A story of how Microsoft went from 5% of the enterprise market to 90% in three years during 1996-1999. This story shows how they did it and reveals a little known fact that GNU/Linux has had the technology to challenge Microsoft for six years.
How Microsoft’s Enterprise Desktop Stifles Linux and How to Fix it
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“little known fact” ? what?
Tell that to the guy who submitted the story. It’s his teaser text.
Well, I doubt most people in here knew that solution existed. Or perhaps people have chosen to forget it.
You run this site. You’re the editor. It is your responsibility for what stories get linked to and what the ‘teaser text’ says.
I (to my eternal shame) was one of the people witnessed the DEC initiative to get “Everything onto Exchange” in the late 1990’s. I saw DEC put lots of people through their MCSE (They even boasted about in their advertising) and then targetted business from the lower end of the SME segment to Fortune 100 companies with “Exchange will solve all your email problems”
So, fast forward to today.
Microsoft has lots of third party companies presenting their latest “This product xxx will solve your yyy problems for ever” marketing plan into business all accross the board the ODD advocates have real problems fighting this FUD ( Fear Uncertanty & DERISION )
The Open Document win in MA and the Linux conversions in places like Munich are the very visible end of the Linux wins. There are others that don’t want any publicity for fear of a backlash from MS.
We can chip away at the Lock in the MS enforces.
One possible way is to push the “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” approach.
Companies like for example Oracle who take the time and trouble to make sure their products work on Linux are doing just that. On the other hand some H/W makers are so in bed with Redmond they dare not do anything except toe the line.
We (OSS Advocates) have a hard time ahead of us as the MS supporting army rally around to keep OSS out. But, if we keep chipping away then eventually, victory will be ours.
If this article is supposed to be about desktops, where is the discussion about the desktop? What I see is Tom’s ranting about Exchange and the solution is for people to embrace his e-mail “solution”!
If his “solution” is so great, why hasn’t somebody picked up on it?
It’s a long article and for those that just want the summary.
Microsoft is where it is today due to Outlook/Exchange.
To get market share away from MS a better Outlook/Exchange needs to be built for alternative OSes.
The author had a product but no one wanted it. Not Solaris, not Apple, not Blackberry and not OpenOffice. There’s some bitterness on the author’s part that no one wanted his solution.
I think someone was working on an Outlook alternative. I think it was someone that had been involved with VisiCalc or Lotus123. Can’t remember the person or project’s name.
Edited 2005-11-13 19:35
You’re probably thinking about Chandler/Cosmo: http://www.osafoundation.org . Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus, is involved.
From what I’ve been reading, IBM with a Novell partnership is starting to make headway into POS/Retail systems with good results. Lower TCO as well as great support. Very encouraging.
“This story shows how they did it and reveals a little known fact that GNU/Linux has had the technology to challenge Microsoft for six years.”
This is what happens when you have people reporting on topics like this when they have NO understanding of what they are reporting about.
Fact: There NEVER has been a challenge between UNIX/Linux and Microsoft regarding technology. PERIOD. *nix technology has always been far far superior to Windows.
The challenge has always been marketing and big business.
When you are up against a company like Microsoft that will do ANYTHING to win, no matter how dirty or illegal, and lie and spread FUD to undermine their competitors and mislead the public, then you are faced with a REAL challenge.
Most people don’t know the truth. And articles like this don’t help.
Your best tool is education.
“Fact: There NEVER has been a challenge between UNIX/Linux and Microsoft regarding technology. PERIOD. *nix technology has always been far far superior to Windows.”
I’ve experimented with Linux every so often over the past 9 years and have always felt a little disappointed about how much work was required to get what i considered basic functionality from this most touted and superior OS. Such as:
• It doesn’t work with my graphics card
• It doesn’t work with my sound card
• It doesn’t like my chipset revision
• Why do you need video capture anyways?
• Recompiling the kernel to install a driver is no biggie*!*
The problem with linux/oss advocates is that cannot accept – and act upon criticism.
.
Edited 2005-11-13 21:17
“The problem with linux/oss advocates is that cannot accept – and act upon criticism.”
No, the problem is generalized statemens like that.
And you missed the point. Read the story then read my post again. If you still want to debate, I’ll be glad to.
You forgot the biggest gap in Linux and UNIX over all; therer are no mainstream ISV’s willing to write and support software for the platform – lets take out Microsoft Office from the equation, be that’ll never appear; even with that removed, there are STILL a large number of software titles that business require.
