You got it. What's a lamer-than-usual story like this doing on Slashdot? Instead of posting original stories that never see the light of day I should try this one, "Studies show businesses sticking with XP over Vista", or, "Studies show that Open Source users primarily programmers, technically minded", or how about, "Studies show that most dogs bark".
Nah! Too original!
Domino/Notes is far less costly and easier to deploy than MS stacks. We use Domino/Notes, Quickr (sharepoint-like), Sametime (web conf and IM) + Domino workflow applications - all of it runs on AIX which makes sense for us because that's the platform we run SAP on. Virtualized p-Servers are very efficient - and slick. On the client side we're using Windows, Linux and OS X - Notes runs natively on all of them. What exactly can IBM 'screw up'? There's a learning curve on the server side though - but it's no different than MS products. Oh, almost forgot - we migrated off Exchange 5.5 last year - that's how we got on Notes - and we have about 500 users.
Companies like Google/YouTube and Apple are in the unique position of having the ear of both media companies and, potentially, lawmakers. Google has sufficient credibility, cash (ie. lobbying), and clout (image / exposure / visibility) to diminish the control of IP hogs like media companies. It will take some epic battles to make inroads in freeing the consumer to be able to copy his/her own DVDs and downloaded music any number of times they wish. It's shaping up to be an interesting year...
Seems to work just fine. I'm at home so bandwidth is poor (in the country) but in the city I am sure it will be fast. Will it slow down during peaks due to use of pre-processing servers? We shall see. Experience is good although takes more clicks then current BB browser to enter new urls, page back, exit application. Has more features though so I suppose this is acceptable.
You're right that they're worried about OpenOffice. Their return salvo is Office 12. If you've read reviews written by those who have actually used it to the point of becoming proficient, they have said it's very difficult to go back to the legacy Office UI once you've becomes used to 12's. Guess who else uses Office 2003's UI? OpenOffice. Once you become familiar with Office 12 at work (and of course corporate zombie CIOs will buy Office 12 licenses by the bushel) it will be hard, at home, to use OOo. If, however, corporations buck, OOo has a chance, otherwise...
Marketing folk just keep shoveling it. Nothing they say has any value - too bad the general public doesn't recognize this. Open source is not about the platform it runs on - whether Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, whatever. Among the choices OSS gives you is the 'freedom' to choose an operating system if the developers so choose.
The armies of MS marketing/sales people will take any meaningless information and use it to their benefit. Truth and reality are a myth to them, to be created and spun at will. Hey, if you can make John Q believe it then it must be true - especially if the positive press / message results in more profit. Total waste of time looking for MS's public face to show any signs of logic or accuracy. Why do you think they're so successful? They know it's not about the data in the message, it's about how its delivered. How else do you explain Windows triumphing over OS/2 way back - emotion, pure and simple.
Imagine: You are Fernando Alonso racing for Renault in your eighth race of the year. A near perfect string of victories and, on your last lap your engine resets itself to factory specs. You reboot, relizing you haven't been saving your ajustments frequently and stare in horror as your steering wheel comes up with a Blue Screen of Death. You reboot again as your engine stalls and you lose steering. Shumacher flies by (he's running Red Hat). You shut down your engine, wait 30 seconds then start up again in safe mode. Your pit crew has lost wireless remote access to your computer because networking has shut down and can't trouble shoot.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, a psycho automotive manufacturing robot (its three laws of robotics having been hijacked by a truly malicious worm) operating MS's robotic OS jumps on to the field and runs at your car, firing up it's arc welder as it approaches your cockpit...
Great. Now we can look forward to real crashes as our robotic vacuum cleaners experience blue screens of death and terrorize our pets and small children while in a robotic psychosis.
Or what about when my robotic lawn mower is infected by a worm from my jealous neighbour who then takes control and mows over my wifes flower bed?
We will no longer have only zombie PCs to contend with but will be facing a world of zombie robots, doing the bidding of their evil hacker masters while we sleep.
I shudder to think of the chaos and mayhem Microsoft is about to unleash on the world.
Good point. An application like this one delivers big bucks to an IT department. No desktop applications to update and keep patched. Every time a new version is out everyone has access simultaneously. An appliance would be much, much cheaper than MS Office which has a featureset that no one on this planet has come close to exploiting. 80% of office (both senses) users would be satisfied with the level of funtionality described in the article.
