Getting Hung Up on the Apple-Microsoft War

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 21:09 -0600, Collins Richey wrote:
>> On 8/10/06, Net Llama! <netllama at linux-sxs.org> wrote:
>>> Quote of the day, in the NYTimes:
>>> "...
>>> After all, the I.T. people know where their bread is buttered. If Macs are
>>> indeed less trouble-prone and complex than Windows PC's, they're doomed in
>>> corporations; the last thing the I.T. guys want to do is obsolete
>>> themselves."
>>
>> There's much more to it than that. The decisions (in corporations of
>> any size) are made by IT directors and CIOs whose bread is buttered by
>> "not rocking the boat." Even so, there is increasing awareness even in
>> these restricted circles about the value of Linux, but probably not
>> MAC since the equipment contracts are let based on maximum squeezing
>> of every last penny out of the vendor.
>>
>> In our corporation which is pretty typical there is a great hodge
>> podge of legacy Windows systems and servers that are poorly defined
>> and work rather poorly. The worst of the bunch are a group of
>> middleware servers that fail several times per day. The corporation is
>> now actively working to replace these with Red Hat and other licensed
>> software (the corporation l-o-v-e-s to pay software licenses - gotta
>> have someone to kick around if you're too dumb to make it work). The
>> NT admins are going to Red Hat classes.
>
> I wonder what happened here. Our company is a Novell company with an
> Enterprise License. Or at least it has been. All network logins and disk
> shares are managed by Novell stuff. Novell asked the company to consider
> moving to SUSE Linux for this. But they have not been very aggressive.
> So, the company is going MS for all this. I wonder why Novell have been
> so timid. This is a 5000+ employee company. Surely it is worth their
> effort. Just another mystery.

In my experience, Novell (and SuSE) have been largely clueless in how to 
deal with attempting to migrate their legacy customers to linux.  Last 
month, I spent a few weeks working somewhat closely with Novell's Linux 
marketing group on an aspect of the SLED/SLES10 launch, and it was a 
comedy of errors on their side.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org