Custom written macros need to be converted over, large numbers of templates for business correspondance, accounting applications etc. etc.
The list goes on and on; so before we *start* caring about whether the latest widgy-didgy camera works, I think the higher concern should be getting those ‘developers, developers, developers!’ porting their software from Windows to UNIX; either in the form of a native port or at the very least, a win32 assisted port with the help of Mainsoft.
That’s exactly right. Microsoft may have been given the PC OS monopoly but they kept it by appealing to the one group who truly runs the show: Developers.
It’s funny too. People choose Microsoft (the platforms for developers) over FOSS or other solutions all the time. These are users making these choices, often. They’re choosing something that’s been completely geared toward developers because it has more applications on it. All the while alternatives sit their saying “we love users, we want to educate them, set them free, and generally make their computing experience good.” But they keep running back to the platforms which say “pfft, you need us, we have the developer mindshare.”
Microsoft sends people to my University twice a year just to talk up what Microsoft has going for developers (ie, hiring + trying to get you devving on their platform). The only other companies that come to do that aren’t making shrink-wrap software…
This is one reason Mac lost the OS war (if you can call it that). They made life difficult for developers. Your code had to be perfect, otherwise you crashed your customers computer (not just your own program). I believe they charged until around 2000 for their development programs (I know Microsoft charged for VS, but they practically give it to anyone who’ll say “I’m a student” and you could always do your final build on their CLI free compiler).
Unix has had the same problem. They’re so busy trying to make things nice for the users they’ve not ushered in developers with cheering applause!
It’s really kind of sad. The lesson here is: Market to developers, they’ll do your platform marketing for you for free.
As for Office. I don’t know.
Just a couple of points:
1) Microsoft also bend over backwards for their developers; I had a friend who worked in a New Zealand company, developing a software title which was like a fushion between Macromedia Director and PowerPoint – it was a nice piece of software.
As he said, Microsoft bent over backwards for them, developer tools, free software, free operating systems, subsidised hardware – they were pratically drowned in free stuff.
2) Linux, Windows and MacOS X all have problems, but what makes people keep coming back to Windows is this, “Windows may have its flaws, but atleast I can still run all my needed applications” – thats why people won’t move; if they can’t have the SAME applications running on another platform, they won’t move; hence the reason why Microsoft Office, Adobe and Macromedia are so important to MacOS X, with out it, the platform would be dead.
Apple has realised that its very existance relies on software companies producing software for it – no softare, no customers.
UNIX folk, especially the likes of IBM, SUN and HP just don’t get it; they praise Linux and UNIX and yet they do very little to improve the software availability – SUN for example sat on a pile of $4.1billion – why didn’t they approach software companies and PAY for the porting of software to Solaris.
Solaris ISN’T just a workstation operating system, its a big frigging operating system that runs on a big friggin server in which users access this big friggin server via thin clients.
No one will want to access that server if there are no bloody software titles for it – SUN and the likes can run naked through the streets if they want to, but isn’t going to change the fact that the software availability on UNIX and Linux is shithouse.
Too bad someones hogging the clue by four, because the UNIX crowd need a monumental smack around the head with it.
kaiwai…
you have a point but it’s not as cut and dry as you portray it. maybe that wasn’t your intention.
i’m a UNIX head myself and follow Linux closely, but i agree with you regarding software availability… in general.
for example…
1) i would agree that *nix software for the corporate desktop world is pretty lame. but it’s getting much better. but that’s a general statement that doesn’t cover backend software and many other corporate software needs such as security. all the great security apps are OSS. Nessus, Nmap, Snort, IP tables, PF on BSD etc…
2) i would not agree that development software for *nix sucks. i would say the opposite.
3) i would agree that there is a great need to port many commercial apps to Linux, but i would also add that there are many “as good as” or better alternatives available.
ok, HP and SUN might not get it, but don’t blame the “UNIX crowd”. blame lucrative, lock-in schemes and contracts in commercial software.
1) UNIX software for server has always been good, thats not the problem; in terms of diagnostic network tools, its great, I love nmap; but the fact remains, thats in the land of geeks, completely irrelivant to the end user.
2) Developer tools do suck on UNIX, not the compiler, thats all good, it seems that UNIX geeks can get the low level stuff working nicely, its the higher level IDE stuff that sucks – Glade being the prime example of a half baked IDE; and Eclipse being no better in regards.
What developers need is an IDE that allows them to drag and drop widgets, double click, assign code, and push out an application to end users within an organisation, within the smallest amount of time – I’ve yet to see something in the UNIX world that can do it.
