Charles-H.Schulz wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, 2005-08-14 at 07:44 -0400, Lars D. Noodén wrote:
Before it was a lobbying organization / political movement, MS was first
and foremost a marketing company and still retains that expertise. So I'd
expect that there was a fair amount of evening meetings involving
all-expenses paid lavish dinners with MS representatives each and every
evening preceding a meeting. MS oriented vendors might have also refused
to sell hardware for evaluation of other systems as well. Who know? We'd
need an insider or close observer to sayhow things went down.
certainly yes. But I'm reading the official reasons the Scottish police
had to migrate back to MS and I have some trouble seeing only "fake
reasons" to it. It seems that somebody didn't do his/her job at catering
the Scottish Police StarOffice users in their daily use and (even more
important) the overall change management of the office suite
infrastructure. I'm not trying to throw stones away to people but still
I feel like these guys have been on their own for the time they've been
using StarOffice. It feels like the Scottish police had trouble not just
using StarOffice but also integrating it in their overall IT
infrastructure.
What the MS sales reps did seem to do however, was taking the right
approach by answering real questions (with biased answers) and showing
that there would be somebody in charge at MS for this customer.
Aren't there any privacy laws in the UK? The MS EULAs for 2000 SP3 and XP
SP1 grant admin rights to MS. That's a back door by any other name and
given MS' track record on security, it's accessible to more than just MS.
ALso, 2003 is heavy on the DRM stuff. That means vendor lock-in for
e-mail and office documents as well as the ability to track which
individual officers/departments are working with whom, since the DRM
server must grant or deny actions like opening, printing, editing, etc.
This is where things start to get interesting. This customer is the
Scottish Police; not a candy retailer. They certainly have some very
sensitive data on their documents or somewhere on their servers and
they'd let MS Office 2003 and XP, that is, an alien company take control
over their data? Now think about that one: Sun has some manufacturing
plan in Scotland. What SO/OOo offers is invaluable: a truly open
document file format; and besides, by buying at Sun you help foster the
local economy. I can't imagine the Scottish police CIO/IT director being
lavishly bribed by MS. It's way too simple, and there must be other
reasons to this drawback.
Best,
Charles.
Bribery is likely. But it only helps us to focus on any business and
technical factors. This is catastrophic.
-Sam
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
