[geeks] M$ crap == HUGE TCO and major headaches!

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, August 17, 2001 at 22:27:44 (-0500), Reagen B . Ward wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] solaris 2.5.1/ppc cd found
>
> Tried putty?  Not sure if it fits your needs, but it's pretty decent.

Yeah, it sucks too, but I don't remember why (or don't want to! ;-).

> Unless he has to do the scheduling/todo/etc and they won't enable the
> web interface.  Not that the web interface is worth using anyway...

I'll bet it's *all* BS.....

A little bit of front-line activism can thwart the efforts of even the
most draconian IT department to force M$ crapware down everyone's
throats.  It helps to be a "demanding consultant", or to have one on
your side, but even a self-assured employee can usually give M$
brain-damaged IT managers what us Canadians call the Trudeau Salute.

> It was easy for them, as they were converting from SCO, and were already
> using X11 apps.  They even compiled KDE on SCO to help ease in the
> transition.  Not to mention the fact that they still have access to
> windows apps on a remote server, a fact lots of folks tend to ignore.

Maybe I'm missing something because I *have* worked in lots of IT shops
that were NOT tied by their necks (and their short curly ones) to the M$
empire, but I really don't see the problem.  There's *tons* of *better*
and easier to use "enterprise" and "desktop" software out there with
*lower* TCO.  You don't even have to come close to offering M$ desk-top
like environments to get even today's far more experienced users to be
happy with the tools necessary to do their jobs.

KDE's no panacea *unless* you're trying to convert a bunch of M$
lusers.  It's nearly as complex and breakable as the M$ crap (though at
least it's fixable if you want to learn C++! :-)

Indeed it sounds to me as though the Largo city IT guys made a big hit
with their users when they were able to put fancy desk-top environments
in front of their users without having to sell their souls to the M$
evil empire.

I think it's important to note though that you don't have to go to
totally free software to get decent results.  (However there is now even
a GNU Enterprise project! ;-)

The fact is that you don't *have* to have *any* M$ crapware to run a
decent IT service in *any* sized enterprise, from one-person to millions
of employees.

It's just that the cheap-enough labour most IT departments can afford to
hire have long ago been brain-damaged by M$ into thinking their's is the
only viable platform for a commercial operation.

At least in the good old days you knew why you were paying IBM for the
somewhat crappy but very reliable and scalable solutions they let you
use on their hardware!  And if you had some favourite extra-curricular
activity in common with the IBM sales-dude you were really (kept) happy!  ;-)

My company does run one M$-only application, Intuit's QuickBooks, but
only because we were too lazy to do a little bit of manual paperwork,
and too cheap to go out and pay up-front a proper solution that would
run on Unix.  However I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that our TCO is
now way higher than it would have been if we'd just kept writing little
awk, python, ruby, etc. scripts to expand our original feeble hacks into
production quality.  We run the damn thing under VMware now, but it's
still a major hassle and costs us time and aggrevation every month.  I
spent less time writing a complete report generation and typesetting
system for our early feeble flat-file hacks than we've since spent
figuring out even just the tiniest anomalies in some weird behaviour of
QuickBooks.  Our biggest downfall was believing we needed commercially
supported software to run our payroll.

The only people I know who claim to like M$ and M$-based crapware are
those who've never really seen anything else.

(Of course if QuickBooks ran fully multi-user under X11 and used a more
open DB it still might not be any better -- it's problem is it's
designed to work only in the PC GUI environment, and since it's data
paradigm is very OO it's got quirks that no change in choice of platform
would eliminate.  It's easily 1000 times more complicated internally
than it needs to be, at least for for the basic jobs we use it for.)


BTW, part of the reason I'm on the rampage here is that I've got a
couple of clients who are small (but growing) ISPs and who've been
running Unix across the board for all their services for several years
now, and who's support staff I've trained extensively to use Unix tools,
etc., but who's support staff are still insisting on sitting in front of
M$ workstations, even when they've got very decent X11 terminals already
set up and ready to use.  At first their argument was that they needed
to be familiar with the environment their lusers were using, but they've
finally given up on even that lame excuse.  The worst of it is that
their ongoing use of M$ workstations leads them to forget their Unix
training and to make damaging mistakes when doing their Unix sysadmin
tasks!

All I can say is I'm really glad to finally see articles like that one
describing the Largo city IT success, and the recent IDC report showing
the profile of Linux buyers to be shifting towards more mainstream and
corporate users....  It's been a *LONG* time since the Unix community
saw such encouraging things in the "popular" media!  Now if only we
could get the likes of IDC to calculate real penetration instead of
basing their studies on "sales" figures!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>     <woods at robohack.ca>
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