[ale] How the Other Half Lives

[James P. Kinney III]

As a company who provides support contracts to business for computers
systems, I feel I am qualified to respond to this.

Business leaders LIKE how Microsoft does business. They want to do the
same thing. Sure they wish it didn't cost as much or crash as often. But
as long as everyone else is doing the Microsoft train, they will too
because that is how they think. Witness the proliferation of management
"style" books that go in and out of vogue every year. Think back to high
school. Who were the trendy crowd followers and what do they do now? Who
were the pioneers and "way ahead of their time" trend setters and what
do they do now?

Right now, the trend in business accounting is to try and reduce payroll
to $0. The ultimate goal in business today is to have nothing but
executives, investors and contractors. Microsoft caters to that desire.
.NET stands to offer the dream of a fully supported, yet fully
outsourced IT infrastructure. "Just Let Microsoft Run Things" will be
mantra in 2004.

I used to think that fear of the BSA would make an effective Linux
marketing strategy. It won't. Why? Microsoft managed to do what no other
multinational monopoly has ever managed to do. They beat the US
government at the "control" game. Microsoft main line during the
anti-trust trial was not that they had lots of competition clawing at
their heels. Their main argument was "look how much good OUR WAY has
done EVERYONE". And the Feds conceded and took the teeth out of any
punishment there was.

Open Source has to chase down the business leaders who are control
freaks. They are the ones who will fall in love with the awesome power
of Open Source systems. The mavericks don't want to outsource their IT
staff. They want their own, highly loyal IT staff to keep the company
data intact and away from prying eyes. Can the mainstream, crowd
follower suit do that with an all contract IT staff? I don't think it is
even a possibility. Honor amongst thieves? 

On Mon, 2002-05-13 at 11:34, Michael Barker wrote:
> On Monday 13 May 2002 11:00 am, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> The "How Does Linux Compare?" page supports my philosophy
> of why a company will not choose open source over MS.
> 
> The business leaders would rather invest in support contracts than
> people.  People being the admins and developers that make the linux
> implementation work.  Invest means either pay for contracts that can be
> enforced in a court of law or build a raport with a talented (not neccesarily
> experienced) individual.
> 
> My $.02 USD
> 
> -Michael
> 
> > Hmm. There's been a little movement on the Microsoft anti-Linux FUD
> > pages.  At http://wehavethewayout.com there's now a link to "Learn how
> > to migrate to windows" which goes to an area at Microsoft.com devoted to
> > why and how you should migrate from Unix/Linux to Windows 2000. Sample
> > arguments for this move include:
> >
> >    * Reliability (it's better than Windows NT (
> > http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/advancedserver/evaluation/whyupgrade/d
> >efault.asp ) ) * Performance (it's faster than Windows NT (
> > http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/advancedserver/evaluation/whyupgrade/d
> >efault.asp )) * Easier integration ("Linux lacks complete programmer
> > toolkits . . ."
> > http://www.microsoft.com/sbserver/evaluation/compare/linux.asp)
> >
> >
> > I'ze just reporting the facts here.
> >
> > -- CHS
> > (Linux zealot)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ---
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-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 




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