Last year I was speaking with an IT manager and we discussed the question of our time: Microsoft vs. Linux
When he asked which camp I was in, I said that any person involved with Microsoft technologies needed to be very careful.
He said that was very interesting because stockholders tend to approve of Microsoft product rollouts at companies while IT managers are often reluctant.
The argument between which of the two technologies to use has two parts. Many people think that cost is the big issue, and ultimately that is the case, but the argument is best broken down into two parts: functionality and risk.
Functionally, you can accomplish anything that matters in the real world without a Microsoft product. For instance, if I am building web applications, I can use Cold Fusion, PHP, or Java (among others) as easily as ASP. They all accomplish the exact same thing. If I am building a desktop application, I can use Delphi or Java, among other environments, rather than Visual Basic or C++. If I need a web server, I can use Apache rather than IIS. If I need mail services I can use sendmail, postfix, Lotus Domino, or qmail rather than Exchange. And so on for every important type ofsoftware in use today.
So if you can accomplish every task without Microsoft products that you can with them, which should you use? The answer is it depends on the skillset of the people you have hired. Unless you are weighing other factors, it usually doesn't makesense to spend 6-12 months retraining employees to use a competitive technology when they already know one. Think about it, if your entry level programmer is making 50K or so, and you have a couple of them and want to retrain them from ASP toPHP, 100K of lost productivity probably isn't worth the benefit of avoiding a few thousand dollars of Microsoft server licensing costs.
The other important factor in determining whether or not to use Microsoft products is risk. A few years ago when Office 97was current, I could get it for $30.00 on eBay. Currently, because of an increase in sales price, the cheapest I can get Office XP is $175 on eBay. And Office 2003 costs $499 on Microsoft's site. For 99% of users out there, the features that they use have not changed in 8 years. Most end users do some basic Word processing, some basic Powerpoints, but they pay infinitely more to do those same tasks because competitors have been squeezed out of the market and you have to upgrade for "compatibility" with other users.
Common practices of Microsoft include frequent updates that break compatibility with competing products, participating in softwarepiracy policing and promising not to prosecute the accused if they promise to take competing products off of their computers,bogus research findings, and even paying for the sabatoge of competitor technology by inside employees in some cases (sounds like a movie but fact is sometimes more surprising than fiction).
At the end of the day, the risk that exists is that a company invests millions of dollars into developing a software infrastructurethat costs a fortune to maintain because of things like the old operating system is no longer being supported and large upgrade fees since the competitors are gone. In contrast, a Perl application written 10 years ago that supports an entire enterprise can be ported to a new computer within hours for very little platform cost.
As an experienced developer, I understand I can give exceptions to the trends outlined above, but overall they are valid issues and ones that individuals with significant and broad management and development experience will recognize.
Degan Kettles
President
Enterprise Consulting Group
http://www.enterpriseconsultinggroup.us
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