When it comes to open source, Microsoft has a balancing act that would be tough for Philippe Petite. Redmond must pacify shareholders by hanging onto commercial licensing, but it can't totally irritate open source-friendly IT pros. If Microsoft is too much of an open source enemy, IT can turn their backs and move to Linux, MySQL and Apache in droves.
Microsoft argues that it's on the right open source track. It believes that open sourcers should respect Microsoft patents, and conversely Microsoft should interoperate with key open tools.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 03, 20090 comments
On Monday,
Doug asked readers
what it would take for them to make the switch to a non-Microsoft OS shop. Here are some of your takes:
It wouldn't take much. We have Ubuntu Live CDs for both 8.04.1 and 8.04.2 that we're playing with. Both easily recognized all the hardware on a year-old Acer notebook -- and they offer a pretty slick experience. As soon as we reorganize the partitioning of the HD, we'll at least start a dual book Vista/Ubuntu setup.
Not that we're very much of a "shop" -- just a two-person home-based nano-publisher, doing it all ourselves.
-Fred
Very good pricing on the product. Free, competent, easily accessible support.
-Anonymous
The answer is more courage than is currently available among the c-level execs, and certainly more resources for their IT personnel. Any change has difficulty meeting a cost-benefit ratio that's strong enough to give those execs the courage to say, "Go for it!" It has always been, "What is the cheapest way we can do this and maintain it?"
As a mobile computing and communication consultant, I see an amazing lack of courage to make smart decisions simply because few people get fired for making no changes. The bottom line is that IT people will always make what appears to be or is defensible as the safest choice, even when it may not be the best or safest option.
-Jim
First, let me say that I am a big fan of Linux. But for us, it would take something that Linux apparently will never have: the ability to run Windows apps the same way that Windows does. We have too many critical programs that we must run that have no Linux counterpart.
The other issue is that Linux still has some problems that Windows doesn't when it comes to installing software and updates. I recently installed the new openSUSE 11.1 and was disappointed by things that didn't work, by how slow the update process is, by how much of a pain it still is to deal with installing some software. I originally planned to run virtual machines on top of the new SUSE install but failed to get either VMware or VirtualBox to install. I was also disappointed that SUSE didn't perform well. It was faster for me to wipe out SUSE, install Windows and then install the virtual server software of my choice -- much faster. Windows performed much better on the same hardware than did SUSE. I had always thought of Windows as a resource hog but clearly this is not true.
-Andre
For the most part, we have moved to an all-Linux shop. The only holdout is our QuickBooks computer because there is no open source equivalent that our accountant recognizes. The ability to run QuickBooks is what is holding most of my clients hostage to Windows.
-Joseph
I already moved to a non-Microsoft OS and it was because of Vista. I have a pretty good powered system and was very disappointed in the performance difference between XP and Vista. I currently run Ubuntu 8.1 as my primary operating system and have XP, Vista and Win 7 running in VirtualBox for the times I need to jump into Windows. I've found that I am able to do 95 percent of what I want to do in Linux and the few times I can't, I use a virtual machine. It's nice not worrying so much about viruses and spyware, but I'll have to say that I haven't experienced the nirvana that others claim to have with never having to reboot, even after updates.
I've always been a Windows guy and have never been one of the MS bashers, but the increasingly onerous WGA problems have caused some of my customers to discuss switching from Windows to Linux or Mac. They are saying that if they are going to have to buy all-new computers to get acceptable performance, retrain their employees on a new OS and MS Office 2007, buy new software, etc., they may as well look at the alternatives. I've had two clients switch to Linux, one is doing a trial on two employees and another is having their software rewritten in a cross-platform language so they have the option of using something other than Windows.
-Matthew
I'd have to say supportability is the key. If a vendor could provide the functionality, security, and enterprise deployment and administration tools that Microsoft provides, I'd consider it. The one question that has silenced every MS basher I've spoken to who has advocated switching from Microsoft products is: "Can I easily deploy (manage, administer, patch, etc.) 1,000 workstations?" The answer is always no, and so they wander off grumbling about MS conspiracies. Microsoft provides a whole host of support and deployment tools so someone is going to have to come up with a similar solution to gain market share.
It was apparent to me that Apple isn't interested in the enterprise market because it could have made huge inroads due to the ongoing Vista fiasco but opted to make humorous commercials instead. And Linux is no threat either, for the same reasons. One has to be an uber-geek to get it to run, and good luck finding support people. At least Vista is sorta like Windows so end users don't have a huge learning curve -- they just spend a lot of time waiting and looking for stuff.
-J.C.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 01, 20090 comments
I've heard all the fear mongering about the Conficker worm. According to some, on April 1 millions of infected PCs will turn into zombies and mindlessly take over the computing universe.
I was around when the year 2000 arrived, and spent the night by my machine ready to post stories on the Web chronicling all the horrors. Turned out to be not so scary.
