[lug] Quote of the Day

[Nate Duehr]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2001 at 04:08:35PM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> They're having a hard enough time selling the newer Windows into the
> DESKTOP environment.  Why would they suddenly take over the server
> market?

Well, here's a real-world story backing this up... this should be
generic enough that it's not proprietary information.

As solid evidence of this, when my employer found it would cost almost
one MILLION dollars for our medium-sized company to upgrade from the
current WinNT (Hey!  I take care of the Linux boxes!) environment to
Win2K Pro, they immediately decided against it in the 2001 budget.
Upgrades to 2K are only done now for "business need" and are
pretty-much "unsupported" by our IT staff & helpdesk. (Although I've
never seen those guys ever turn down a help request from anyone, even
those who claim to have "done nothing" to their machines... *wink*.
They deserve medals-of-honor for putting up with that.)

That much money for USB support on our laptops just wasn't worth it.

There was no other technical reason to go to it, yep... that's all a
million dollars will buy you from Microsoft in the business environment
these days.  You don't have to buy the serial port cradle for your
Handspring.  (heh heh -- I'll be honest, there may have been real
benefits for the admins on the NT side of things, but they still decided
those benefits didn't justify that much money either.)

Many of the "enhancements" would raise our cost of ownership immensely.
(Active Directory Services would requires a multi-month audit and
deployment plan for very little added functionality over a properly
administered NT network.)

Meanwhile the count on the Linux systems is now over 100, and this at a
company that originally had no room (political room, not technical room
obviously) for Unix of any kind when I hired on a year and half ago.

Even now that certain machines are so critical in the Linux portion of
the network that downtime of two hours time would equate to more than $1
million in refunds, yet people still come up to me and ask, "Why do we 
run XYZ on Linux *still*?"... Like there's another choice?!  Of course
many of these same people have NEVER run Netscape browsers.  ("Why would
I want to download that thing?  There's a perfectly good browser on my
machine!")

I simply explain that the current uptime on those systems is over 270 
days and the last downtime was to add RAM.  They usually go away still
wondering... 

And they still think I'm some kind of crazy Unix zealout with nothing
better to do with my time than bash Microsoft.  Hello?  Why is it you
can explain in real hard uptime numbers (looking at AVAILABILITY of the
services offered, not just the kernel being up...) to managers but they
still don't get it?

Microsoft's marketing machine is amazing sometimes.

Anyway, I would add that there's no WAY I would put Linux desktops in
front of the average Sales or Marketing person... Windows (like any
tool) definitely has its place in the corporate world.  But I heartily
recommend that mission-critical services can be done on Linux or other
Unix variants cheaper and more reliably.  Some days you win that
argument, others you lose.  Most of the time half of the WinZombies just
think you're nuts.  :)

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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