[Wolves] Now I know what Vista hell is!!!!

[Mark Harrison]

On Jan 18, 2008 8:02 PM, Richard Smedley <smedley358 at btinternet.com> wrote:

> However, things are changing. More and more businesses are keen
> to stress their community and green credentials, buying locally,
> reducing environmental inefficiencies, and supporting
> community projects. Surprisingly in tune with the times the
> recent Companies Act [1] mandates directors of plcs to take
> account of the community and environmental effects of decisions
> that they make.
>
> We can still sell Free Software to businesses on its benefits,
> but the social benefits could now be said to count for business
> too :-)
>

I agree with that bit.

The good news coming out of the Companies Act is that "social benefits" now
counts as a "business conversation".

Sadly, I have had conversations with people in the Linux community who use
phrases like "Microsoft is Evil", and still don't understand why this isn't
a very effective sales pitch to the average CIO :-)


I am the IT Director of a medium-sized financial services company as well as
being an IT consultant a few days a month [1]. We now have an all-Ubuntu
policy [2] on the server side, but an "anything goes" policy on the desktop
- this is because most of our staff are home based, and our "back office" is
now entirely web-based, so we have staff on Macs, Windows PCs, and even
Linux desktops. (To be fair, about the only one who uses a Linux Desktop is
our chief programmer, and that's only on one of her PCs.)

The most _effective_ conversation I have with my "peer group" is about how
WEB APPS are saving us money across the board (not least because some of the
team are quite happily running 8+ year old PCs and able to work perfectly
well), and how Linux is a far more flexible, scalable and secure platform
than Windows for said apps.

Mark


[1] I like that firm, but not so much I'll give up my other, long-standing
clients.

[2] Other Linux distributions are available. Please no-one make this about
Ubuntu vs. ANO :-)
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