[Gllug] Ted T'so's Talk

[Wulf Forrester-Barker]

Chris <ChrisJS at aol.com> wrote:

> For those who didn't attend, his point was that we should be worried rather 
> than pleased that microsoft OSs haven't been making huge leaping changes in 
> the last five years or so, because they certainly haven't been 'sitting on 
> their hands' to use his phrase. He thinks that the upcoming changes which  
> Wulf mentioned are going to make some very large anti-exit barriers to those 
> who choose to use microsoft products.

Microsoft are playing for high stakes. Their customers are not stupid and I think that many are looking very carefully at the 'lock-in' issues (along with security issues, quality issues and maybe even, in some cases, ethical issues). Where expertise has been available, an increasing number of people are finding that Linux does very well on the server side... but there are still plenty of weaknesses on the desktop side of things.

Part of that is just getting people to give it a try. I was in the local library earlier this week and flicked through a tutorial book covering the European Computer Driving Licence. When talking of Operating Systems, it mentioned some minor choices such as Unix or Mac - not a mention of Linux. Even worse, all the examples (wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc) looked to be on Microsoft Software. Anyone know much about the ECDL? Who would be the person to write to with the message that as a European citizen you expect the qualification to be about using computers, not using the proprietary products of one manufacturer?

Anyway, back to my work of using open standards (XML), helped by open tools (GNU implementations of programs such as sed, grep and csplit) in a hetrogenous environment (mainly Winnt but quite frequent use of the Linux desktop in the room as well)....

Wulf




wulf.f-b at uhl.nhs.uk 

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