Privacy will be an issue for business users. No educated user would be willing to hand the security management of his/her intellectual property to a third party. Appliances with storage pushed onto network 'shares' is the only way to go.
An even better application that I can see is for students to use it. My older kids are in grades 4 and 6. They could work on a project at home, go to a friend's house, work on it with him; go to school, work on it there; share it with a friend who's collaborating on it with them and let them update it. You get my point. Very, very cool.
This guy really needs to read "Brave New World" to get a handle on reality. He talks about the disconnect Microsofties experience due to the campus' isolation from the real world as well as the cost of what they use - well, he's living proof of his observation! As long as MS is charging several hundred dollars for a desktop OS, an office suite etc. customers will be robbed. Where could my company better put a few hundred thousand dollars to use (instead of buying Software Assurance [aka extortion pay])? I can think of a few pressing business problems that could use the cash. They have an effective monopoly and pricing policies that abuse it. Who'd pay $500 for Office if they had a choice? There are no choices because they've all been killed off. And please, someone honestly tell me how you can justify the cost of this software in terms of value delivered to the consumer. I am sure the privileged in communist regimes could defend their having access to the best and most expensive while others lived in poverty.
--
Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom
I get pretty tired of the Intel / AMD war. There is no innovation in these chips, just iterative improvement. IBM's Cell processor, although it may not succeed, is the first interesting architecture which has some weight behind it, to appear in years.
Licensing costs for 14 copies of XP Pro Academic Upgrade would run just under a grand...Yes it's a significant chunk of change, but not crippling expensive.
You clearly don't have kids. A thousand dollars is a lot to many public schools. I'll try more constructive responses unlike the totally useless criticisms expressed above.
You'll need to find out if there are other teachers, parents or students (depending on the kids' ages) who can support Linux before seriously considering this. You'll also need to train the local support staff to do basic administration. You'll need to understand which applications they need to run and if replacements are available for Linux. Linux has great educational software. Realize that even if everything is in your favor - i.e. you have support, the apps exist etc. you'll still may need to sell the idea via demos, the history of Open Source etc. Even then it may not work but at least if you go in with eyes open you'll be prepared for the work that needs to be done to make the change in O/S and teacher/administrator mentality.
There is virtually no way to make a rational and reasonable argument about this. Technology is not just about worker productivity it is about how transactions are done between businesses. Money flows electronically between banks; ERP systems help schedule work orders, raw materials purchase, plant employee scheduling; Databases track client interactions, purchases, bank transactions...the list is long. People are not disciplined in their use of time and waste it sending/replying to meaningless e-mails, reading ones that don't concern them. Some systems do hamstring employees by forcing them to work in ways that are counterproductive but these are few. Turn of your Blackberry vibrator so it doesn't break your concentration every time you get an e-mail. Kill that Outlook pop-up telling you there is a new mail message. Forward your phone two hours a day and concentrate on tasks that require it. There is a sense that more is expected and it is. Technology has made faster trade requiring faster decisions and task turn-around. People have decided to compete on that level. The market economy encourages work to the max and without limits. Globalization has increased this effect. Blame capitalism not technology. Stop blaming an individual casue for the resulting problems - it's a question of dynamics that involve the entire system and not just one or two parts. But that would require that people inform themselves and actually think instead of whine and complain.
Encourage your management to buy research from well-known and respected firms like Gartner and Forrester. Both organizations support the use of Linux for certain types of applications. If they don't listen to research and reason then try to understand what their hot buttons are. Is it security? Reliability? Prestige? Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)? Acquisition cost? Will you convince them with a presentation (for 'readers') or via a discussion (listeners) or a combination of both. You have to know your audience and what they care about and present the information in such a way that they will hear the message.
I can relate my experiences to you in the hopes that this will help. I've been VP IT in two large companies, one American, one Canadian, working in the Marketing and Financial Services industries. I'm currently Director IT in a Pharmaceutical Company. I've also worked in a Banking IT shop. Here's what I've seen.
