On 10/24/10 12:46 PM, Seth Galitzer wrote:
Selling any *NIX solution to a shop that is pure Windows will always be
a challenge, if not impossible. But where you can expand your user base
is in those shops that are already heterogeneous and already have the
expertise in *NIX.
There are two other possibilities here. Consider the clueless:
First, users who are sick of Windows but aren't aware that there are
alternatives. This is extremely common among nontechnical people.
The second is a very strange situation, but it happens a lot: users
who don't know that it's possible to have a computer that's NOT running
Windows...to them, ALL computers run Windows, because that's what
computers do. No, I'm not kidding. All they know is "to get to the
Internet, I click on the blue 'e'".
Coincidentally, BOTH of these situations existed in the last place
where I installed a bunch of Sun Rays. The head of the company is very
smart and reasonably technical, but he wasn't aware that there were any
good alternatives to Windows for desktop use. The whole company is now
running Linux-backed Sun Rays, and several of his users have commented
that they've "never seen this version of Windows before". One even
asked "Is this Windows 7? Wow, they made it so much better!" One guy
does little other than spreadsheets all day long, and he, to this day,
believes he's running the very latest version of Excel, one that's a lot
faster and has nicer help menus. Put plainly: These people have no idea
that they were converted from Windows to Linux back in March, and have
been running nothing but Linux ever since. "And wow, these new Sun PCs
are really small and quiet!"
This is representative of the average level of clue in the typical
Windows user base.
Windows blinders notwithstanding, for businesses, Sun Rays make a
great deal of sense in every way, as long as Oracle doesn't jack up the
price. 99% of desktop applications are covered by Firefox, Thunderbird,
and OpenOffice, all of which run equally well under Solaris and Linux,
but Solaris runs on more powerful hardware. There haven't been any real
document interchange problems or file format compatibility issues for
years now. The remaining 1% are vertical-market applications that can
be handled by a Windows app server accessed via RDP or similar.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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