It may not be sexy, it may break every rule in the ‘good coders’ hand book – but the reality is, businesses run on quick and dirty code; not over engineered master pieces that make CS majors feel nice, warm and fuzzy inside.
3) Adobe would be willing to port if they; saw there was a large market of people willing to purchase it – which is what they don’t see OR HP/SUN/IBM or someone comes to Mr Adobe and says, “I love that software, what will it cost to get it ported to our operating system”.
4) People don’t want ‘good as’ alternatives; believe me, I deal with end users and customers on a regular basis; they want to use the same software, the know the features, how to navigate the software, how to avoid the pit falls – they’ve invested many hours learning the software; they don’t want to have to re-learn a whole new application again.
They use computers to get a job done for their business – to make their business more efficient, and re-learning an application simply for the feel good factor of being away from Windows, doesn’t add anything to the bottom line of the business.
Edited 2005-11-14 10:09
Most of the stuff you mention has nothing to do with the Business desktop, so I’m afraid you’re grossly off-topic.
That said, Linux:
*Works with the graphics card of all my PCs (NVidia, ATI + S3 integrated chipset)
*Works will all my sound cards (Soundblaster, ATI integrated chipset)
*Never had any problem with chipset revisions
*Can do video capture easily (even with an EyeToy PS2 camera – okay, it’s pretty bad quality, but I already owned it…)
*You don’t need to recompile the kernel to install a driver. That’s why kernel modules exist… A good example is the driver for the EyeToy camera (OV519) – I had to compile the modules (it’s pretty obscure), but that didn’t take long. Then all I had to do was modprobe the module and it worked.
Linux and OSS advocates will accept criticism when it’s warranted – the only problem is that in the vast majority of cases it’s simply FUD being thrown around by anti-Linux posters.
P.S. Linux has improved tremendously over the past 9 years. I suggest you give it another spin…
Improved tremendously over the last 9 YEARS?
9 years ago was 1996 before GNOME had started and KDE was pretty crappy. Did we even have the 2.2 kernel? I can’t remember, that feels like a century, not a decade ago.
Having said that, it’s amazing that the linux desktop is as good as it is now even though the kernel only started 13 years ago. I use it every day (on it right now) and im very happy with it.
ps. Im a nerd, so I dont mind setting things like graphics cards/ recompiling the kernel for a speed boost etc etc…lets just say I run Gentoo
<p>ps. Im a nerd, so I dont mind setting things like graphics cards/ recompiling the kernel for a speed boost etc etc…lets just say I run Gentoo
<p>Yes it have improved tremendously, but compare that to what Apple has produced in a far shorter time span with probably far fewer developers…
flame on…
what apple did was take a existing kernel and rework it. then splash a gui on top.
let see, darwin is a reworked netbsd kernel isnt it? and there is cups, samba, and a whole lot of other open source stuff under the hood?
basicly apple got os x out the door so fast because they based it on existing stuff rather then do yet another remake of the wheel…
I don’t hear you say that MacOS-X, is a bad OS just because it doesn’t run on your hardware. If you bought hardware and and not checked that it run anything but windows, even though you also had Linux in mind, you can only blame yourself.
The amount of avilable hardware that actually runs flawlessly, and gets automagically detected, and configured by Linux is huge, so even if you didn’t do your due dilligence and ask if it worked on Linux, you must have had really, really bad luck.
I must admit I have no experience of video capture, so that might, or might not, be an area where there is little support, as there are software for Linux that is supposed to use this kind of hardware, I guess some vender soupport it. I would suggest asking around in some Linux user group, or on support mailing lists for various Linux distros, they may have some idea of what hardware to use.
So far I havn’t seen any modern PC I couldn’t boot an Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD. The list of PC includes laptops from IBM, Fujitsu, HP. Perhaps you should tell us what you are using so others that intend to run Linux on it can be warned, and not buy it.
By the way, what actions do you want from the Linux community? In the majority of the cases where you actually don’t have a driver for a certain piece of hardware is that the manefactuerer is uncooperative in giving the developers specifications they need to develop a driver.
Oh great! Another one who EXACTLY knows how to do things, how things work, and what the truth is. Yet, this one (as article author) doesn’t wonder why possessing the truth didn’t help him takeover the market.
Most people don’t know the truth.
