Posted on 11/06/2003 11:28:52 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
Your definition of a slush fund is the same as corporate America's definition of a flexible profit margin. That's why you evidently won't accept any situation where Microsoft provides the low bid: "It must be the illegal slush fund."
Mine would simply say that the government must buy the lowest-cost software available that fits objectively written criteria for the task at hand.
As an example, I'm sure someone could dumb down the requirements for office software bidding so that OpenOffice meets the criteria. But Bush2000 brings up a good point: Useability, retraining, compatibility, productivity all have their costs & benefits which should be factored into any objective criteria.
When an employee is pulling down $50K plus benefits, what employer would forego spending a few hundred dollars per year for the tools to make him more productive? I would say a very short-sighted one. I know I wouldn't want employees eating up my payroll wrestling with 2nd rate, feature-challenged GPL crap like OpenOffice.
This fund is targeted only for situations where Microsoft may lose to Linux, no other. It is specifically targeted to kill Linux at any cost. You didn't have a problem with the large trucking companies driving independents out of business using the same system? In government contracting, such a fund may be illegal, at least as the pricing rules were explained to me while working at a few Fortune 100 IT contracting companies.
I'm sure someone could dumb down the requirements for office software bidding so that OpenOffice meets the criteria.
Show me your average office user, then show me where OpenOffice doesn't meet the requirements, or StarOffice since it's also much cheaper than Office. Most people don't use 90% of what Excel or Word can do. For those few that need it, give it to them. It's the same thing that happens when Windows houses needed abilities that only Macs could do -- you'd find a few Macs running there.
When an employee is pulling down $50K plus benefits, what employer would forego spending a few hundred dollars per year for the tools to make him more productive?
Does Excel make the average user more productive? I don't think so, and I use Excel extensively at work and OpenOffice extensively at home. Switching between the two is easy. A few thousand employees times several hundred each in licenses adds up.
Useability, retraining, compatibility, productivity all have their costs & benefits which should be factored into any objective criteria.
You want to know what the biggest training problems were for Largo? "How can I change my desktop background" and "There's no floppy, so how can I take stuff home?" Application-specific training was almost not needed since for the vast majority of people most of these applications work pretty much alike.
Why the hell would anyone do that? Taking a Web server offline to update content is about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. One main reason for such bad uptime on IIS (aside from the fact that it just gets unstable after a while) is both the frequency of patches and having to reboot the system after installing those patches. The constant reboot is one of the major architectural flaws in Windows.
I seem to remember IBM being very nasty, then losing big-time to a government monopoly suit. That time the judgement wasn't the kiss-ass settlement that Bush gave them. They definitely learned their lesson.
When MS uses its lobbyists to achieve a result, by definition that is lobbying.
OSS is going to cost more for support.
Support that statement with facts. The only place I've seen lower TCO from Microsoft was in their reality distortion field just as bad as Steve Jobs' "G4 is as fast as a P4 3GHz" one.
Likewise, there are additional training costs.
That assumes a current Windows shop switching. Otherwise, like I said in Largo, training for switching was negligible.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, no matter how many times you guys try to pull that cr*p.
Sometimes there is. When volunteers come to the shelter to help the homeless, that is a free lunch (in cases, literally). When volunteers write a world-class operating system, that is also a free lunch -- you didn't pay for it. The only thing you have to pay for, if you don't have it in-house, is support, which you'd have to pay for on any system.
Looks like the pubbies are getting so many contributions that their servers can't take it.
I am sure that they don't mind it one bit :-)
Mac doesn't go that low into the market, so it's stupid to compare PCs at that cost in the first place. You still keep wanting to bitch that Mercedes is a marginal car manufacturer because they don't make one to compete with your POS Neon. It doesn't matter, since they're still the brand everybody wants to be, and they have the standard features and quality that will show up on the rest of the cars years down the road.
Did you know that Dells sell with USB and IEEE 1394, and they've discontinued floppies on laptops and will be doing so on their desktops soon? Did you know they have wide-aspect ratio notebooks? That smart power management and quick sleep/wake feature on Windows is great, and so is built-in wireless in the latest notebooks and some desktops. It's also pretty cool to have DVD writers standard in your line of professional desktops.
Those are all things no one was willing to touch, or hadn't even thought about doing, until Apple had done it for a while. One reason Apple doesn't sell in the computing ghetto is that they only sell advanced features and quality, and you can't do that selling that far down-market.
Maybe the so-called "average user" only uses 10-20% of the features in Excel. But each "average user" doesn't use the same 10-20% featureset. Hence the need for 100% of the features offered.
Open source zealots always start out with outlandish claims of how superior their software is. But eventually they, like you, fall back on "You really don't need all those extra features that the commercial-grade software offers... and the open source is FREE! Whoopee!"
So much for quality.
Show me your average office user, then show me where OpenOffice doesn't meet the requirements...
Most people I know would rather be sent to the Russian front than be pegged with "average user" status. I've used OpenOffice, and I know its shortcomings firsthand. For one, it won't render any except the most simple Powerpoint slides. Thanks, but no thanks.
Allowing unbundling of the suites at a decent cost was one of the unprecedented offers Microsoft made to try to win the Munich contract. Normally it's too expensive to buy just the applications you need across thousands of seats.
Considering that Macs are easier to use, more secure by design, include lots of useful bundled software, and are and less vulnerable to viruses and worms, it's exactly the average user who needs them.
One of the many articles showing the amounts and purpose, plus the info that this isn't just used to get licensing costs down, but to give away free services.
There's your proof. But you won't believe it because you think Microsoft is this great and benign company that never does anything immoral or illegal in business.
You're the one making the extraordinary claim that Netcraft uptime doesn't correspond to the amount of time servers are actually running, responding to requests. You're the one who came up with a rediculous scenario that servers are taken down to update content, a practice I haven't even heard of while dealing with or running Web servers since 1995. You need to show proof.
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