from that President's country was a bad person.
My son asked "Why did the nice people make a silly man President, and let him do all sorts of bad things to people in other countries? Once they found out the President was a bad person, why didn't they make someone else President instead?"
I told him I didn't know, and maybe he should be President instead.
You say "any business needs money" like it's a "people need air to breathe"-type fact.
.NET with FOSS); hosting services are nearly free. What isn't free is your own time, and that's the tradeoff you make.
I'm in the process of starting my 3rd Australian business now and none of them have required any significant money. Computers are close to free these days, or free if you can use a 3yo one that someone's throwing out; FOSS is free (and, yes, you can develop in
Some suggestions:
- live off your savings. If you don't have any, then get some. If you can't save any money, then you won't be in business long anyway so you may as well get a job
- spend as little money as you possibly can. Really. If you need particular expertise, scour your personal network to see who's got that expertise; once you find someone, offer your skills in exchange for theirs. Work from your own house, and live on coffee and sandwiches if you have to. If you eventually have to go to a VC for money, they'll want/expect to see that you're tight with your money before they give you some of theirs
- call in favours from friends and family. Visit your parents at mealtimes, if you have to. Track down that teenage cousin who wants to build Web sites for a living, and have him build yours; if you can't pay him, tell him he can put it in his portfolio and you'll refer people to him later. Pick the brains of people you know who've run their own businesses; in particular, find those who've *failed* because they'll probably have insights into how they went wrong, and you can learn from their mistakes
- when opportunity permits, seed the idea of what your business is with people who have money, but *don't ask for their money* and *don't* give them enough info so they could get someone else to build it for them. Go to networking seminars, if you don't know these sort of people and want to track them down. Show them your business plan, but don't go with your hand held out for cash. At some point, you may want to sell your business to these people, but you want them to be coming to you begging to buy, not you going to them begging for cash
There's free versions of it that you can download; it produces small EXE files;you can link in everything so all you've got to distribute is a single EXE file.
I've been writing command line stuff in Delphi for years for these 3 reasons. For at least the past several years, for me GUI == Web, so I haven't done any Win32 GUI programming for a long time now.
As a contractor/consultant, I'd say self-training is quite definitely the norm. Although I'm regularly offered training by the customers I work for, it's almost always in niche areas that are probably only relevant to very few customers, or to meet some customer corporate mandate that "Everyone working here must complete these training courses". I'd say that you should expect to be paying for your own training if you're contracting.
As an employee, I think you've got every right to expect training, particularly in your situation where you've been dumped in a job that you didn't apply for. An organisation that doesn't value training doesn't value its employees; it's really that simple, and you should regard lack of training as a pretty sure sign that you're in a dead-end and/or undervalued role. That said, if you're working for a small company, funds for (expensive) IT courses might be tough to come by.
There may be a middle ground you could work within. Catching the train to work gives me an hour or so each day that's otherwise idle; I generally use that time to read books to keep my skills up to date. If you commute by public transport, you might suggest to your employer that they could buy you all the books you request that are relevant to your job, in lieu of classroom training; you'll then train yourself in your spare time. That strikes me as a potential win-win.
What you've said pretty much mirrors my understanding of where Sparkle is aimed.
One thing I'm curious about is whether it will be possible/practical to migrate Sparkle-generated XAML code to XUL (Mozilla's pseudo-equivalent to XAML). If this can be done easily, then Sparkle may become the XUL IDE of choice - there's no robust IDE for XUL at the moment, and I suspect the lack of an IDE is possibly the main thing holding XUL back.
Imagine being able to author your XAML app using Sparkle, then e.g. run it through XSLT to generate a XUL UI that would run on Mozilla, Firefox etc. I'd buy such a tool without a second thought, although I'm highly unlikely to buy Sparkle unless it can do such a thing - I'm just not seeing XAML as a winning technology at this stage, whereas XUL is already installed for the ~10% of people using Firefox browsers.
I'll vouch for the Linksys NSLU2 solution as well. It's simple, elegant, and does exactly what you're asking. Additionally, it runs Linux and can be tweaked - mine runs a DAAP music server, for example - quite extensively.
As far as backup goes, you could either simply backup from one disc to the other, or maybe (haven't tried this) install cron and tar/zip/ftp files to some other server.
iTunes (the version that runs on your own PC, not the download shop) uses the DAAP protocol to act as a music server. Fire up iTunes with your music collection on one PC, then fire up iTunes on another PC on the same network and you can see and play each other's music across the network from within iTunes.
Better yet, there's DAAP servers available that mean you don't need a GUI based tool such as iTunes to share the music around. I run mt-daapd on a cheapy Linksys NSLU2 disc server (which runs Linux under the covers), and it works perfectly - every PC in the house can see every piece of music in the house, by running either iTunes or another DAAP client such as GetItTogether. Next purchase is a Roku SoundBridge, which is a hardware box that can attach to the main stereo system to play DAAP-sourced music. All up, it's a simple, powerful, elegant solution that's been rock solid in my experience.
