Replies

In some ways, Microsoft's real problem is that it has been too successful (or successful enough) for its own good.

I'm running a small network. All the servers are NT, the workstations are Win98 with Office2k. It works. It's stable. We don't need anything else. There's no reason for me to upgrade, but now that MS is going to suspend support for NT and 98, we have to. You can bet there are some NT vulnerabilities out there that crackers are delaying exploiting until the day after MS stops releasing security patches for that OS.

So I need to spend tens of thousands to upgrade to software I don't need, upgrade my hardware to accomodate it, and introduce yet another Microsoft product that will need to be patched several times right out of the box. There are retraining issues, support issues, etc. that I really don't need.

Worse thing, as soon as I get the whole package running and stable like my current setup, Microsoft will force me to upgrade to yet another level of products I don't want and don't need.

I came very close to getting Linux in here, at least on the servers, but as noted in the article, career managers are loathe to make any decisions that aren't "safe" - even if it means spending lots more money. Like they used to say about IBM, no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

The thing is, we're quite happy with the Microsoft products we're using. What bugs us is that we're forced to upgrade from something we're happy with. I'd almost rather they just charge a license renewal fee and leave us alone.

Change is coming. Microsoft can either be business' best friend or worst enemy. It seems right now like they prefer the latter.