Open-source fight on the 'wrong battleground'

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You are really scared of losing you job, aren't you.

---My company, for example, has about 7000 employees world-wide, 5000 or so in the US and uses Word and Excel forms for all of their internal reporting and employee admin activities---

So, tell me what happened when M$ changed their scripting language a couple years back? Had to rewrite everything? Had to spend all those millions again? Guess what. M$ is changing again. You will have to rewrite all those macros again. You will have to spend all those millions again. It's the M$ way. Forcing you to spend money over and over to buy the same second-rate virus transporting garbage.

M$ Office (you claim) $129.00 X 7000 = $903,000.00. Mighty steep just to have a timecard. Not to mention all the other M$ products you are going to have to buy just to be able to use the vendor lock-in 'features'. Oh, yeah, don't forget the $40.00 /person /server CALs. You'll need at least 50 M$ servers to support that many people. That will be about $40.00 X 50 servers X 7000 users = $14 million plus $1,000.00 / server for os for another $50,000.00. Don't forget support for your servers @ $1,000.00 / month each that's another $600,000.00. Plus the cost of the OS (you claim) $50.00 is another $350,000.00. Then there's (virus) Exchange @ 1,400.00 plus $70.00 X 7000 for another $491,000.00. What about M$ SQL? Another $1,400.00 plus $50.00 X 7000 = $351,400. (Of course one M$ SQL server won't support that many users, you'll need several. Tack on a few $million more.)

A subtototal ( I don't even know what the (virus) sharepoint crap costs plus the half-dozen servers you'll need to use it plus the 3-year 'rental' cost. I'd guess another couple $million) of $16,745,400.00 or $2,392.20 / user plus the cost of the other M$ crapware you have to buy to use these 'features'( probably closer to $20 million). Yeah, don't forget the 7000 workstation copies of virus scanner/firewall software and the same for all the servers. Of course that does not offer that much protection. You will still need to do what M$ does and hide all this behind some Linux servers or get a hugh stack of Cisco firewalls. Don't forget the training costs for all these new 'features'. Should be about $2,500.00 - $7,500.00 per user. And the best news of all? In three years you get to do it all over again with longhorn (aptly named for a product that gores it's companies).

With software costs like that, I see one word in your company future ---OFFSHORE.

Star Office $25.00 X 7000 = $175,000.00. A savings of $728,000.00 (If you need support).

Openoffice $0.00 X 7000 = $0.00 (for the competent system admins).

Since you have to write all those macros again why not use something that does not change every version, works just a well and you don't have to send jobs offshore to afford it? Not to mention you could hire a couple top-notch programers to develope web-based apps to do everything you praised M$ for at a couple hundred thousand, replace all the M$ virusware servers with Redhat, SuSE, etc..., with 24/7 support, for $225,000, and free versions on desktops, use Apache for $0.00 and save your company more than $16 million and, at the same time, your jobs. Almost $2,400.00 per user (a recurring cost, BTW) for software, plus a couple dozen admins, is not only ridiculous, it's stupid. It's easy to justify offshoring for these sinful costs.

Company I work for had 50,000 employees, uses a java based web app for timecards. Written entirely in-house by a staff programmer at a (one-time) cost of maybe $25,000.00 and works great. And, yes, you can break-down costs for every project, list every hour logged by each employee on each project and query the system seven ways to Sunday, schedule vacations and personal leave, check YTD wages and overtime, etc... Limited only by your imagination. Your boss needs to hire some competent personnel instead of throwing tons of cash at some cheesy M$ solution and pray it works, does not get infested by viruses, and doesn't crash 5 times / day. Sounds like your company, like M$, is still stuck in the '80s.

You make M$ sound like the best thing since white bread. Why do you always forget to mention what it costs? All you M$ shills seem to, conveniently, forget the cost of the CALs plus all the additional servers/software you'll have to buy to make the bugware actually 'useful'(term user very loosely).

There is only one battle OSS needs to fight. That is in education of upper management of the stupidity/incompetence of it's M$ admins that are incapable of actually learning how to use a computer. Shouldn't be too difficult. Simply demonstrate how their incompetent M$ admins keep wasting tens of millions of dollars on cheesy M$ products simply because they seem incapable of learning something else and growing with the times.

Posted by: zd-spam   Posted on: 11/15/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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