Unlike a lot of other household IT projects, this definitely merits the Spousal Seal of Approval - all the household music CDs (~700 at present, give or take) get ripped once, copied to the NSLU2, then filed away in crates under the house. No clutter, no empty CD cases or orphaned CDs left out to get scratched, no furniture needed to store purchased CDs beyond 1 x $5 plastic crate per ~100 CDs. The NSLU2 and attached 2 disc drives actually sit on top of a kitchen cupboard, and is shown off by my SO as a tribute to my "IT genius" to both her friends and my geek buddies - you can't top that!!!
My guess is you're an American, and that you've been told by the NRA and its affiliates that Australia was up in arms about the introduction of gun control laws. I've been to the US several times, so I've seen the propoganda for myself and I know it can be convincing.
...; here, it's absolutely normal that people don't have or want guns in their houses, and anyone who did would be very much the exception. We do have a gun lobby, but unlike the NRA which has some pull in government, the gun lobby here has none and is generally regarded as a bunch of clowns.
I'm Australian; nobody I know could care less about "losing their rights" to bear guns. Aside from farmers, we don't need them, and farmers simply had to register their guns in order to keep them. The one guy I know who had a gun at home handed it over quite happily; it hadn't been used for years, and he was slightly concerned that it might get stolen one day.
Unlike the US, our country wasn't founded after a war of independence against a "mother state"; England happily participated in transitioning us from being a colony to a country. *Nobody* feels the need to keep guns at home to protect themselves, unless they happen to part of a crime syndicate; *nobody* feels we're likely to have to defend our homes from invasions from e.g. Tasmania or Queensland, so there's no state militia. We're mildly concerned about terrorist attacks, but the reality is that Osama's guys aren't likely to invade my house in such a way that me possessing a really big gun would make a lot of difference.
As far as arming our homes go, the situation here is very similar to Canada, England, most of Western Europe, most of Asia,
Here endeth the lesson.
Feel free to choose to believe the US NRA and anyone else who may tell you about the ongoing community outrage here about us losing our gun rights, but I'll tell you as a simple fact that it isn't so. Even in small country towns, which I visit a few times a year, nobody gives a stuff about it. In fact, come over and see for yourself if you doubt I'm telling the truth, and you're prepared to question what the NRA tells you as fact.
Now, porn filters, on the other hand - it'd be a concern if it wasn't laughable. Those of us who know how the Internet functions know it can't happen, so we don't bother to speak up against a bunch of conservative politicians who are trying to make their voters' consciences clear. Note that they aren't calling to shut down all brothels, which would be a logical adjunct to filtering Internet porn; that's because they know it's technically feasible, and would actually attract concern from those interested.
I don't have any mod points, but that strikes me as a really good suggestion...
An option that nobody seems to have come up with yet is to use Mono. Yep, it's reverse-engineered "MS crap", but it's actually really good. C# is a nice language to develop in.
Assuming you *can* switch to Mono (and that's a really big "if" there), you could supply instructions for how to install Mono at your Web site for the common distros - it's simple for all Debian-based distros and for Gentoo, and probably RedHat/Mandriva/etc. as well. Alternately, you could (possibly|probably) ship Mono with your code, in something broadly similar to a statically-linked binary.
A big advantage of using Mono would be if you decide you want to ship to Windows users as well - it could be as simple as changing your UI code.
Not guaranteeing that it's a good solution for you, but it might be.
Ubuntu is very nice - no doubt about it. I've got it on my main desktop at home, and have been very happy with it since the first release.
I've also had a lot of joy with Mepis; a particularly nice feature is that you can boot off the CD, then install off the same CD. Ubuntu has separate discs for "live CD" and "install". I know it's a minor point to experienced Linux people, but having a single CD to boot and/or install from is pretty mindblowing for someone who's had to install Windows...
That said, being able to install a complete desktop with a full set of desktop apps from a single CD is pretty wonderful, compared to Windows. I know my parents were pretty impressed with that when I moved them off Windows; from past experience reinstalling Windows, I think they thought it'd take several hours rather than about 30 minutes.
You've got your in-laws about to move in with you, and you think your computer network is the biggest problem???
Seriously, I'd grab a junker PC from somewhere and turn it into a dedicated firewall/router. Have one LAN card connect to your broadband, one to your gear and a third to your in-laws' gear. If you want to play games as well, have a 4th LAN card connecting to your gaming stuff - you want to keep that separate if possible.
