Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 03:22:05 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Cc: atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr Subject: RE: Instead of freebsd.com, why not... Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNGEGMFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <468469277.20050215000639@wanadoo.fr>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Anthony > Atkielski > Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 3:07 PM > To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: Instead of freebsd.com, why not... > > > > Yes, and unfortunately that happens a lot. The most frequent > constraint > I encounter myself is the need to read or write Microsoft Word files. > Fortunately it is mostly just reading, so I can get away with the free > Word viewer downloaded from MS, but if I must write the files, > I have no > choice but to use the dusty old copy of Office running on my oldest > desktop machine. Many wordprocessors write in Microsoft Word format these days. > I personally have no use for Word at all, since I do > all my text processing on Quark these days, but other people don't have > Quark XPress, usually. > That is what AW used to layout my book, as a matter of fact. It's currently the defacto standard in the publishing industry because they can go directly from it to a printing press. But it is rediculously expensive at $1,045.00 SRP. I hesitate to tell you how large of a percentage of my book royalties a purchase like this would take, but I will say it's definitely more than a single digit percentage. IMHO this is self-defeating. Very few book authors would spend this for writing software, and the publishers (like AW) spend millions a year in retyping costs to take manuscripts from printouts and such to stick them into Quark. Quark is really vulnerable from being disloged from this monopoly. I can see that Quark is already starting to fight a rearguard action as they are dumping copies of it at the educational price into the academic market, now. (where a lot of books originate) You should at least check out Scribus http://www.scribus.org.uk/ This is an open source project that is aiming to replace Quark There has already been one book published with it. While perhaps you might not be able to use it now, give it another 5 years and it might do it. I would have probably used this for writing mine if it had been available then. > > But even if this were not the case, the obvious question still arises: > WHY would I switch to 100% UNIX, when Windows works perfectly on the > desktop? YOU personally might not. But you were originally arguing that FreeBSD was unsuitable for a desktop OS. Now I see this is subtly changing, you are now only arguing that FreeBSD is unsuitable for YOUR desktop OS. But, you see, that is the point that I was trying to make in my last post. Anything can be used as a desktop OS, depending on your needs for a desktop. One of our customers for example uses Wyse Winterms (my idea, incidentally) that he purchases off Ebay, that are logged into a Fedora server. His desktops are at a number of stores that are in the grocery store chain that he manages the IT for, they have cash registers attached to them. The company he works for is one of the faster growing regional Mexican grocery store chains in this area. I am quite sure that his company is successful in a large part because of the massive inventory control they have - the second something is sold in any of their stores it's updated in the master inventory, there isn't any of this batching bullcrap that a lot of grocery stores use, where they have individual servers at each store who all dial into each other at night and attempt to create some recognizable update to the database. His chain can probably move product between stores and get product ordered faster than any of their competitors, and when your dealing with perishables this is of paramount importance. (particularly when most of them are shipped from Mexico) Now, most people aren't going to be using Winterms but the point is that people have wildly varying needs, and many of them could in fact use FreeBSD successfully as a desktop OS. > > They don't need an excuse. If they have a program that they > know how to > use, there's no reason at all for them to learn to use another program. > Tell that to Microsoft then. The new versions of Word, Excel, etc ARE ANOTHER PROGRAMS the training required to bring most of the office users up to speed on them is considerable. I know this from experience I used to work as a sysadmin for a number of years and worked at several companies. I always hated when Microsoft brought out new versions of software because users would pester me with support questions for MONTHS after updating them. The worse offenders in fact were usually the same people who were the biggest pushers to get updated. And the costs had nothing to do with it. I remember the Office 95 - Office 97 upgrade, for example. At the company I was working at that time they were a small startup and didn't have a lot of cash - I sat down with the CFO the day after pricing was announced for Office 97 and laid out exactly all of the costs required for updating - from new system purchases (for some people with older systems that would just be too slow) to the licensing plus a sketchy analysis of the productivity losses and labor costs. The guy went white, and we jointly went to the CEO and all of us agreed to stand firm in the face of user demands for upgrading, as the company just couldn't afford the expense then (at least, according to the CEO and CFO) But of course I was being naieve - 2 months later I was commencing an Office 97 upgrade, and all the costs I had predicted materialized, plus a considerable number more. The CEO had buckled under userbase screaming