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/ Proud to be a DMOZ editor since 10-98 http://dmoz.org/ cause humans do it better! Profile at: http://dmoz.org/profiles/shen.html
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