Oh great! It reminds to me the story of a guy who knew the truth (him too! Did you tell him too or did he find the truth by himself??) and he had a great product whose fate was to takeover the whole market. He went around offering his product to everyone on this Earth, including cats and dogs but… they (ALL OF THEM) refused it! (blind people… godless ones!). I can’t recall his name, though…
It’s amazing how people can state they know the truth, what you must do, what you shouldn’t… yet they cannot succeede. Weird, uh?
Someone (who’s surely uneducated) might even say that your products aren’t that good, after all! Go figure…
The author of this article is just angry that noone believed in him and his program(s) that were merely untested clones of something that was more widely available and supported.
Nothing to see here. Article is just another troll attempt.
and reveals a little known fact that GNU/Linux has had the technology to challenge Microsoft for six years.
Does it matter?
“having technology” means nothing & is of no use if you don’t “use it“
While I do feel the author is a little bitter over not having his *exchange* clone go anywhere I do agree with him that Exchange/Outlook is one of the major pieces of the MS foundation in the enterprise.
At the company I work for (one of the companies he lists that did not want his software btw) we have many technical workstations running UNIX (mostly RS6000 units), all of the UNIX workstations allow the user to remote to a profile on a windows server so that they can run outlook and get their mail. There are a few who even have a windows machine next to the unix box just for email!
Its literally the backbone of the entire company and this guy is right. *nix will never be able to break the MS hold on the enterprise until its fully addressed.
What is interesting about this article is that it illustrates the difficulties in bringing one’s product to the customer. We’ll never know if this guy’s product was in fact what he claims it to be, since there was no eating of the pudding, but seeing how superior products have failed in the past because noone would buy it/because the product was badly marketed, it’s not unbelievable if he did have something.
The article also illustrates the devious ways Microsoft uses to gain a foothold in any market, and how their greatest strength might be exploiting unknowledgeable managers.
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*nix technology has always been superior — ha ha ha that goes to the hall of shame stupid statement for today. dude don’t make a fool of urself. do urself a favor and study the kernel design and architecture of windows and linux. do ur own comparison and u will know who is superior. come back when linux has full asynch IO support, unified driver model etc. damn man, its only now that they have fine grained acl with se linux…lol linux & far superior nahhh wake up buddy
Bell labs stupid?
are you saying that Windows is superior to UNIX/Linux?
good luck.
Capitalizing the first word of every sentence will help you to be taken seriously. Also, not referring to inanimate things with pronouns like “who” will help as well.
Do your own study, write your own English book, and come back when you learn to write the language properly.
PS- Normally I’d just mod you down, but I opted for the ironic response today.
Who cares if a person knows english well. It is all about free exchange of information.
He didn’t specify Linux, he specifically used *nix. Take a look at real Unicies like Irix, Solaris, or AIX and look at the kernel internals there. Hell, Irix had a/v capture and editing long before Windows was usable for that sort of thing. IIRC, it was either AIX or Irix that was the first non-mainframe OS approved by the US Government for use in their highest security environments because of their fine grained security. And then there’s clustering technology to look at. Windows is just starting to realize the importance of that. Home desktop technology, windows has the advantage of being pretty and easy and familliar. But for enterprise technology, windows is just now starting to get where it needs to be. A unified driver model would definitely help many of the *nix os’s. I say screw them both, Microkernels are where the real os achievments shine.
But what is so important about Outlook / Exchange for businesses?
I’m just a student and have traditionally very little interest in email clients aside from making sure that Mail.app got all my various accounts organized nicely
In the mid 1990’s, e-mail became one of the “killer apps” and Microsoft was able to convince a lot of people that Exchange and Outlook was superior to GroupWise (Novell), Lotus Notes (Lotus then IBM, and Banyan Vines. Keep in mind that Novell and Banyan’s e-mail solutions were far more scalable and GroupWise was certified for B-level security under the TCSEC.
The US Government bought Microsoft’s marketing speak and replaced UNIX and NetWare based infrastructre with Windows NT. Later did they find out about all the caveats to using a Microsoft solution. My first post Navy job was at a site converting from Banyan Vines to Windows NT, it was not pretty, trust me.
VB is like what RoR is to J2EE – the ability to quickly throw together gui apps that talk to a database.
