On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 15:44, Rick [Kitty5] wrote: > Norbert Kamenicky wrote: > > "How is it possible, that governments and state apparatus > > of most countries in all over the world are spending billions $ for > > totaly unreliable and unsecure M$ software?" > > I am quite sure that in the US MS's campaign funding does not go to waste, > however that cannot explain the state of affairs the world over, nor can it > be the only factor. > > A possibility could be that Linux lacks professional representation, e.g. > your in the position to throw a small fortune MS's way and they will send > someone round to sell it - And usually not to the people who actually have > to use the systems. Your average IT illiterate decision maker will feel much > more comfortable in sticking to what they think they know. Remember the > phrase, well these days its "nobody ever got fired for buying MS".
I can give one insight about why Linux isn't more successful. (And possibly never will be...) We tried to switch in our little company from Windows to Linux, and actually, that part wasn't too difficult. Work level browsing is OK under Linux, much better than home-type browsing. Email is fine, and actually preferable under Linux doe to the lack of viruses and what not. Networking to file servers is fine. Linux as a platform presented almost no real problems, as I would guess all the IT type people that are on these lists understand. However, there was a huge problem. The problem, which I think is probably typical, was that you have to interface to the rest of the world. People are sending us documents all the time that we have to work with. These documents are created using some portion of Microsoft Office - Word, Excel, Power Point, etc. Star Office and Open Office were not compatible enough to open, edit, print and save these documents in ways that would work for our business partners and our vendors. The documents get messed up where Word won't deal with a document that has been edited by these apps. Fonts get changed. File formats get changed. When you create HTML from them they don't look the same. It caused problems, and the problems were pretty difficult for a small company to deal with, and in fact many of our partners refused to deal with it, so we couldn't do the switch. In the end, it comes down to the tools, not the platform. In my mind Office is far more important than Windows. There are now these middle-ware sort of tools from Code Weavers that allow you to run Windows apps under Linux. One of these days we may revisit running M$ Office that way, but beyond Office there are 5-10 other apps (Accounting, Facilities stuff, etc.) that we need to use to get completely beyond Windows as a platform, and it's a lot of work, and costs a lot of money to set it up and make sure things are good. All that work to eliminate a $200 Windows XP license? Maybe it's just not worth it? I think it is, but possibly not... As I write this from my Linux box at home I'm happy to use Linux where I Can, but that doesn't mean it's the best choice all the time. Cheers, Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
