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Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week)
Business Week looks
at Linux adoption by European governments and Microsoft's response.
"Yet over the past 18 months the giant from Redmond, Wash., has
unleashed a fierce counterattack, and there are signs that it's
working. Paris was only the most recent and important victory. Last January
the borough of Newham in London reversed course on a planned change to
Linux after a consultant's report said Windows would cost $600,000 less to
support each year. To seal the deal, Microsoft offered Newham an
undisclosed discount. The Finnish city of Turku also changed its mind about
dumping Windows after a three-year experiment with Linux showed employees
resisted the switch."
(Log in to post comments)
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 14:38 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " AN UNDISCLOSED DISCOUNT "
And how much more into the decision makers pockets ??... where is the study that show Windows advantage publicized ?... it would be interesting to analyse!
That is how Windows is cheaper than Linux offerings.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 14:51 UTC (Fri) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] And that seems to be the only way (at least the primary way) Microsoft has beenable to retain current large organizations.... by huge monetary discounts. Take that away and Microsoft cannot compete on a level playing ground - regardless what the alternative OS is.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 15:05 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " Takethat away and Microsoft cannot compete on a level playing ground - regardless what the alternative OS is. "
But MS never palyed fair... and they are successfully bribing and brain washing people in markets where IBM, HP, RH, Novel should have the edge... Where is the counter-attack ?... where are responsible studies showing MS Lying trough their teeth ?...
...after SCO this is FUD War II... somebody should do something... remember most computer users are clueless, and most decision makers, specialy politicians, are bribable...
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 15:23 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] Not to worry, it will all work out in the end. I agree with you that decision-making is not always about making the best choice, because of personal motives or temporary triggers like a huge discount. The beauty of Open Source is, though, that it cannot be bought, and it cannot be destroyed. It is only a matter of time before enough people in the right seats will make the right decisions. ;-)That said it annoys me that some of the problems described in the article seem completely unnecessary and are really bad advertisement (I mean the email and internet connectivity problem). 'Cause that's the best "counter attack": show that it works.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 15:44 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " Not to worry, it will all work out in the end. "
How can you be so sure ?... exposing the wrong is a moral dutie, not a D. Quixote cruzade... and that is exactly the problem, as i point in this site, about a study: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&...
" "You have do to pay for the report"
*@«'##3*@... someone please awake the community?... the giants in "our" community ?... it seems that no one cares if MS get away lying and shiting...
IT SHOULD BE PUBLISHED EVERYWHERE, AS OFTEN A SMALL 'COMMUN' FUND WOULD ALLOW IT "
If nobody with 'real' interests(finacial, image, market share...) in this, NOT ME, would not worry or care, than that is why ??
I agree with you that Open Source as a 'Global force' is undestroyable for now... but it can be stalled.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 16:50 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] It will work out because Microsoft will have to give deeper and deeper discounts to compete, and this will cause their revenue to decline each year on a year-to-year basis. They have piles of cash, true, but public corporations are expected by their investors to grow, not shrink.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:29 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " They have piles of cash, true, but public corporations are expected by their investors to grow, not shrink. "
Oh come on... 'Remember Enron'... when it was no more possible to cook-book... letting Microsoft get away with criminal activity is exactly what they want to continue sitting on top of a financial pyramid, without distributing any dividend( or almost none)... and that is why they are protected by goverments, specialy the USA, because they are a financial Icon,.. not because of their crap software products or the Open Source menace( classified as commie-pro by right wing financial sharks)...
Should Other corporations (IBM, HP, RH, NOVELL...) sitt iddle with fear of 'goverment entalgments' and lose money for their shareholders ?,... or should they fight-back in the press no mattering Microsoft having a heavier machine?
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:28 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] I really think Open Source will not only change the software landscape, but also the way people think about it. Already we see that traditional ways of doing business are not always sufficient; for instance, increasingly, price and features are not the only criteria anymore.There's only so much time Microsoft can influence the market by sheer brute force (offering huge discounts), especially since their not exactly strong in the areas where Open Source excels, and that have the attention of companies, governments and universities alike: openness, reliability, excellent support and continuity, to name a few.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:36 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] Beautiful and i agree... but nothing falls from the sky, you have to fight.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 19:02 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] Ah yes, of course!Let's just get our shoulders under it and lift Open Source to even higher levels. It will be amusing to see the moloch squirm.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 21:09 UTC (Fri) by daveB49 (guest, #25748) [Link] It won't be stalled very much - or for very long. There is a hugemovement out there to move away from MS (and generally towards Linux). It's taken a long time to get going but it has momentum that even MS can't stop. More than half of the systems out there are pre-XP, most of them running on older machines that can't even run XP. MS has stopped supporting those operating systems, XP is in the headlines every day with security issues, so where are these people going to turn. Certainly not all to buying new computers with XP. The 'light' versions that they're putting out has far less going for it than Linux, and it's only available on new boxes anyway. Linux distos have come a very long way in the last couple of years. As the market share starts to grow, the pace of development will increase. MS can't maintain the 'discounts' and all of the costs of programming patches without starting to hurt. They already had to scale back on Longhorn - which will need a very high level system to run - because they had to put their programmers onto SP2 (which doesn't make them any money). Certainly their little tricks should be published - and they getting published, more and more of them all the time. This is already moving a lot faster than most people were predicting even a couple of years ago.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 22:58 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link] Right. Besides, it's not like Microsoft hasn't been trying for years now to cut Linux off at the knee.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 23:26 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " More than half of the systems out there are pre-XP, most of them runningon older machines that can't even run XP. MS has stopped supporting those operating systems, XP is in the headlines every day with security issues, so where are these people going to turn... "
Without any effort of educating them, and user-friendness, they will again turn to Microsoft of course... without a shred of a doubt.