There is no right answer simply because senior management, not just in IT but in the position IT reports to, who set the direction. I personally believe that a large organization needs to have distributed IT shops for the sake of organizational agility. Centralized shops work well in situations like the one I'm in now - we're small and have personal relationships with all division presidents and department managers. In a large shop I would have a central function for functions like architecture, business analysis, project management, and financial analysis. Distributed orgs woould have their own support for systems they maintain while we would provide full support for systems we maintain. All projects > $250K (let's say) would go through a formal approval process and fall within the 'Corporate' IT project portfolio. Anything less would be handled exclusively by the business units themselves. When distributed IT departments got bigger than a certain amount (including outsourced / contract resources) we would repatriate the department for governance, re-use (across BUs), and cost effectiveness reasons.
I'd love to help you further if you have questions - just visit my blog and give me a shout.
Kids don't listen to their parents becasue the parents aren't prenting. It's an issue fo trust and privacy. It's one thing to block porn sites from your kids because it is really easy to make a mistake and enter the wrong url etc. and to be impulsive when their friend writes in an e-mail, "Hey, check out this site..." with games you can:
a) Tell them why you are limiting them and why they can't play certain kinds of games until they are older
b) Expect them to be responsible and follow your instructions
c) Deal with violations as they happen and teach that actions have consequences and privileges are earned etc.
Always trust your kids when you can. At the same time be wise and expect they won't always follow and look out for it.
COTS is software that is general purpose, packaged by a third party and generally offered for sale. Windows XP is COTS, SAP is COTS, Siebel is COTS, MS Word is COTS. What's there not to understand?
Perhaps you are confusing this with a system that can be made up of COTS, OSS and custom software.
In terms of "Business Considers" I know a bank that uses OSS (not just Linux but Perl, JUnit and other Java stuff) for building production systems. There are many other examples.
There are numerous sources of alternate energy that could replace environmentally harmful sources of energy within decades.
The problem is not scarcity of alternatives but that the true cost of harmful sources is not factored into the price paid by consumers (nor charged by suppliers). This is the only reason alternative sources are more expensive. True cost would include the cost to undo the damage caused by using it. What is the cost to reverse global warming? What is the cost to reverse damage caused by coal mining (leached acids and heavy metals into the groundwater + acid rain)?
Slashdot Mirror
You got it. What's a lamer-than-usual story like this doing on Slashdot? Instead of posting original stories that never see the light of day I should try this one, "Studies show businesses sticking with XP over Vista", or, "Studies show that Open Source users primarily programmers, technically minded", or how about, "Studies show that most dogs bark". Nah! Too original!
Duhhhh
Domino/Notes is far less costly and easier to deploy than MS stacks. We use Domino/Notes, Quickr (sharepoint-like), Sametime (web conf and IM) + Domino workflow applications - all of it runs on AIX which makes sense for us because that's the platform we run SAP on. Virtualized p-Servers are very efficient - and slick. On the client side we're using Windows, Linux and OS X - Notes runs natively on all of them. What exactly can IBM 'screw up'? There's a learning curve on the server side though - but it's no different than MS products. Oh, almost forgot - we migrated off Exchange 5.5 last year - that's how we got on Notes - and we have about 500 users.
like a MacBook Pro
Companies like Google/YouTube and Apple are in the unique position of having the ear of both media companies and, potentially, lawmakers. Google has sufficient credibility, cash (ie. lobbying), and clout (image / exposure / visibility) to diminish the control of IP hogs like media companies. It will take some epic battles to make inroads in freeing the consumer to be able to copy his/her own DVDs and downloaded music any number of times they wish. It's shaping up to be an interesting year...
Seems to work just fine. I'm at home so bandwidth is poor (in the country) but in the city I am sure it will be fast. Will it slow down during peaks due to use of pre-processing servers? We shall see. Experience is good although takes more clicks then current BB browser to enter new urls, page back, exit application. Has more features though so I suppose this is acceptable.
You're right that they're worried about OpenOffice. Their return salvo is Office 12. If you've read reviews written by those who have actually used it to the point of becoming proficient, they have said it's very difficult to go back to the legacy Office UI once you've becomes used to 12's. Guess who else uses Office 2003's UI? OpenOffice. Once you become familiar with Office 12 at work (and of course corporate zombie CIOs will buy Office 12 licenses by the bushel) it will be hard, at home, to use OOo. If, however, corporations buck, OOo has a chance, otherwise...
