On August 31, 2004 11:22 pm, Fajar Priyanto wrote: > http://www.forbes.com/enterprisetech/2004/08/31/cz_dl_0831msft.html
First off one needs to seriously question whether Newham was at all interested in using Linux or was simly using Linux as a way of bashing a pricing deal out of Microsoft. That said, the article is full of errors of fact. For example: "Add in the cost of retraining users and IT staff, rewriting applications to run on Linux, and the cost of paying separately for programs like application servers, Web servers and directories (which come bundled with Windows). You also may need to pay consultants to stitch the pieces together, and you might need to buy insurance to protect you against lawsuits over intellectual property rights. (One outfit hawks such policies for $150,000 year.) " Last time I checked, which was all of about a day or two ago, application servers, Web servers and directory servers are available as GPL'd software at little or no up front charge. Certianly even Forbes has heard about Apache. As for consultants I can't think of one municipality or medium to large company that doesn't pay for consultants to stitch these things together regardless of the OS they run on. Also, last time I checked, most of the applications mentioned in the paragraph above are freely downloadable for every major distribution and most little guys. Later the IT type for the town goes on about that latest useless gimmick called a tablet PC. At this point those things are not even close to ready for prime time, need to be coddled to keep working because the hardware is so fragile and the software..well..the less said at the moment the better. I've field tested two of them and they're pure useless junk. Towards the end of the article a well known microsoft shill named Rob Enderle is quoted. This man has a history of not letting the facts get in teh way of his opionion or his "learned" comments. So much so that he's even managed to offend our lady of Groklaw, which is probably the dumbest thing he could have managed to do. Oh yes, and IP insurance. To date the attempts by SCO to sue end users has ended up going nowhere fast and it still looks as though they'll be soundly beaten in the end by IBM if there's still an SCO to beat up on. Finally, so what if Microsoft has beaten IBM, Novell and others in the past? MS was a different company back then and so were IBM and the others. I'd suggest that MS had less to defend back then and more to gain by buldgeoning everyone, customers included, in sight. And Linux itself is a different beast in that it's not Red Hat, MDK, Novell or IBM but something bigger than that. And that's the other problem with "beating" Linux. It's a moving target and MS doesn't quite know what to do with that. Microsoft has a problem now that it didn't have then. It's fighting a multi front war in OS, development and application space. In that sense they're similar to IBM when they went after them. Even more so when you consider that while Microsoft doesn't make much hardware they do attempt to control it. Like anyone in that position they can't be everywhere at once and they can't do everything at once well. The fate of Longhorn should make that clear. Linux and Open Source and even the closed source that is clustering around Linux have a serious advantage in that they can concentrate of OS or application or development. And 'Nix's inherent modularity means that fitting the parts together isn't a huge insurmountable problem or that it needs to be buried in an OS a la Windows. Add to this the fact that in spite of their own PR Microsoft hasn't really innovated in anything. Oh they've copied, stolen and sometimes improved but to say they've ever really innovated is bunk. The culture around Microsoft has become bureaucratic, as it must be, slow and fat. It's a monolith and everything must fit into whatever master plan they have at the moment. Even if they don't really seem to know what that is. The culture around Linux and Open Source is general is close to anarchy. Contrary to the popular computing press this is a definite advantage. People can and do concentrate on what interests them or what problems they can solve. Innovation tends to be small but cumulative. The explosion in quality and quantity of applications in the last 24 months is nothing short of phenominal even more so when one considers how much had to be reverse engineered. Contrary to Forbes there is precious little hardware that Linux can't make use of now with ease. So there's no block there. FUD is FUD..even when published in Forbes. ttfn John -- *********************************************************** Composed on a 100% Microsoft Free Computer Guaranteed Virus Free Mandrake Linux 10.0 OE Registered Linux User 362316 ***********************************************************
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