Worst Microsoft is deceiving them to belive they are going to be safe, and adding more pain to the injury,... they are saying they are more save them Linux!!!...gush!!!...
Well my experience on the field, tells me that that kind of users "trend" to support an amazing dose of abuse from Microsoft... even graduated people inside entreprises... they know something, or at least they belive they know something about computers... Microsoft led them to think so... its something they adquired, and want to preserve as valuable... and the last thing they want is some ' new wave' guy to demonstrate that they dont know letterly nothing about computers...
The truth in face of the ever growing complexity of computer 'things', as stricked as intuition, and so these people domestic/SOHO/SME mostly trend to stick with what they belive they know and dominate... virus, worms, BSODs, everything... so Win9x has still a substancial base of installations(economic reason is not the primary reason).
Some reposition of the truth is badly needed here, studies, press divulgation,... and there is where IBM, HP, RH, Novell should enter strong.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 23:34 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] Experience should be different from country to country, but the 'general picture' would be very close, i belive.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 30, 2004 2:02 UTC (Sat) by daveB49 (guest, #25748) [Link] Microsoft is giving Linux lots of press coverage, and thanks to the factthat Steve B represents the worst side of MS (and that's saying something) there are a lot of people having a look to see what it's all about. Yes we need to educate people - it isn't going to happen overnight, but we are starting to get somewhere. I use google news canada for my news headlines. There's at least 5 Linux items every week these days, a year ago you barely saw Linux mentioned at all, and most of these items are positive towards Linux. There's also a lot of bad-news stuff on MS.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 31, 2004 15:54 UTC (Sun) by sgposs (guest, #12391) [Link] MS is a business and the business of business to is to make money.Considering it is headed by an incredibly competitive guy who values making more money than anyone else, it will remain competitive regardless of what it sells or how it sells it. Fair/unfair is largely irrelevant and certainly, like morality, relative to one's perspective. This being said, the fate of Linux and Open Source is really in the hands of its users/members. If the Linux/OSS community wants to get out from under the monopoly that M$ currently provides the world, then the extent to which each individual member of the community contributes to improving the Linus/OSS environment, will determine how or what it creates. Let us channel our creativity into writing code that is available to all, whether in C, Java, C++, Perl, etc. and developing active community projects that provide software whose functionality is second to none. When you feel compelled to vent your frustrations with M$, sit down take a deep breath and then instead, write some code, or improve currently existing online documentation, create a better Linux/OSS friendly website, or better yet, come up with a wholly new idea that will propel Linux/OSS forward by a huge leap. If for every M$ comment on the net, we had just one line of code, we would be well on our way to lessening the grip of M$. If everyone in the Linux/OSS community takes this approach, M$ won't stand a chance, whether M$ offers bribes or undisclosed discounts or not. As use of Linux/OSS increases, so does the spinoff ($) in terms of support, software, etc. for the community to plow back into its own (individual) success. Although those in the US tend to be overwhelmingly America-centric, there is a hugh base of opportunity for the Linux/OSS community to grow outside the US. This does not constitute a political threat, rather an opportunity for Linux/OSS members everywhere to benefit from the good work of each other. So have fun and do the right thing (whatever you think it is, I'm optimistic that reasonable members of the community can figure this out in a way that we can all benefit).
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Oct 29, 2004 15:47 UTC (Fri) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link] It seems The Paris Mayor is a Flip-Flopper also, or was it a precision sleazedirt game from the start ? In a municipal governmental ICT plan, the budget limit is always set at start of the game. This plainly means : better spend the complete IT Budget or be warned to receive a smaller budget next year. Knowing this its clear to me now, that these municipal ICT dudes just stick EUR 600.000,= in their private pockets, make my words! In other words, not only is Linux itself abused, by not getting deployed, Linux is also used as a abusive weapon againts M$ to allow the sleazedirt to fill their own pockets. I think neither of both camps (Linux nor Microsoft) should be happy with this outcome. Robert
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Oct 29, 2004 16:53 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Why do you assume it's sleaze? While I'd prefer to have Paris switch to Linux, there is a transition cost, and if the mayor can negotiate a huge discount from Microsoft he has saved the taxpayers a lot of money, so you are wrong to assume corruption without evidence. Such claims will not help our cause.