Once you've got that working, with all LAN cards on distinct subnets, you can think about the following:
- if you open up the firewall appropriately, you can connect from your subnet to the in-laws' subnet, but not back the other way. Might be handy if you need to constantly fix their PC/s, but make sure they can't connect back to your subnet or you could be in trouble
- bandwidth throttling. If your in-laws' PCs are going to be spewing junk to the world courtesy of malware, you might want to throttle back how much bandwidth their systems get
- reporting. As per the previous point, you might want to regularly check how much traffic is being generated from the in-laws' subnet, and use it as a "nasty stuff" warning system
- port blocking and content checking. You might want to only allow specific ports (e.g. 80, 443, 25) to connect out from the in-laws' network, and block/alert when other connections are attempted
- spam filtering. If you suck down all their traffic onto your own mail server, clean it using e.g. SpamAssassin, and only then let the inlaws see it, you might save yourself a world of hurt later on. If nothing else, allowing only your mail server to connect outwards on port 25 (i.e. disallowing outgoing port 25 connections from other systems) might let you restrict the systems in your house from being used as spam relays
On another tack, now you've got all the opportunities in the world to convert the in-laws to Linux (or Macs), and the wonders of virus- and spam-free computing! After the 957th bout of Windows viruses here, I'm about to forcefully convert my kids to Linux on the grounds that I don't have the time to continually fix their PCs and they're not interested in learning how to do it themselves.
Good luck - it sounds like a potentially ugly situation
*If* he's holding out on assisting the search for a cure (and there seems to be considerable doubt about that), maybe it's that he's demanding that the details of all research concerning his bod are released to the world immediately. Maybe he's actually not interested in lining the pockets of a drug company with patent-generated money for a cure to something that's killing all his mates. Maybe he wants there to be a generic, low-cost cure that can be given to large numbers of people in Africa, and is leaning on drug companies in such a way to make this happen.
I could well imagine a drug company saying "No buddy, we want it all for ourselves", then spreading the story that he's a prick simply as a way of applying pressure to get him to comply with their wishes.
>For example, Microsoft search can be adless (or charge less for ads) and hyperfast thanks a server farm
... in order to collect". "No, just give me the bloody answer, and piss off". Of course, there's a certain monetary value of these prizes that would tip me over the edge, but unless MS plans to give me a *sizeable* amount of money in return for my personal info, forget it. This *is* MS we're talking about, a company that I have *significant* concerns about sharing my personal info with...
> 100x Google's size. Hell, they can throw in prizes for prominent users, whatever.
Several problems with this suggestion:
- Google's ads are virtually invisible unless you choose to look for them, so MS being ad-less really doesn't constitute a benefit
- Google's done a load of research about how to run a big server farm. I'm yet to see evidence that MS has got anything like Google's expertise in this area; they could throw loads of servers at a problem, and still not get the throughput Google gets. To my mind, Google's server farm expertise is a major part of the value of the company, not just an expense item on a balance sheet
- prizes, schmizes; when I'm looking for something, I want the answer now! I don't want to be told "Congratulations, you've won a prize. Please enter your name, address, email, phone,
On the other hand, I agree hat MS could tweak their browser and other OS tools to use MS Search, and that would take market share away from Google. On the other other hand, MS still has antitrust police on its back, and I don't think a move to "lock-in" users to MS Search would be treated lightly. Google has enough money to pursue MS through the courts, unlike a lot of the other small companies who've been hurt by MS' anti-competitive behaviour.
Finally, MS also now has a stock price that is basically stable, not doubling every year or so. If they decided to try to operate at a loss in order to drive Google out of business, I doubt their shareholders and the FCC would let them do so for very long.
I suppose you could encrypt the data, with a suitably powerful key, then store the encrypted data at Google and keep the keys yourself.
Not sure about the legality, but it should be untraceable
Build a Linux Terminal Server box, get a bunch of crappy old PCs that everyone throws out, fill them with your RAM - every one (or every room!) in the house gets a PC.
I dream of the day I have a toilet PC, but there's still a few logistical challenges to work out (e.g. mounting the screen behind the door, storing the optical mouse somewhere, choice of keyboard), as well as the all important "Can I find a printer that prints on a roll of toilet paper?". You may laugh, but once I've got mine, everyone's gonna want one!
The combination of Outlook/Exchange is one that blocks a lot of sites from replacing Windows with *nix, both on the server and (potentially) the desktop.
./ed), then *in theory* those email+browser+scheduler people will only need a Web browser to do their entire job. A Web browser can run on any platform, so they're now independent of Windows and can migrate to a lower cost platform once Zimbra has been bedded in.
In any moderately sized organization, you'll have a big bunch of people whose only computing requirements will be:
- Web browser (for Internet and/or intranet sites)
- email
- scheduling (i.e. Outlook)
In theory, after the geeks, these should be the easiest people to migrate to a non-Windows desktop. Their requirements are minimal, and the retraining required should also be minimal.
The problem has always been, for these people, in replacing Outlook. Outlook is a key tool for many sites, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been a true drop-in replacement in the FOSS world that has allowed users to ditch Outlook as part of a migration away from Windows. Tools like Evolution are great, but they mandate a switch to Gnome, and that means moving away from Windows at the same time in a big-bang approach. Lots of cost-sensitive IT shops want to migrate away from Windows, but aren't prepared to take the risk of that big-bang changeover - they'd rather put in an alternative to Outlook, bed it in, then at some later date move off Windows once they're sure all their requirements are covered.
If Zimbra has a decent Web-based client (can't tell - site is