So far, Conficker looks to be as feeble. I'm halfway through April 1, and my Latitude D520 runs just fine, and no reports of widespread havoc have come out.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 01, 20090 comments
On Monday
we told you about the "Open Cloud Manifesto," a white paper purportedly from the
Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
. Microsoft preempted the release, complaining it was strong-armed into signing it when it had no part in writing it. Redmond declined to sign.
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Posted by Doug Barney on April 01, 20090 comments
The
Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
released a white paper asking that all cloud apps, services and offerings be based on open standards. The paper, with either apologies or kudos to Karl Marx, is named the "Open Cloud Manifesto."
Microsoft shot back, apparently even before the document was released. Microsoft argues that the document is far from egalitarian and is in fact one-sided, allowing a small cadre of vendors to control the means of cloud production and therefore acquire all the das kapital thus created.
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 30, 20090 comments
Reports are surfacing that Windows 7 may ship sooner rather than later, good news for OEMs, ISVs, IT...and the HTWE (High-Tech World Economy). A Web page mistakenly put up on TechNet
indicated a May date
for the release candidate. This could give an approximate commercial release date well before the end of the year -- meaning it could and should be a merry Windows 7 Christmas!
Posted by Doug Barney on March 30, 20090 comments
Marc shares his own take on Vista's dismal enterprise adoption rates, and what that might mean for future OSes:
About as many in the enterprise adopted Windows 2000 before XP came out as will have adopted Vista by the time that Windows 7 ships. And enterprise adoption always lags well behind consumer adoption. The reasons? First, many enterprise-owned programs were developed in-house, while many others are industry-specific and might be costly to upgrade. It can take months to thoroughly test and upgrade all these applications under the new operating system.
Second, most enterprise customers replace hardware based on three- to five-year lifecycles. Operating system upgrades tend not to happen until at least half of the company workstations have been replaced with new hardware. The fact that service packs are released every 18 months or so may simply be coincidental.
-Marc
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 30, 20090 comments
Microsoft hoped that Vista, with its new features and slick new interface, would explode on the market like Little Boy. Instead, this dud is barely ticking. Forrester's latest report states the obvious -- that
enterprises are sticking to XP
like grim death while waiting for some Windows 7 relief.
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 30, 20090 comments
Marc thinks the
Vista Capable lawsuit
is still much ado over nothing:
I am surprised we are still talking about this! The Vista Capable specs (800MHz, 512MB of RAM) were no more ridiculous than the original Windows 2000/XP specifications (300MHz, 64MB of RAM). Microsoft has a long history of stating MINIMUM specifications which were technically accurate, but deplorable just the same. Should someone have raised a stink in 2000? Probably, but nobody did. Were the Vista Capable specifications misleading? Well, yes! Practically, though, what was the extent of their damages? If you bought a brand-new low-end machine in January 2007, it was equipped with a 3GHz+ Celeron, 512MB of RAM and integrated Aero-capable graphics capability -- and you paid under $400 for the system. At that time, 512MB of RAM cost about $50, so the REAL damages for a buyer of one of those systems was the cost of a RAM upgrade.
If anyone deserves damages regarding the Vista Capable moniker, it was those folks who went out and bought shrink-wrapped Vista code expecting to install Vista on their (circa 2000) 800MHz, 512MB machine. They paid anywhere from $100 to $400 for Vista expecting it to work on LAME hardware. No amount of hardware upgrades would make such a system "acceptable."
-Marc
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 27, 20090 comments
I cut my journalistic teeth on MIS and mainframes. As a young buck writing for
Computerworld
in 1985, it was all CICS, terminal emulation, spaghetti code and leased big iron. A year or two later, pundits were predicting the death of the mainframe, upon which IBM exercised a Microsoft-esque (big) iron grip.
Twenty-four years later, I'm more of an old sow than a young buck, but the mainframe is as young as ever -- and so are lawsuits over IBM's monopoly. The old mainframe cloners like Amdahl are long gone, turning a mere monopoly into a sheer monopoly. And IBM will do whatever it takes to preserve its market grip.
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 27, 20090 comments
Microsoft has more or less conceded Internet search to Google; there's no force powerful enough -- not Yahoo and not MSN Live Search -- that can topple the Google. But enterprise search is another matter, and here Microsoft may at least have a shot, if not an edge.
That's exactly why Redmond bought FAST, a Norwegian search company. It seems that Microsoft will
tie the FAST search engine
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 27, 20090 comments
There are two reasons mainframes have survived: They handle big apps very well, and there's little benefit to redoing much of this software to run on other architectures. And mainframes, if configured right, are greener than a Tiger Woods dream. The highest-end IBM System z mainframe, for instance, can act as 1,500 separate servers.
I looked into the System z and while it's designed to run Linux VMs, I was told by an expert I trust that there was no architectural reason it couldn't run Windows, as well.
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Posted by Doug Barney on March 27, 20090 comments