On May 26, Paul Vixie wrote:
> corporations are sheep.  it's human destiny when operating in crowds to be
> stupid in some ways, including just paying into the forced-upgrade licensing.
> microsoft knows exactly what they can get away with in order to benefit from
> yet preserve inertia in this case.  there's every reason to believe that
> microsoft office and windows XP licensing will each grow by double digits
> for each of the next five years.

  There is?  I'm sorry but I just don't agree.  Well, no matter, we can
both speculate all day...or we can just wait and see.  It might grow
over the next five years, and it might not.  I don't know ANYONE, even
Windows people, who hasn't called XP by some very dirty names.  Office
used to account for something like 60% of Microsoft's revenue, now
it's something like 35%.

> >   Software...The mainstream PeeCee software market (i.e. Microsoft)
> > exists because there haven't been useful (at least according to
> > perception) alternatives for Microsoft Office and the file-management
> > GUI of Windows.
> 
> i wholly disagree.  it's because an MIS manager in the global 2000 has a
> much bigger problem to solve than "which one is useful."  an army of
> support people has to be trained on any chosen alternative, for one
> thing.  the total cost of ownership of a given seat in the corporate
> empire is known (budgetted) down to about a $25 granularity, and the
> seats which aren't standard (usually including mine) can receive no
> support unless there's a transition in which case the "new seats" will
> have a cost, during transition, that's probably 2X higher than what you
> would think of as "hardware cost."  and that's without amortizing all
> of the back office and training costs, which add up to tens of millions
> of dollars for just a domestic setup.

  When those very same MIS managers are being quoted in trade rags as
saying stuff like [paraphrased] "this new licensing scheme is forcing
us to evaluate competing products", well...there's very little room
for interpretation there.

> i wish i could say "that's a load of crap" but we're in polite company and
> it's the morning after and i no longer have booze as my excuse.  but no part
> of microsoft's serious revenue stream is capable of making a turn within a
> few-week radius.  and the TCO, even with microsoft's predatory licensing,
> is still lower than the TCO of an open source alternative, unless an MIS
> planner can look more than three years out, which mostly isn't allowed.  let
> me say again that microsoft knows who they are selling to and they have done
> _nothing_ to cancel out any inertia through their latest set of moves.

  Sure, Microsoft's management folk are *experts* at milking suits for
money and creating an environment in which the actual quality of their
product (or lack thereof) never comes into play...but have you read
what people are saying about this licensing policy change?  Look in
pretty much any trade rag or business paper in the past several
months...the whole world is screaming about it, and talking about
looking to the competition.  I mean, it could all be inverse-FUD from
the Linux kiddiez, but it sure doesn't look like it to me.

> let's imagine you're PAIX and you've got ~80 employees who have ~120 "seats"
> if you count laptops and power users and whatnot, plus another ~40 "back
> office" servers (file, print, web, firewall, what have you).  the TCO for
> these, assuming your parent (MFN) just went into chapter 11 bankruptcy, is
> only on a forward going basis.  you can go forward with win/XP and office/XP
> and deal with predatory licensing.  or you can switch.  let's say you decide
> to switch to linux or netbsd, with staroffice.  TCO is the a&d on licensing
> *plus* a huge amount of one-time costs, probably including consulting, to get
> trained and switched over.  *plus* you're taking the risk that you might have
> "guessed wrong" and will have trouble finding qualified sysadmins a few years
> down the road *plus* the difficulty in getting third party apps like SAP to
> run in case *they* decide that they've guessed wrong in a few years.

  I don't disagree.  But that doesn't change the fact that people are
starting to look elsewhere.  Believe me, I'm surprised and skeptical
too, Paul.  But it sure looks like that's what's going on.

  I mean...I'm no suit, and I don't pretend to have any business sense
(I had to actually think about what "TCO" stood for, but hey, I'm an
engineer)...but I do listen to the folks who do.  And my boss, a
traditional Businessman to the last, asked me to get StarOffice
running on a box for him a week or so ago.  "mov pudding, #proof".

> any reporter for the NYT who fails to take TCO into consideration is insulting
> your intelligence.

  Of course I can't disagree with the concepts there.  But this isn't a
case of one lone reporter selling a load of horseshit to someone who
doesn't understand suitspeak.

  Heck, you're Paul Vixie...I'm quite aware of your professional
reputation; your opinions mean a great deal to me, and I appreciate
and respect your point of view, as I'm just a no-name engineer.  But
I'm a no-name engineer that's fielding an exponentially increasing
number of questions about stuff like "how to migrate away from
microsoft windows".

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                       "Actually, I've found that I rarely wear
St. Petersburg, FL                    pants in Florida." -Sridhar