[Sussex] The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 9:14 pm, Mark Harrison wrote:
<snipperooney>
> I genuinely believe, having been both an IT manager for 10 years, and now
> as a consultant that the biggest thing HAMPERING the adoption of
> open-source is the fact that many of the proponents come in and immediately
> start rubbishing Microsoft. It never ceases to amaze me how little the
> Linux community seems to understand that most IT managers regard this as
> very disturbing.
>
> I had a drink with the IT Director of one of the UK's 50 largest companies
> last week, and had exactly this debate with him. He said: "I don't want to
> have a religious debate. I don't want to have a philosophical debate. I
> want to have a business debate about what this [Open Source] can do to help
> drive down costs."

I think you're right.  It's hard to be dispassionate, but business people want 
to hear how a particular tool is going to help them meet their objectives 
within their budgets, not why the tools they are using are crap (or at least 
not only that the tools they are using are crap).  

As I have stated here many time, what has always really pissed me off is that 
a lot of business people are not prepared to consider the options at all - 
they just blindly buy Microsoft products.  Fortunately this seems to be 
fading now - people don't see implementing Exchange a way to boost their 
career anymore - saving the company a few hundred thousand with an Open 
Source strategy could be though, so we have the enlightened, the greedy and 
the ambitious all eating out of our hand now.

That aside, if you do get the opportunity to hold such discussions with people 
then a lot of the business thought process is neatly docuemented in the book 
"The Business and Economics of Linux(TM) and Open Source" by Martin Fink 
(ISBN 0-13-047677-3).

Martin Fink is the head of LINUX strategy of a company that did the math and 
worked out that it needed to be involved in Open Source in order to move it's 
business toward the future - Hewlett Packard.   It's nice little book that 
gives a really fair and objective view of the situation.  It doesn't rubbish 
Microsoft or any other vendor as such, it just points out excatly why Open 
Source works as a business proposition, and economic phenomenon and a 
development model and how, ultimately this will all impact on the commercial 
software vendors.

> Having a strong vision of what we, as IT professionals, managers and
> consultants can do to improve the business of our clients is absolutely
> vital to making a difference. However, that vision has to be positive, and
> every breath we draw trying to cast down the most succesful IT company in
> the history of the world detracts from our ability to focus on what we
> SHOULD be doing.

What have Bell got to do with this?... oh.. I see you mean the most succesful 
_software_ company.   

It should be noted that at the point the USA joined the 2nd world war, Bell 
was worth (adjusted for inflation) around 10 times the current value of 
Microsoft and was such a powerful and oppresive monopoly that they changed 
the law in the USA to control it.

-- 
GJT
tealeg at member.fsf.org
Free Software Foundation