[Sussex] Linux market to exceed $35bn by 2008

[Paul Graydon]

> > Sticking Linux on a console is hardly going to be the greatest 
> > advertisement, they'll just get the impression that its okay for 
> > gaming software, but that hardly relates to machines in the 
> workplace.  
> > An old boss of mine expressed some concern when I was trying to 
> > persuade him that we'd get much better value for money if we bought 
> > some Athlon based PCs instead of Intel ones, because he 
> thought Athlon 
> > was a gaming chip, wheras all the adverts showed him Intel 
> was for all 
> > purposes..  I lost that argument, grudgingly, because he at least 
> > agreed with my decision that we should stick to a single 
> OEM company 
> > (Dell in the end.. Hence the reason I lost the
> > argument!)
> 
> You should have asked him why he employed you if he didn't 
> respect your technical knowledge more than his own?

He respected my technical knowledge.. He was head of finance, and so was
more concerned with purse strings than what I was necessarily advising him.
He'd been looking after IT for a while before I got there, after the rather
abrupt departure of the previous IT Controller.  The outsource company we
used had always reccomended Intel to their end users, so he was rather more
swayed by that after a couple of years of being told that.  The other thing
that probably weighed against me at the time was my age, being an 18 year
old fairly fresh out of college at the stage :-)

> 
> I had a senior exec at a previous employer who argued with us 
> about buying a 2x600Mhz Ultrasparc III Sun box because he 
> could get a 1ghz, single CPU Pentium III box for the same money.
> 
> Now quite apart from the fact that he was want to swap 2 
> 600Mhz 64bit processors for a single 1Ghz 32bit processor he 
> was also ignoring the fact that the contract this machine was 
> being used to fulfil stipulated that the machine on the end 
> of the line was running Solaris 8 on Sun hardware.
> 
> That debate raged until the IT director of the stock exchange 
> in question rang this guy up and told him in no uncertain 
> terms that if he didn't stop acting like an arse he would 
> have all of his contracts with him revoked.

I'm in a better position where I work now, they trust our department to know
exactly what its talking about.  If we say we really need something (being
in education, the old purse strings are little tight), they do what they can
to get us the money we ask for.  It strange to have come from a company
where money wasn't a large issue (small but with a nice high turnover &
profit) and to step into one where money is tight and find that they're more
trusting of the IT folk :-)

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