[luau] News: Red Hat says Linux desktop should take on MS

[Eric Hattemer]

> Linux's total cost of ownership is considerably higher, and the
> business value is lower than Windows," Peter Houston, senior director of
> Microsoft's Windows Server Group, said in a statement. "Key factors
> included the cost of desktop management, retraining costs and
> availability of applications."
>
> (How the heck does Microsoft get these numbers!?)

We're talking about business majors and secretaries, not computer
programmers.  At my job if I'm trying to teach a person to for instance use
Netscape instead of Eudora, it can be well over an hour of work, and leave
them still confused.  Now assuming they were programmers or something
equally as technical, where they required thorough knowledge of system
administration and whatnot, think about how long its taken you to learn how
to administer a linux system.  I've spent years (hundreds of hours) working
on linux, and I probably still know more about windows.

Furthermore, consider that maybe you're thinking of jobs where everyone just
does word processing, etc.  If you were thinking of that kind of job,
teaching 10,000 employees how to use the odder functions that they used in
MS products that may or may not exist in things like open office (such as
equation editors, mail merging, etc.) would be quite a challenge too.

Now let's say you're thinking of a more complex job.  Almost every job has
specific tools for it.  Perhaps the brokers have their favorite stock
ticker.  My dad likes his internet voice chat program.  At IBM, the entire
company now collaborates with a program called SameTime that uses the AIM
protocol.  Electronics designers tend to be dependent on Sun software.  The
point is, try telling all of these people that they can't use the programs
they're used to, and instead they have to learn new programs (assuming such
programs exist for linux), which may or may not work properly and contain
all the old functions, or that they have to run their programs through a
windows emulator, which creates odd anomolies with their programs, all
because your company wants to save a few bucks.

Ask yourself, how many $150 copies of winXP can you buy for the yearly
salary of one full time linux expert to teach your entire staff to use
linux.

I don't know what desktop management really refers to, but availability of
applications is definitely lacking.  I don't know how many times I've looked
for a linux application, not found anything, then rebooted to windows.  Or
other times when I found the application, but it was missing 50% of the
functionallity, but I used it for some odd idealogical reason or another.
Linux is great for servers, but I think its another 5 years before its
practical for desktops.

-Eric Hattemer