Marketing folk just keep shoveling it. Nothing they say has any value - too bad the general public doesn't recognize this. Open source is not about the platform it runs on - whether Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, whatever. Among the choices OSS gives you is the 'freedom' to choose an operating system if the developers so choose.
The armies of MS marketing/sales people will take any meaningless information and use it to their benefit. Truth and reality are a myth to them, to be created and spun at will. Hey, if you can make John Q believe it then it must be true - especially if the positive press / message results in more profit. Total waste of time looking for MS's public face to show any signs of logic or accuracy. Why do you think they're so successful? They know it's not about the data in the message, it's about how its delivered. How else do you explain Windows triumphing over OS/2 way back - emotion, pure and simple.
Imagine: You are Fernando Alonso racing for Renault in your eighth race of the year. A near perfect string of victories and, on your last lap your engine resets itself to factory specs. You reboot, relizing you haven't been saving your ajustments frequently and stare in horror as your steering wheel comes up with a Blue Screen of Death. You reboot again as your engine stalls and you lose steering. Shumacher flies by (he's running Red Hat). You shut down your engine, wait 30 seconds then start up again in safe mode. Your pit crew has lost wireless remote access to your computer because networking has shut down and can't trouble shoot.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, a psycho automotive manufacturing robot (its three laws of robotics having been hijacked by a truly malicious worm) operating MS's robotic OS jumps on to the field and runs at your car, firing up it's arc welder as it approaches your cockpit...Great. Now we can look forward to real crashes as our robotic vacuum cleaners experience blue screens of death and terrorize our pets and small children while in a robotic psychosis.
Or what about when my robotic lawn mower is infected by a worm from my jealous neighbour who then takes control and mows over my wifes flower bed?
We will no longer have only zombie PCs to contend with but will be facing a world of zombie robots, doing the bidding of their evil hacker masters while we sleep.
I shudder to think of the chaos and mayhem Microsoft is about to unleash on the world.
Good point. An application like this one delivers big bucks to an IT department. No desktop applications to update and keep patched. Every time a new version is out everyone has access simultaneously. An appliance would be much, much cheaper than MS Office which has a featureset that no one on this planet has come close to exploiting. 80% of office (both senses) users would be satisfied with the level of funtionality described in the article.
Privacy will be an issue for business users. No educated user would be willing to hand the security management of his/her intellectual property to a third party. Appliances with storage pushed onto network 'shares' is the only way to go.
An even better application that I can see is for students to use it. My older kids are in grades 4 and 6. They could work on a project at home, go to a friend's house, work on it with him; go to school, work on it there; share it with a friend who's collaborating on it with them and let them update it. You get my point. Very, very cool.
This guy really needs to read "Brave New World" to get a handle on reality. He talks about the disconnect Microsofties experience due to the campus' isolation from the real world as well as the cost of what they use - well, he's living proof of his observation! As long as MS is charging several hundred dollars for a desktop OS, an office suite etc. customers will be robbed. Where could my company better put a few hundred thousand dollars to use (instead of buying Software Assurance [aka extortion pay])? I can think of a few pressing business problems that could use the cash. They have an effective monopoly and pricing policies that abuse it. Who'd pay $500 for Office if they had a choice? There are no choices because they've all been killed off. And please, someone honestly tell me how you can justify the cost of this software in terms of value delivered to the consumer. I am sure the privileged in communist regimes could defend their having access to the best and most expensive while others lived in poverty. -- Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom
I get pretty tired of the Intel / AMD war. There is no innovation in these chips, just iterative improvement. IBM's Cell processor, although it may not succeed, is the first interesting architecture which has some weight behind it, to appear in years.
Intel, AMD, who's better? Who cares.You clearly don't have kids. A thousand dollars is a lot to many public schools. I'll try more constructive responses unlike the totally useless criticisms expressed above.
You'll need to find out if there are other teachers, parents or students (depending on the kids' ages) who can support Linux before seriously considering this. You'll also need to train the local support staff to do basic administration. You'll need to understand which applications they need to run and if replacements are available for Linux. Linux has great educational software. Realize that even if everything is in your favor - i.e. you have support, the apps exist etc. you'll still may need to sell the idea via demos, the history of Open Source etc. Even then it may not work but at least if you go in with eyes open you'll be prepared for the work that needs to be done to make the change in O/S and teacher/administrator mentality.
