[Gllug] Microsoft Get The Facts Seminar

[Bruce Richardson]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 12:10:14AM +0100, Adrian wrote:
> Most companies are small companies. They don't have IT support contracts. The 
> cost of Linux software for them is pretty close to free once they summon up 
> the courage to install it. And for a small company that could be important.

On the other hand, most small companies don't have any proper IT staff,
just one or two people who are a bit better with MS Office than
everybody else.  Linux is (initially) a more demanding OS than Windows,
requiring a higher skillset to understand it and do anything useful with
it.  So small companies may not have anybody with the skills or the time
to invest in learning and switching.

> 
> Even medium sized companies might only employ one technical staff person and 
> have no external support contract with anybody.

Again, you have the problem of time and skills.  If we take this next
level of companies as ones that do have at least one permanent IT
staffer, you have to accept that most of these posts are filled by
point-and-clickers, people who have no understanding of the technologies
they use.  Only some of those will have the aptitudes to learn Linux and
those who do often no time to devote to learning new skills because of
the workload.

A couple of months ago, I was called in to help such an organisation
sort out its e-mail problems.  After fixing the immediate problems, I
discovered that they had one proprietary e-mail/groupware system as
their mailstore and had installed a second one, of similar feature range
and cost, simply to do the job of fetching mail from their ISP multidrop
POP account and delivering it to the SMTP gateway of their central
system.  Not only was it a completely inappropriate purchase, when a
simple tool could have done the job, but the entire job was unnecessary
since they have had broadband for several years and the ISP could simply
deliver directly to them via SMTP.

Their IT person isn't stupid but she's a VB/Access developer who has to
run the whole show and never finds the time to add to her skillset.  The
kind of person who can cope in that kind of work environment and add a
whole new OS to their skillset is rare.  As it is, if she were working
in a larger IT department alongside knowledgeable colleagues, she'd
probably pick up a lot but that isn't going to happen there.

Even in organisations with slightly larger IT departments, you often
still find that they are point-and-clickers who only know how to install
applications and tick the occasional box.

There are a lot of small to medium companies in that boat and they just
do not have the resources to move to Linux.  Not until Linux skills
become much more common, at the very least.

> 
> For these people the *marginal* cost of each Linux install is more or less 
> nothing. But, yes, there is a cost involved in finding someone with the 
> Unix/Linux skills.

And a big risk, if you don't currently employ anybody with those skills
and don't have any way of judging either the real worth of potential
applicants or the actual benefits of the OS itself.

The reality is much more complex and difficult than you make out.

> 
> 
> For the big corportates, there are different economies of scale, but the 
> attraction of Linux to them should be better security - especially as MS 
> always seem to be only half a step ahead of the black hats with their 
> "security through obscurity" approach.

Big corporates have the problem of momentum.  If you have a legion of
Windows development staff and Windows-based applications rolled out
across a number of locations, changing course is a very large job and
most sensible managers won't even consider it unless not doing so would
demonstrably cost them a lot more than just working around the existing
problems.  If Linux makes an entry into such an organisation, it's more
likely to be for simpler network tasks.  A bold executive might decide
to try developing an individual new application on Linux, as a tester,
and more may follow if that works, but it'll be a slow process.

-- 
Bruce

What would Edward Woodward do?
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