From: R.E.Ballard (r.e.ballard@usa.net) Subject: Re: "No-one gets fired for buying Microsoft" Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.alpha, comp.os.linux.advocacy, comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy, comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy Date: 5th September 1999 In article <936390733snz@vision25.demon.co.uk>, philh@vision25.demon.co.uk wrote: > There is a phrase, "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft". > (Originally this phrase was about IBM, but times have changed). In the words of Groucho Marx: That's the most redikulus ting i eva hoid (shake cigar). > Is this still true? (Was it ever?) It's never been true. The success of Microsoft is paved with the corpes of corporations gone bankrupt, executives whose careers ended rather abruptly, and project participants whose jobs were lost or farmed out to consultants because they had a little too much confidence in Microsoft. Dead corporations - MITS, Commodore, Atari, Tandy/Radio Shack's computer manufacturing division, Seattle Computer Company, Buttonware, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, Borland... and the list goes on and on... John Akers essentially lost his job as CEO of IBM for buying OS/2 from Microsoft (which turned out to be a pig in a poke). The previous CEO of Compaq was routed because his deals with Microsoft had run some of Compaq's product lines into the red. Microsoft's "sweetheart deals" to support PPC, MIPS, and Alpha are now clearly being shown as nothing more than an attempt to keep UNIX off the desktop. Gates would have ported to Sparc, but only if Sun agreed to stop promoting UNIX (SunOS and Solaris). Support for RISC chips was rarely more than nominal. Since the earliest releases of NT 3.x, the OEMs complained that Microsoft wasn't giving them the support, the software, and the applications the needed to compete with the Intel platform. If there were DLL conflicts, race conditions, and lockouts on Intel, imagine what they must have been like on some of these multi-pipelined RISC chips. These days, Linux has sold more Alphas (Since Titanic) than NT ever did. IBM hardy ever sells PPCs for NT, but RS/6000 machines running AIX (and now Linux) are a key product for IBM. The $2 kernel did something much more important to for the UNIX community. It generated a mind-share that could quickly and easily be integrated into other versions of UNIX. If you ran out of interrupts (Linus insists on refusing to use semaphores), you can switch to FreeBSD on Intel, or AIX on PPC, or Digital UNIX (soon True64) on Alpha, or SGI's UNIX on MIPS. The important thing is that you don't have to give up your favorite applications because the "Linux" source (actually supporting code that is not part of the Linux kernel) can be ported to the other platforms. In many cases, you can't tell whether you are on Linux or UNIX until you notice that you have a CDE desktop instead of a KDE desktop (and some users are even choosing KDE over CDE now). > Consider the position of an executive who has just bought a > large Alpha system (and some Alpha boxes cost $100,000), running > Windows NT. Microsoft have just decided not to support NT on Alpha > any more, so the executive has just bought some rather expensive > paperweights. Does anyone know of anyone in this position, whose > job might be now a little, how shall we say, precarious? That executive would be nailed for Choosing Alphas, not for choosing Microsoft. More often, the executives who get nailed for choosing Microsoft are the ones who budget a Microsoft project as if it was a UNIX project (instead of multiplying by a factor of 10), and then end up with a strategic project in the ditch, bleeding red ink, and wiping out in the middle if the most critical periods in the business cycle. When the adage "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" that was because IBM sold you a solution, which included hardware, software, support, and crisis intervention. If your system failed at 3:00 AM and the only person who was qualified to fix it was in Poughipsie NY and you were in Oakland CA, the would have him on the first flight and he might be in CA within 6 hours. On the East Coast, it wasn't unusual for IBMers to get in their cars at 2:00 A.M. to help a brokerage or bank get their systems back up and running before the markets opened. You really paid for the service. When you knew that IBM would make every reasonable effort to get things back up and working, you didn't mind paying several million dollars for hardware and several million more for software. Today, the industry has moved into an "ala carte" environment. You buy hardware from one vendor, software from another, development from another, operational support from another, and crisis intervention from yet another. As a result, hardware has become a commodity market, most of the "general purpose" software has become a commodity (bundleware), and the real money is in custom development, operational support, and crisis prevention/intervention. > All is not lost, however. Linux runs on Alpha, and will always be > supported -- because of the power of Open Source, it matters a lot > less if the vendor walks away from their OS. Linux is a better OS > anyway, so it's a blessing in disguise. Compaq was actually smart to "follow the market" The previous CEO of Compaq was getting millions of dollars of free publicity from Titanic, one of the biggest block-buster movies ever (up to that time), and yet he was dismissing Linux because he didn't want to offend Bill Gates! When a CEO starts undermining one of the key elements in the sales of one of it's most profitable lines, it makes investors very concerned. Profit on Windows machines is so thin it's often going into the red. During some promotions, on some product lines, the makers of Windows machines actually LOSE MONEY on each machine sold. Yet Microsoft refused to negotiate a workable deal - in fact they insisted on even MORE control of the boot sequence, the initial screens, and the application mix. At the same time, third party vendors were selling Linux-on-Alpha systems almost as fast as they could make them, while Compaq remained loyal to Microsoft. Today, Lou Gerstner, Michael Dell, and the CEOs of Compaq, HP, Sun, and several other OEMs are pushing back. They have announced the availability of Linux powered machines. They have announced the availability of Linux support. They have announced broad product lines that provide a smooth transition from Linux/Intel machines to high-end UNIX/RISC machines. It may be bumpy for a few months, but the opportunity for much more profitable product lines are opening up. Corporate customers are also getting fed-up with MS-Windows nonsense. Windows 95, Office 95, NT 4.0 with SP3 and Office 97 are all having Y2K compatibility problems and the cure is worse than the problem. Many companies are refusing to apply NT4 SP4, Office 97 SP2, and the Windows 98 upgrades. There is so much risk that they are now looking at Linux, even for desktop systems. For the OEMs, it's a big win because they can sell additional support, consulting, and service contracts. > -- > Phil Hunt - - - - - - - - - philh@vision25.demon.co.uk > - Linux will be 8 years old on 17th September! See: - > http://www.vision25.demon.co.uk/prog/linuxbirthday.html -- Rex Ballard - Open Source Advocate, Internet Architect, MIS Director http://www.open4success.com Linux - 48 million and growing at 3%/week!