There is virtually no way to make a rational and reasonable argument about this. Technology is not just about worker productivity it is about how transactions are done between businesses. Money flows electronically between banks; ERP systems help schedule work orders, raw materials purchase, plant employee scheduling; Databases track client interactions, purchases, bank transactions...the list is long. People are not disciplined in their use of time and waste it sending/replying to meaningless e-mails, reading ones that don't concern them. Some systems do hamstring employees by forcing them to work in ways that are counterproductive but these are few. Turn of your Blackberry vibrator so it doesn't break your concentration every time you get an e-mail. Kill that Outlook pop-up telling you there is a new mail message. Forward your phone two hours a day and concentrate on tasks that require it. There is a sense that more is expected and it is. Technology has made faster trade requiring faster decisions and task turn-around. People have decided to compete on that level. The market economy encourages work to the max and without limits. Globalization has increased this effect. Blame capitalism not technology. Stop blaming an individual casue for the resulting problems - it's a question of dynamics that involve the entire system and not just one or two parts. But that would require that people inform themselves and actually think instead of whine and complain.
Encourage your management to buy research from well-known and respected firms like Gartner and Forrester. Both organizations support the use of Linux for certain types of applications. If they don't listen to research and reason then try to understand what their hot buttons are. Is it security? Reliability? Prestige? Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)? Acquisition cost? Will you convince them with a presentation (for 'readers') or via a discussion (listeners) or a combination of both. You have to know your audience and what they care about and present the information in such a way that they will hear the message.
I can relate my experiences to you in the hopes that this will help. I've been VP IT in two large companies, one American, one Canadian, working in the Marketing and Financial Services industries. I'm currently Director IT in a Pharmaceutical Company. I've also worked in a Banking IT shop. Here's what I've seen.
There is no right answer simply because senior management, not just in IT but in the position IT reports to, who set the direction. I personally believe that a large organization needs to have distributed IT shops for the sake of organizational agility. Centralized shops work well in situations like the one I'm in now - we're small and have personal relationships with all division presidents and department managers. In a large shop I would have a central function for functions like architecture, business analysis, project management, and financial analysis. Distributed orgs woould have their own support for systems they maintain while we would provide full support for systems we maintain. All projects > $250K (let's say) would go through a formal approval process and fall within the 'Corporate' IT project portfolio. Anything less would be handled exclusively by the business units themselves. When distributed IT departments got bigger than a certain amount (including outsourced / contract resources) we would repatriate the department for governance, re-use (across BUs), and cost effectiveness reasons.
I'd love to help you further if you have questions - just visit my blog and give me a shout.
Kids don't listen to their parents becasue the parents aren't prenting. It's an issue fo trust and privacy. It's one thing to block porn sites from your kids because it is really easy to make a mistake and enter the wrong url etc. and to be impulsive when their friend writes in an e-mail, "Hey, check out this site..." with games you can:
a) Tell them why you are limiting them and why they can't play certain kinds of games until they are older
b) Expect them to be responsible and follow your instructions
c) Deal with violations as they happen and teach that actions have consequences and privileges are earned etc.
Always trust your kids when you can. At the same time be wise and expect they won't always follow and look out for it.
COTS is software that is general purpose, packaged by a third party and generally offered for sale. Windows XP is COTS, SAP is COTS, Siebel is COTS, MS Word is COTS. What's there not to understand?
Perhaps you are confusing this with a system that can be made up of COTS, OSS and custom software.
In terms of "Business Considers" I know a bank that uses OSS (not just Linux but Perl, JUnit and other Java stuff) for building production systems. There are many other examples.There are numerous sources of alternate energy that could replace environmentally harmful sources of energy within decades.
The problem is not scarcity of alternatives but that the true cost of harmful sources is not factored into the price paid by consumers (nor charged by suppliers). This is the only reason alternative sources are more expensive. True cost would include the cost to undo the damage caused by using it. What is the cost to reverse global warming? What is the cost to reverse damage caused by coal mining (leached acids and heavy metals into the groundwater + acid rain)?