I agree with all your points,
but I'd like to add one thing.
Perception is everything.. and which OS has millions spend on forming
peoples perceptions every year?
until things get more even keel, the CEO's of the massive companies will
stay where they are.
they don't want to hear There is an office app for linux now they'd rather
hear, hey did you know we can upgrade our wordperfect license from windows
to the latest linux version. or something along those lines.
teaching 4000 employees the ins and outs of completely new Os and
applications would not be cheap, and it wouldnt' be fast either and they
wounldn't be productive in the meantime either.
I want linux on every desktop cept bill gates's. (may he be forever forced
to use windows.)
and I think we are in the right direction for that, but it will forever be
the techno's OS till we get alot more main stream OS's to give it some
commercial clout.
believe it or not, but CEO's are still of the thinking that if its free it
can't be any good.
(one of the reasons Staroffice will not be free for much longer. (if it
still is.)
rgds
Frank
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of shane
Sent: Saturday, 23 February 2002 1:10 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: other OS apps and competition was: [newbie] Anti-virus
On Thursday 21 February 2002 23:52, Franki opened a hailing frequency and
transmitted:
Although the OS is free, alot of the tools are not yet up to the standard
of comparitive windows apps..
though i hear this a lot from bith linux and windows supporters, i often
woder about it. office is a good example, it looks much nicer than open
office or thinkfree or the like, and it seems to have many more tools. but
in 6 years supporting 4 different OS and 5 different suites, 90% of the
extra tools are never used, and over 90% of my support for win/office is
it keeps crashing, and won't restart where even with the worst crash for
any office client on linux, it does restart. and they _very_ rarely crash
in the first place.
which costs more to support?
So the total cost is this.. either pay for alot of training for staff to
learn new apps that are linux generic.. or stick with windows until linux
version come out...
and like many companies are finding, training for the average linux app
isn't all that hard. supporting a bunch of windows crash boxes, and
patching daily is full time work.
after all those years of support work i know windows better than linux.
cause i had to. i never had to worry about linux once it was setup
correctly. windows i had to reinstall regularly and troubleshot non-stop
so getting MS apps workin is a fast track to getting on alot of
workstations fast.
on a weekly basis there are new articles about companies/governments who
are changing from msoffice to star office or any ms, to anything else. the
ms days are numbered
i am not disagreeing with what you say. it is very true. i am just
pointing out that it won't take long.
I take my hats off to the programers that do this.. its almost harder
then writing the apps was in the first place.
now i disagree. almost? it seems it would be _much_ harder. but then i
know 0 programing.
So while it is better to have native linux apps, we don't have access to
the companies that write the most well known windows apps, and everyone
knows that its the apps available that make an OS useful, (thats why osX
for mac wasn't the default os till now.) So untill all the developers
start making linux versions, the quickest way to make linux a favorable
workstation OS is to make windows apps run on it.
perhaps we also need to standup and be counted so to speak. as long as
ms claims a 95% desktop share and no one gives hard facts otherwise, they
have a stranglehold. sadly, linux users by nature reject a centralized
system, so there will never be an acurate count.
--
Linux, cause i reboot less often than windows users reinstall.
shane
http://shentzu.home.mindspring.com/
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