Hey are you always that stupid or its your birthday? Just see the first line in my post, which is auto-generated by OSNews. I was writing that post from my PDA so typing is a little difficult. Secondly, i am not a native english speaker so yeah blow me…
Now to the point, please provide arguments to the points i raise just don’t troll here..
well, I kinda agree with the artical. with the addenum of AD with GPO’s. sure ISV and enterprise software like CAD,scheduling software,accounting software. and activeX drive services. weigh heavyly
on enterprise desktops.
you can’t tell your CxO to replace stuff like outlook/exchnage and all the other stuff with
either replacements or hacked together solutions. it just does not work that way.
when a companys has say 10 years of data, in a solution migrating it to a new soltion is not easy, and the cost of migration and how the users ablity to be productive in the new soltion is considered.
for many many companys the future roadmap is win2K>winXP>winVista
now many companys will replace many many backend servers with a *nix one.
but, exchange/AD will stay.
-Nex6
or whatever it was supposed to be called.
didnt they work on this for the german goverment or something?
i dont think there is so much a killer app as there is a killer combo.
novell had the grip on small office addressbooks and mail systems. but they where only about the back end and used windows as the front end.
then MS slipped in their first gen exchange connection into windows, released NT and presto. hell, the exchange client was default mail client for windows until they became serious about the internet and released the combo of IE and OE. i recall playing around with it on win95. it was simple…
then came office with outlook. and then we have active desktop on win2k that plays nice in networks based around internet technologys (tcp/ip, dns) and kerberos.
the classical statement about MS still stands, embrace and extend. if you allow MS to play around with your tech you can be damned sure that they soon release something thats compatible with yours but provide extra benifits when used with other MS products.
just look at what they are doing with the xbox360.
it can play nice with both PSP and ipod. but you can be damned sure that it will play even nicer with music devices that uses that new MS tech they talked about this year.
thing is that ms makes sure to not licence stuff out unless they are sure the entity that gets the licence cant one up MS.
MS is to the corp desktop what mac is to the home desktop, a religion. that windows is on about 90%+ of the desktops in this world is that people want to run their same apps at work and at home.
while apple caters to home users with ilife (itunes, iphoto), MS goes for the kill on the corp desktop (office with outlook, exchange, active directory, even activex).
for open source to go up against MS on the corp desktop they first need to take the exchange server on. just like the article points out. basicly you need a server that can be a drop-in replacement for the combo of exchange and active directory. one that plays nice with outlook, and a host of other clients. then those that dont need to run specialized software that only available on MS systems can go with anything they want.
problem is tho that anything that open source comes up with, MS can reimplement and extend. if open source trys that, MS just picks up the extensions.
didnt they work on this for the german goverment or something?
You probably mean Kolab http://www.kolab.org
looks like it.
quotes from mad_d…
quote #1:
“It’s funny too. People choose Microsoft (the platforms for developers) over FOSS or other solutions all the time. These are users making these choices, often.”
users? try big business and lock-in’s. but nice try.
quote #2:
“Unix has had the same problem. They’re so busy trying to make things nice for the users they’ve not ushered in developers with cheering applause!
wrong. talented developers are more attracted to Linux than Windows because there are real contributions that can be made. that’s why OSS works so well.
read here and learn… http://rixstep.com/2/20051110,00.html
quote #3:
“This is one reason Mac lost the OS war (if you can call it that). They made life difficult for developers. Your code had to be perfect, otherwise you crashed your customers computer (not just your own program).”
what???????
quote #4:
“It’s really kind of sad. The lesson here is: Market to developers, they’ll do your platform marketing for you for free. “
no, the lesson here should be yours, cause i believe you to be either a troll, a shill, or just a person that doesn’t understand what he is talking about. either way, your going to show people what you really are. so be my guest, keep posting.
quote #5:
“Capitalizing the first word of every sentence will help you to be taken seriously”
no, understanding the topic and having the facts will help you be taken seriously. you have neither.
The article was pretty dead on in describing 1996-7 as a crucial time in Microsoft expanding its footprint in the enterprise. A few things are worth remembering, too:
At one time, WordPerfect was the clear leader in Word Processing. Probably because of problems with its early windows versions, MS Word became more attractive. I don’t think WP really understood the Windows paradigm; i.e. they used their own printer drivers instead of using the system’s.
The clear market leader in corporate email in the mid-90s was cc:Mail. Groupwise wasn’t really on the horizon (Novell was still charging for the IP protocol then). Lotus Notes was a fine product that was a bit immature and with very little following. I suspect Lotus didn’t want to compete against itself, so it never really pushed Notes as a mail system as opposed to a database.
cc:Mail was godawful by 1996-7. There was no way to control storage effectively. It’s internet connectivity was lousy. The remote client, while it worked, used direct dialing to the cc:mail system not PPP, so as the internet and the web became a larger part of how people used the internet, you couldn’t use both at the same time. Lotus wasn’t adding new features or addressing problems. Their market share plummeted by at least 50% in two years. That’s not just being overwhelmed by competition, it’s imploding.
