At 12:37 AM +0530 6/27/05, Trevor Warren wrote:

--- sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:

...

In fact i have stopped talking price with customers (i collect the M$ tax u see) and focus on a zillion other things which shreds everything that billy baba and 2000xp chors can throw.

[snip]

No worries JTD, as long as we have IIM babus running commercial organisations like those at redmond such reports are bound to surface.

Actually, it also has a sprinkling of IIT walas. Just a few, here and there. No lack of ability. Just good old organisational dynamics at work.

Infact, the report did give me a lot to ponder. You know terence, managing networks with 500-1000 nodes with MS can be a real nightmare especially when patching the machines on a daily basis is more of a norm. MS has an architecture in place seamless across distributions to push these patches across the entire enterprise. How much of this works....you know better.

Don't ever confuse working 'better' with 'perception of deliverables'. This is what kept IBM afloat in the years before MS became a standard in the industry. It's what has kept Apple from dominating the desktop.

Question is, just how 'big' is the market for networks of 1000+ nodes, and how big is it for much lesser numbers of nodes?

With FLOSS in a network as big as the one consisting of 1000+ nodes you will realise that management-patch scheduling-upgrades are the most significant part of the TCO. This in effect drives the need to acquire systems that the average "techie" can deal with.

I tend to think that if someone studies it honestly, the results will show that applications that deliver business solutions across networks are the key - one of which may well be the ability to deploy patches remotely and securely, but let's not fool ourselves: such apps are only appreciated by techies/sysads.

If you want to win hearts and minds, you have to deliver to the foot soldiers, but whether you do that or not, the big bucks get sanctioned by the big bosses.

The paradigm of centralised apps, from ye olde mainframe days, is returning with web based applications becoming more powerful (in terms of deliverables). The tech issues are moving from those managed by maintenance techies to problems of security and speed. However, this is not yet obvious to senior management, which fears the lack of security, but does not understand yet how the issue of security itself has morphed.

With many large organisations (and therefore, in good old copycat or 'safe' mode, most smaller ones too) still favouring MS platforms for application serving, it will take more time for FLOSS to reach the business sector.

What is painful and painfully obvious too, is the fact that too many non-business sector organisations also favour the safety of numbers. I suspect this is an opportunity that too many of our listmembers are ignoring. But more on this separately.