[Sussex] In short..

[Geoff Teale]

Morning all..

Heading off to Italy in a couple of hours so I'll keep this short.

1 - Angelo 
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Corel?? Surely you mean SCO...?

2 - Mark
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Small business _is_ better than large business in terms of fair distribution of wealth - small businesses in competition are less inherently efficient than large corporations and do not benefit from economies of scale, thus they generate more employment and better distributed wealth - countries like our own and the USA would suffer in terms of corporate taxation because small businesses are unable to hoard wealth on a global scale, but the world economy as whole would be more balanced and stable.  Moreover as a nation we would probably be better off if we preserved small business and stopped pandering to large corporate bodies who have demanded extreme tax cuts in real terms since the 1970's that have led us to a state where employees should the greatest burden of taxation and a massive shortfall in funding has been in force for nearly 30 years.  Why is the NHS rubbish?  Blame big business and the governments that courted it, the same for the train system and anything else th
 at was reliant on funds from taxation.

On a global scale big business is bad because it generates massive profit and isolates in in the bank accounts of businesses and their wealthy patrons.  As I have stated before there is only a finite amount of resource in the world economy and monetary wealth is only a representation of it - the hoarding of wealth by large corporations and their patrons reduces the world economy as a whole and causes collapse at its weak points. 

So in short.. 

Globalisation and Mega-corps:
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Good for:
* the exceptionally wealthy. 
* For western governments (in a very short term sense).

Bad for:
* Anyone with less than a few million in the bank to invest in them.
* A sustainable world economy.
* World peace.
* Global ecology.
* The long term survival of the human race.


3. Linux on the desktop
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I think the answer here is this - are corporations ready to look at what they actually _need_ on their desktop and what is best for the business.  Several studies have shown that businesses work more efficiently _without_ office software.  Most businesses need communications systems a few very specific pieces of functional software (Accounts, etc) and the odd bespoke system.  

The world has so heavily bought into the idea of this Microsoft Office orientated environment that very few people are actually considering what the cost of all this is.  How much administrative overhead goes into maintaining out desktop environments?  How much hardware?  How many support staff? 

Has everyone forgotten all the research that tells us that more focused and the less flexible are tools are the more efficiently we work?  Have we forgotten that bespoke green screen apps bring about 60% increase in data input and recall efficiency after the first two weeks of use (or that they are easier to program, suffer from fewer error conditions and better define work-flow than their GUI counterparts)?

What is the value of a Word document?  Better still, what is the value of a word document compared to a document written in plain-text or an e-mail even?  If you break down the costs and the time taken (employees are by far the most expensive resource in most businesses) I think you find that E-mail is not only more efficient and more manageable that Word document creation but it is also much more profitable and more pleasant for employees.

Frankly.  If business spent as much money addressing their businesses processes and acquiring appropriate IT as they did buying and maintaining Office and Exchange Servers then almost all of them would work more efficiently.

-- 
GJT 
Free Software Foundation