Newsgroup: it.cultura.cybersocieta.lamer
Titolo: Commentary: How to wean your company from Microsoft products?

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Davide Inglima - limaCAT
A scary, real-life situation: I work as a system developer at a
manufacturing company. We create in-house code to aid our staff with daily
tasks, and to improve our competitiveness in the market. We are three
separate factories, all doing manufacturing, and we use technology in order
to stay ahead. We mainly export our goods, and have a large marketshare,
especially in the UK.
I'm a strong believer in GNU/Linux and the Free Software movement. I
have been running GNU/Linux since 1996, at which time I installed Slackware
as my first distribution, and Slackware remains on my system to this day.
At work we exclusively use Microsoft Windows, with a majority of our
computers being Windows NT 4 workstations. This is something that bothers me
deeply.
It's not about me not liking Microsoft as a company, although I don't,
but this is not the reason I dislike Microsoft products. The reason I
dislike Microsoft's products is mainly because they don't work. I know this
is a pretty vague statement to make, but it's the God's honest truth.
To name a few of our problems, just to give you an impression on what
we are battling against, almost every day we encounter programs that won't
shut down when we ask them to, or at least won't shut down gracefully. We
have PCs that won't do a certain task, but instead decide to either hang, to
not start, or to crash. When trying to kill these rogue processes, they
often aren't killed completely, which results in a fresh reboot of the
workstation.
We also run into constant problems with viruses being spread, with
workstations being infected heavily and laid completely useless. We have
printers that won't work correctly because of the printer server's buggy
software. Remote sessions on our servers die all of a sudden, leaving us
with the annoying task of going down to the server in person and restarting
the remote session manager. We see processor time on servers not being
utilized correctly, or at least to our satisfaction. We have processes that
will devastate all other services running on that machine, leaving yet
another user functionality completely deserted, and the list goes on.
We pay a pretty fair sum to keep our servers licensed, and keep them
correctly installed, by using consultants. Often these consultants' fees
reach incredible levels because the consultants themselves don't know the
problem, much less the fix for it.
In the end, the users lose, no question about it.
Another reason I dislike this entire setup of our computers is the
fact that I can't create small scripts or programs that can carry out the
functionality I want for a certain problem. The scripting languages on the
Windows platform exist, but are so poor that they remain useless for
anything other than a learning experience in dragging and dropping. I hate
that we have to pay hundreds of thousands each year to have other guys
create software for us. We would be able to do a lot ourselves if we had the
freedom to do so, but we don't. Using Microsoft products constrains us from
creating nice and usable things for our users. And it causes us stress,
because we know we could do a better job if we were allowed to.
Once more, the users lose.
Not long ago, I attended a meeting concerning security of a Web
solution we are creating. This Web solution will be able to provide our end
customers with information about our products and the company in general. To
our retailers, we will supply the ability to order or products, along with
diagrams, pictures and other information to help retailers speed up the
ordering cycle. The Web solution is also being created to help our
salespeople give out information faster and more reliably, without needing
to look it up manually, but instead pointing the end customers to this site.
This Web solution has been based upon Microsoft IIS 4, along with a
networking system on it that allows us to talk to our "business" system.
This is the main reason for choosing IIS.
We invited a couple of guys from our software supplier to come tell us
about this solution, and how they recommended we should deal with security
issues. A sales person and a younger technical person showed up in their
usual business suits. They were very nice people, especially the younger
technician, who is a network security expert, so he knew a lot about the
Free Software movement, and what it has produced over the years.
After they had gone through all the introductory material about this
solution, we started talking about security concerns with webservers. The
salesperson clearly demonstrated that Web servers running Apache were far
less likely to be infected and far better coded. He showed a recent Gartner
Group article about this very issue, where Gartner recommended not using IIS
at all until it has been completely reprogrammed. The sales team was not
completely under the Microsoft umbrella yet, and they stated that no matter
what server, you still needed to take care of it, which I agree with, no
point in leaving obvious security holes open. They basically said you
shouldn't just use an IIS webserver solution "out of the box." The sad part
comes when we all realize this, but still move ahead with IIS. The sales
people had just quoted a research group saying our software is so faulty it
shouldn't be used. Our vendors agreed it's a completely buggy solution, and
no one said a word. I was stunned.
It should be said that this meeting was an introductory meeting, where
you normally go through the individual components of the upcoming system,
and everything is basically being put on the table. This might explain some
of the silence, instead of complaining about the solution, but not the total
lack of questions.
I couldn't be silent any more. The technician told us that one of the
largest manufacturing companies in the country used IBM's WebSphere
products, which is based upon Apache, but he didn't mention Apache at that
point. When I spoke up, I asked him, "Why should we use a solution based
upon buggy software, when other companies, though larger than us, have
realized that they need to get the best of the best in the category?" I
thought that might ring a bell with them, since as vendors of computing
equipment and software, they were basically saying, "Here is our solution,
it's quite expensive, its really buggy, and others have refused to use it on
the grounds that it doesn't work."
Are we really at the point where we choose systems and problem-solving
techniques because we have been bullied by a software giant, yelling at us
that there are no other ways of doing things except theirs?
Why is it that some people automatically assume that software has to
be expensive and non-free, in order to deliver what they want? Why is it
that countless testimonials about how well GNU/Linux works are being ignored
completely?
The situation got even worse later in the meeting when my co-worker,
my boss and I, along with these two vendor sales guys, were sitting down,
talking about viruses and threats in general. Apparently this large vendor
uses Microsoft Exchange servers for its daily work. A couple of months ago,
their complete infrastructure of Exchange servers in Europe went down, of
course because of a virus. All our consultants since have been reminded of
this, and with some irritation, they agree that Exchange is bad. Why do they
run it?
So after a while, the young guy admitted that his department actually
had a GNU/Linux server set up, so they would always be able to receive and
send email when their Exchange server didn't work. He said this without a
blink of an eye, like this was perfectly normal to have an extra server,
when the primary one goes down because of buggy and badly designed software.
Again, I was stunned.
I left the meeting with a bad feeling in my stomach, and a desire to
yell, "What's wrong with you people?!" I say "you people" because it
includes us, a company using products we know are buggy, overpriced, and
replaceable by something free/gratis, and reliable. Why aren't we using it?
What does it take to convince my boss that something is wrong with this
mentality, and that we don't need to follow other companies' bad examples?
This is a plea to all those out there who are in a similar position:
recognizing a problem, knowing the fix for it, and wanting to spend time to
fix it, but not allowed to because of this general attitude. Does anyone
have any ideas on what to do in order to get the message up the corporate
ladder?

