Open source reshaping services market

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Enough of the back slapping, treat the post with the contempt it deserves

"In fact I can remember talking with the owner of the local
"ComputerWorld Store" (anyone remember them?) and his
saying that while he could sell $4,000 PCs all day long, he
couldn't sell a support and service contract at any price"

Sensational, selling to end-consumers and he couldn't sell
a support contract. Does this mean the lack of support
came with zero cost? Of course not. Just that for many
buyers the upfront cost is all that counts (funny this is the
basis of MS's TCO campaign, modelled on the failed Apple
campaign in the 80s).

The 80% of windows machines recently surveyed by AOL
with AOL would attest to the cost of the "ease of
administration" of windows. Or perhaps the daily or weekly
service reboot to keep the server going, or add the
downtime for virii, users downloading the latest p2p client,
or the need to reboot after each nMS patch. No_Facts
position becomes even more embarrassing.

Of course for the rest of us in the real world, we work on
at least $US2,000 per windows machine per year to
maintain. This is the true cost. Either outsource it, give it to
an IT Dept, or absorb the cost yourself, either way you're
paying.

"That means there are two possibilities, either Linux (open
source in general) must be come much easier to use and
administer, or it won't receive wide spread adoption."

Or we ignore the No_Facts position and accept that the cost
to admin *nix is high but can be spread over a greater
number of sites, leading to an outsource model not
possible with windows (limited by how many sites the MSCE
can visit in a day to press the restart button). This is a
market that encourages a service model.

Ease of use != Ease of administration != TCO

Any customer without full-time IT personal and an internet
facing server is in trouble regardless of OS. For companies
building a web services infrastructure it is suicide. So either
pay for a professional, or get follow No_Facts to advice and
go for it alone. Good luck:-)

Apple's OS X is a very impressive OS, but for the solutions
mentioned in the article a Linux solution with a support
contract provides a hard to beat solution (LAMP or LA/J2EE/
SQL).

Posted by: Richard Flude   Posted on: 01/11/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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