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:23 UTC (Fri) by stock (subscriber, #5849) [Link] Well read again :" AN UNDISCLOSED DISCOUNT " cheers, Robert
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Oct 29, 2004 20:23 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] Well, read again:"Newham"
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Nov 2, 2004 8:10 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] And don't forget ...
If I've got it right, all this stuff about "MS saving money" is true for certain values of true.
If you pay for the study, apparently they compared the current MS setup against the proposed MS setup (with nary a *mention* of Open Source), and came to the conclusion - surprise surprise - that upgrading the MS solution would be cheaper than staying where they were.
So no, they did *NOT* conclude that "MS is cheaper than Open Source". They just spin it that way to fool the watchers...
Cheers,
Linux abused to fill own pockets Posted Oct 29, 2004 20:42 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659) [Link] This is an important point. Public agencies are accountable to the public, and if they can be convinced to withold information about pricing, this both gives the appearance of impropriety and opens the door to corruption.
It is thus perfectly appropriate to use strong language to expose the hypocrisy here. As any accountant will tell you, the burden of proof of innocence is and must be on those who are spending the money -- let alone their citizens' money -- hence if done behind closed doors, it is not unjust to assume the worst.
What's more, tactically, it will serve our interests well to pry open these doors of secrecy and force Microsoft to offer the same discounts to governments worldwide. But that should be a by-product rather than the reason for doing this, which is to hold public servants accountable for their decisions.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:04 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link] Looks like the market is waking up to the fact that Microsoft Software is not worth what is being payed. As FLOSS keeps getting better the large proprietary software vendors monopolies will be broken. Unfortunately it will take a lot of time, and us techies aren't known for patience.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 17:15 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " There are reports of glitches and cost overruns from other Linux adopters, including Munich and the German Parliament, which had to revert to Windows servers temporarily in mid-October when a third of its 5,000 PC users couldn't access the Internet or get e-mail. "
That is why where i go i not only turn off Automatic Updates( if one or two good Anti-virus/Anti-trojans can't do the job, Microsoft can't certainly do it, i'm willing to bet a fortune on that, mark my words) i use http://xpy.whyeye.org/ to shed all crap as possible, including IE and OE, as also unhide(erase the 'hide' in all configuration lines with a text editor) everything in /windows/inf/sysoc.inf so it can be normaly uninstalled... that when is technicaly and other reasons 'impossible' to convert a Desktop to Linux.
The state of affairs is so stupid that if you change Firefox/Mozilla Icon with IE Icon, most people dont complain(OE is easyer)... otherwise you could be shot_gunned at the entrance by some users... geez... go figure...
Conclusion: Wouldn't anyone belive MS is capable of sending *bombs* trough their Automatic Update ?... a convicted criminal with testimonys saying they have done exactly that??... so it's most probabily the problems aroused from Windows machines, not Linux servers( if otherwise in this case, than please someone show that!)
* Its time for the Open Source Community to Get Wiser *
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Oct 29, 2004 18:17 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] >Paris was only the most recent and important victory.<br>
Is this even true? This is the first I've heard of it, and as of a day or two ago, other news sources were reporting on how Linux was being considered by Paris to replace Windows.
MS Buying Time Posted Nov 1, 2004 14:36 UTC (Mon) by doodaddy (guest, #10649) [Link] For those who think MS will ultimately lose because they are giving huge discounts and will eventually not be able to compete with free software, think about this:
I'm pretty sure MS is trying to buy 2 or 3 years until their DRM crap comes out. At that point, if they can spin DRM as valuable to governments and citizens, there just might be lock-out.
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Nov 2, 2004 12:32 UTC (Tue) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] Worth pointing out that the law of unintended consequences applies.
If you have a business currently running on (say) Windows NT, it is now very much in your interests to propose a migration to Linux as an alternative to Windows XP -- even if you have no real intention of migrating to Linux, because you can use the evidence that you're seriously considering it to force large discounts out of Microsoft.
And sometimes ... once the door has been opened, the information will be absorbed, and the business may come to realize that even after considering Microsoft's discounts, it's *still* better value migrating to Linux!
At the very least, Microsoft are paying the wages of, and opening doors for, Linux Migration consultancies!
Not So Fast, Linux (Business Week) Posted Nov 4, 2004 12:17 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Even this hurts though, I'm not so sure this should be seen as a "win" for MS.What this story tells all potential large MS-customers is that credibly threathening to go with something non-MS is all it takes to get MS to give deep discounts. That alone is a significant step forward. For some time now the situation was so that most organizations would've felt they had to choose MS no matter the price. MS could've tripled the price and many would have felt compelled to bend over. Now the sitation is another. MS is the one who has deeply discount its products to manage to sell them at all. In other words, for the first time for some time they have *competition* that strange thing which generally prevents companies from demanding extreme prices without loosing sales. The lesson is, you should be seriously considering linux (and other MS-alternatives) -- MS themselves are indirectly saying the competition is now so good that MS at "standard" MS-prices is uncompetitive.
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