[Gllug] Windows 7

[Shannon Carver]

Interesting story about your company and the SuSE install which everyone
loved... I often wonder one thing though.  When a company adopts the cheaper
(i.e free) alternative does that alter the perceived value of software and
the amount they're willing to spend in future??  For example would the
realisation that the saving of (x hundred machines with + £500 worth of MS
licenses on each) mean they'd be less likely to allow for expenditure on
products that are worth their cost (debatedly) like the Adobe Suite or
commercial (supported) RDBMS software, MS Visual Studio etc.

It'd annoy me greatly if a company went open source and saved a stack in
cash, only to reduce IT/Tech budgets and bitch when things actually do cost
money.  After all, I'd rather work for a company who wastes good money on
licensing and useless software than one who's stingy and doesn't allow for
any expenditure at all (no matter how much its needed).




2009/11/23 Christopher Hunter <cehunter at gb-x.org>

> On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 09:50 +0000, Benjamin Goodacre wrote:
> > I think that one of the problems is that decision makers don't 'care'
> > about the subject like we do. Even if they could be persuaded that Linux
> > is better etc etc they do not want to bother learning anything which does
> > not behave exactly like Outlook/Windows. Even if TCO of Windows can be
> > proved to be > Linux they simply don't care as they dont want to have to
> > spend time out of their day learning a new OS. There is a 'not in my back
> > yard' reasoning where change of IT is fine so long as it does not affect
> > their desktop. It was easy for me to persuade DMs that moving to Apache
> was
> > a good idea but a move away from Windows for desktops? No chance.
> >
> > Benjamin
>
> Just for the sake of it, I built a KDE 3.5 desktop, on Suse, to look
> pretty much like Windoze Vista.  I configured Evolution to look like
> Outlook, and even made a big blue "e" icon for Firefox!  The clueless
> executives who were "upgraded to Vista" thought it was fabulous, and
> told all their friends how wonderful it was.  There was exactly ZERO
> "learning curve" (OOO "Writer" looks exactly like "Word") - they could
> all use it right away.
>
> They continued with it for two weeks, and then we showed them exactly
> what they were using. They were all astonished. We gave them all the
> option of a Windoze Vista install (for real) and they all declined, and
> continued to use the Suse system! They all still do to this day (almost
> two years on).  They've also discovered the delights of the BSOD
> screensaver (which always causes great amusement) and most have asked
> for installs for their home machines.
>
> It's simply a question of will and presentation.  The company were
> amazed at the size of the licence fees they had to pay for all their
> proprietary software, and with the adoption of FOSS (without any pain),
> they found that they could make a very substantial saving.  This
> particular company only have use for email, letter-writing, web-browsing
> and basic spreadsheets.  They were ideal candidates for migration, but
> trying to reason with them would have been a waste of time.  We left the
> vast majority of machines with XP (at the time) and did the "upgrade"
> for a select few.
>
> The times I'm asked "what's that?" when I'm running Mandriva on my
> laptop with all the whizzy bits turned on never ceases to surprise me.
> Most people still have the impression that Linux is "hard" or for
> "techies", but this notion can quickly be dispelled if you give them a
> "live" CD of Mint or Ubuntu and have them try it for themselves.
>
> I actually can't be bothered trying to proselytise about Linux - people
> will discover it soon enough when their Windoze machine is struck down
> by yet another virus or trojan that their "anti-malware" snake-oil
> failed to deal with!
>
> C.
>
>
> --
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