Novell Netware was going through a difficult time from 1994-97. The transition from the 3.x, bindery system of management to the 4.x NDS system went very badly. It was hard to understand even for people well versed in 3.x netware. (I taught a cne course around this time, and I saw the confusion of experienced sys admins first hand.) There were some problems with 4.0 that were considerable set backs. The DSMERGE utility for merging different Trees was buggy and was withdrawn in subsequent versions. Without it, it was impossible to consildate different Organizations’ NDS databases.
Banyan VINEs had had a similar system to NDS, but its network drivers were very buggy.
Novell’s licensing was very simple; you bought X number of clients and when the server had X number of connections, you couldn’t make anymore.
Windows NT, by 3.51, was not a great file and print server compared to Novell, but it had some distinct advantages. For licensing, it was basically an honor system. You could type in the number of maximum connections, or put “unlimited” and say you were managing connections by other means. I think MS has always left a lot of room for playing around and dishonesty because it ultimately wants you to buy its product, and MS doesn’t care too much if you’ve paid for every single license. Windows NT server was the same as NT workstation with the abililty to have more incoming connections. If you knew Windows 3.11 for workgroups, you had many of the fundamental skills to run NT server. This allowed smaller organizations and people outside IT to look at it for themselves, play with it and see how easy it was to get it to share files. They could do this with NT workstation, and then buy the server, so it wasn’t that expensive. In 1996, it was a good chance that they already had NT workstation. What happened in the firm I worked for then was that one department was fed up with IT, and started buying its own servers and set up its own infrastructure within the corporate network. It probably didn’t perform as well as Novell, but the ability to bypass corporate IT with a working product was invaluable, and as Novell faltered, MS just gained more momentum.
A fine article. Although I don’t know quite what any of this has to do with Linux. Linux wasn’t a good option in ’96 or ’97 for workstation or server. And if the analogy is being drawn to today, Linux is going to have to take advantage of some MS failing as much as it plays to its stregths.
yeah, at the time Microsoft came to “power”. things where much diffent. it’s alot like right time right place.
the artical makes some pretty good points, as much as linux is taking over the server room, the domain controllers and groupware/exchange servers are staying.
with each version of exchange MS is adding much needed features.
-Nex6
Very good points. At last someone who reports what the problems are/were instead of believing World conspiracies to undermine superior Linux (which, as you stated, was not an option in 1996/97).
Maybe if Linux zealots used their time to finish off their products instead of spreading tons of BETAs, provide decent support (replacing the “Go fix it yourself or shut up!” behaviour), stop disappearing in black holes just when you decided to switch to their applications and other amazing things like those, they could succeede in providing some good products.
Sure, using all your forces/time to state that “it’s all because of marketing” is easier than developing software… I understand that…
quote from TBPrince…
“Maybe if Linux zealots used their time to finish off their products instead of spreading tons of BETAs, provide decent support (replacing the “Go fix it yourself or shut up!” behaviour), stop disappearing in black holes just when you decided to switch to their applications and other amazing things like those, they could succeede in providing some good products.”
you are entitled to your opinion.
but, being cynical and angry doesn’t invited good debate, and lashing back with the term “Linux zealots” is the equivalent of 3rd grade name calling.
good luck.
Edited 2005-11-14 18:58
I was the Network Admin at a medium sized (!=200 pc’s, 18 servers) in Ohio for 5 years. I was only 21 and they needed a CIO; of course it wasn’t going to be me. They brought in some guy who knew what tech was, not how to use it. He started buying up everything MSFT that he could. In about 1.5 years, we had over 12 DL380’s running every backoffice product you can think of. I am NOT a Microsoft hater, but I do enjoy choice. Like most of you, if Microsoft didn’t exist, my company wouldn’t either.
I began messing around with Red Hat/etc. I discovered that I could turn our old machines into thin clients that logged automatically into our Terminal Servers. Our exec’s were thrilled, but my CIO was not. He didn’t like that there was something *else* there. So, he used Outlook/Exchange against me whenever the suits would ask, “Junior, what’s with all this Linux stuff…can we use it?” I wasn’t even trying to flip the place, just save us some money.
In the end, I left. The article is correct…it’s got to start with the “killer app.”