Why Linux will win and Micro$oft will lose

[KevinO]

It's true, Amazon replaced Unix boxes with Linux. They didn't buy any
(more) Windoze server licenses either. The article on CNET that Susan
posted was accurate in this respect.

I think the gist of this thread was about whether Winblows was easier to
use than Linux anyway, as that was the point that the first rebuttal to
the original post tried to make.

Windoze is not the easiest interface to use, just the most common one...

However, I don't believe that the cost of deploying Linux onto a Desktop
is much higher than MS. The company (Fortune 500) that I work for
doesn't spend squat on training people to use their boxes. We just got a
new person from a different division where they still use Macs. He is on
his own but he is picking it up when time allows and his other tasks are
completed. 

The same was true for the rest of us when we made the transition a
couple years ago.

It has recently come to my attention just how much we are spending for
MS licenses for our little business division - $1000s per seat. It would
almost certainly be much cheaper to give Linux boxes to those who don't
need to use Windoze while getting rid of some of the MS CRAP(tm) in the
server room.

Our IT department apparently isn't staffed enough to be able to support
our own mail server on site, so we use an exchange machine in Chicago.
How much does the lost productivity cost for every person to have to
wait 5-10 seconds for an email to open, up to 1 or 2 minutes when some
management type decides to post a sizable powerpoint document ? (Just
switching to a pop client such as netscrape makes this delay go away for
me ;-) )

The MS licenses just keep costing money as time goes by. You can't just
buy the rights to run X number of boxes indefinitely as a one time cost
and expect to get any support down the road from the great gods in
Redmond. MS forces you to keep paying over and over again. 

The sooner a change to open source/truly free software is made, the more
money is saved as time goes by.


Oh and by the way --- Howdy Robert !

-- 
Kevin O'Connor


> "Leonard, Robert B Mr EACH" wrote:
> 
> Here's a link re: the amazon/intel migration stories.
> 
> Let's keep the FUD in redmond.
> 
> http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=23086
>