 because we know we could do a better job if we were allowed to.
Tradotto: "non so usare windows, nè so programmarlo, nè mi interessa 
farlo. Per piacere, installatemi linux che almeno quello lo so usare."
Ma fatemi il piacere... di GNUlebani ne ho fin sopra i capelli...
Fabio Alemagna

 
e chissenefrega non ce lo metti: ti tirassero giù un paio
di torri....

replaceable by something free/gratis, and reliable
Il problema e' questo: associare in toto il software a pagamento col
software mal scritto. Esistono, e il tizio dovrebbe saperlo, software
a pagamento scritti bene. Certo, non windows, ma...
Obelix

 software mal scritto. Esistono, e il tizio dovrebbe saperlo, ...
Sono perfettamente d'accordo che non tutto il software free e'
una meraviglia e che non tutto il software a pagamento sia una
schifezza. In ogni caso non so perche' ma il software scritto da
MS spesso e' peggiore e piu' buggato degli altri.
Nonostante tutto e' il piu' gettonato.
C:\>iao Angelo
P.S. Nessuno e' mai stato licenziato per aver scelto software
     della Microsoft.
P.P.S. Forse sarebbe ora di cominciare :-)
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Secondo me il software MS č bacato ne piů e ne meno di tutti gli altri.
Punto e basta.
Saluti
Massimo


 Massimo
A giudicare dai bug con cui e' stato rilasciato XP, si puo'
affermare che e' molto piu' "open" di qualsiasi Linux o *BSD :-)
Ma ovviamente e' gia' pronta la patch.
C:\>iao Angelo


Now here is a person who could be making more money and have great job
security if you could support your Windows LAN better. I know you want
to trash Microsoft for not making a perfact OS, but who has the
perfact OS? It's not Linux for some very simple reasons... Little
hardware support, no tech support, users want Windows... With these
things in mind I always tell people who hate MS stuff that if they are
in the tech support feild than MS stuff being buggy means job
security, we will always have a job... I don't get home from work at
night and worry about Bob not printing or Mary not getting e-mail or
any other software related problem because if there was perfact
software and all we had to do was install it and walk away forever
then there would be very few of us in the biz...