Matthew Macdonald-Wallace wrote: [Long post snipped]
Matthew, Good message. I've just come off the phone from Mr. Scargill, who is an incredibly reasonable chap with some very positive things to say about Ubuntu. The point on which I absolutely agree with him is that integration/interoperability - for many businesses, this is the most important factor, since the costs of sorting out interfacing issues can (and in my experience frequently do) cost rather more than the software licences. He said that Ubuntu is the best version of Linux he has ever seen. He said that if he were starting a small business from scratch for office-based staff, he would use Ubuntu on the desktop. He also said that he had not yet come across good Linux tools that supported the mobile user base as well as the Exchange Mobile solution, so if he had mainly a field-based operation, he'd probably still go with Microsoft SBS. He said that he would like to know of any good tools to provide Exchange Mobile - equivalent solution for messaging (not email, but the more generic messaging problems.) I'm with him on that - I have a good email client (ThunderBird), but it's not a replacement for Outlook (as opposed to Outlook Express.) His biggest criticism of Linux is that what we see as "choice" is very close to "confusion". And that one man's "modular solution" is another's "set of different packages that need to be bolted together". What I think that we, as a group, often miss is that most people want a balance between "choice" and "certainty." In some areas - the car I drive - I want to absolutely be able to pick something quirky and unusual (which is why I drive a Morgan.) In other areas, like say laser printers, I just want the certainty of dealing with something I'm familiar with and that I know will work (which is why I have an old HP Laserjet 4M Plus and an HP Colour Laserjet 2600n) - because I knew that I would be able to take them out of the box, and get them working in five minutes. While, on my personal PC, I want to be able to fiddle and install whatever software I want, when I was running helpdesks I had a duty to keep the overall cost of IT (not the licence cost - but the overall cost) down, because that was the mandate from the Board. The easiest way to keep costs down is to have complete standardisation across the organisation (I was supporting about 2,000 people across 6 locations) - that meant that I needed to have my desktop support staff trained in one set of applications - as a result of that, we could concentrate on building value-added services that would work across that set. Our problems came when one unit wanted, say, to use Excel instead of 123... or Word instead of WordPerfect (this was about 7 years ago - now the MS solutions are the incumbents...) The biggest thing we could do as a community to expand the installed reach of Linux would be to persuade Dell and PC World to offer Linux with a range of "cheapest" PCs... so that it became the value option. The reason that I'm on the Ubuntu list rather than that of any other distro is that I see the Ubuntu foundation / Canonical as the group with the most clear vision of how they are going to achieve that. When people raise criticisms, the winning approach is NEVER to say "You're wrong - you need to do X, Y, and Z", but always to say "Good point - what can we do to improve it?" Mark -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