about it, and had been talked into believing it would save money (by the sales VP of course) It never did, then they went through the whole thing again with Office 2000 2 years later. I had left them by then and gone to work elsewere, they eventually folded in 2002 or thereabouts. But it is a fact that there were major and badly needed IT infrastructure upgrade projects - such as a new main switch - that never got done on account of the constant demands for help and assistance from the userbase for the new Office software. And the few times I tried telling the user's supervisors to tell them to go get training, I was rebuffed with the "that's what we are paying you for" line. Well, no, what I was being paid for was to keep the infrastructure stable and growing to support the company, not to babysit a bunch of lusers who couldn't read the manual. And since I ended up wasting time on the training, I was not particularly proud of the infrastructure in the company when I left it. So, don't give me the bullcrap about people wanting to stay with what they know. They don't. If the vast majority of users in a company knew anything about computers beyond how to turn them on, companies wouldn't need IT people. In reality only a handful of users in most companies take responsibility for their own computer literacy, the rest of them expect to have it hand-fed to them, and will learn as little as possible. And you can hand-feed them FreeBSD/Linux and office apps that run on that platform, with just as much trouble as you can hand-feed them Windows and MS office apps. > It's not up to these people to justify to you their continuing use of a > solution that has always worked for them and continues to work > for them. They never do this. Oh only if they would I would have been so happy to let them contine using their copies of Office 95!!! I would have been much happier and most of them would have also. > It's up to you to explain to them why they should expend > additional time > and effort learning to use something new just to accomplish exactly the > same thing. > You just don't get it. It just doesen't work like that in reality. In reality, what happens in these companies is that you get 1 or 2 power users, or more commonly, people who think they are power users but are just wannabes, who read the marketing literature saying how the new version is going to be so much easier and faster. They then go get copies of the new stuff (often expensing it in violation of internal company policy) and load it on their PC, then call in IT when that blows up something on their PC because now they can't work and it's an emergency. IT gets badgered into getting a bandaid in place on their system, so they eventually get it running. Then, they go around to everyone else and use the old "I got something that you don't got" psychology, and next thing you know the rest of them want it also. I will also observe that all the time that these power users spend on this pretty much means they can't do the work they were hired to do. But, they don't seem to ever get fired for that. > You seem to think that switching from Windows > to UNIX is > no big deal, For some it isn't a big deal. > even though it serves no purpose, Not true. In businesses it makes a LOT of sense. > They want the path of least > resistance so that they don't have to waste time thinking about > computers. No, so they don't have to spend time thinking, period. Has it really escaped you that the vast majority of the US adult population is very uninterested in this activity? > And on the desktop, the path of least resistance > is Windows. > And, guess what? Putting apple juice and grape juice in the kid's glass instead of milk is the path of least resistance too. easy does not always equal best. > question comes up again: Why bother? Windows does the job, so why > _not_ install Windows? > The principle and most obvious reason is cost - an Open Source solution is cheaper - assuming the costs we are talking about are overall, long term costs. Think of it this way. Supposing that you personally were not required to output in Quark file format to your customers. (we will assume for the moment that all other file formats you output in can be produced by open source software) Suppose you have another 30 years of work before you retire. Suppose that you generate your current and future income from these desktop applications. Right now you only know your Windows desktop apps and your looking at the UNIX apps and thinking about the big learning curve that you would have to go over to switch to them before you could become as equally productive. (I'm of course ignoring the gaming apps which are transitory and produce little of anything of value, and can be argued that time wasted on them is being stolen from much healthier games such as physical activity games that will keep you from having a coronary at age 50) You know that during that learning curve you will be spending a lot of time on it, as time=money, this represents a significant cost to you. SO your asking why spend the money? The answer is that if you stay with the commercial software, over your lifetime you will have spent a much larger portion of your income on commercial software, than if you take the cost now of switching over, beause those commercial companies cannot survive without a revenue stream, and they get this by constant upgrading. That upgrading also raises your lifetime hardware costs significantly. You know, people face decisions like this for things like buying water heaters - I think you were arguing in favor of something like this last week in fact - and make the obvious choice to go with the cheaper overall cost solution in a blink of an eye, every day. Why is it so agonizing when it's their computer software? Ted
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