[juneau-lug] Microsoft... What you are buying...
- From: "Jeremy C. Hansen" <jeremyh@xxxxxxx>
- To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 16:02:01 -0800
Hello,
As I move out more and more into the world where I engage in application
development I think about what Microsoft is doing and realize, it isn't
the application itself that costs so much. It is the thousands of hours
of research and development that go into building a good application.
Microsoft has managed to accelerate the way we do business on the
computer by simplifying the process that is required to do things. They
have pretty much mastered the three-click philosophy; they pour
thousands of hours into finding the features that will be most utilized
and are most desirable and organizing them in a way that makes intuitive
sense. These are the reasons that we find ourselves back to MS
products. They have flattened the learning curve. They are most often
slow to market, and when they are quick to market they have buggy
software. They purchase good software companies (IE. Visio) and
integrate them, have you seen what you can do with Visio, you can tap
right into Microsoft SQL Server and execute DDL. To myself that is
impresive, and they have made this possible through the purchase and
integration of the products. Now Visio would have never of made this
possible themselves. This is a good all Microsoft, TOTAL SOLUTION
approach to doing business. If you want a real tool because this is
what you do for a living, sure you can go open source or buy $4000.00
Erwin or $15,000 RationalRose package.
As linux users I think that we have been able to compromise because of
the price tag, availability of substitutes, and we are technically
inclined. We know that we can't do a mail merge with Abiword and Gcalc
yet (As far as I know, last time I used it). But we know of ways to get
around this. For my mother, an average PC user, she was able to figure
out how to do a mail merge with Excel without any instruction and then
teach me how to do it. What we do and are unique user needs can be met
with an open source solution. But for a user, Microsoft is a very
appropriate solution.
Another thing that I haven't seen yet is a large Microsoft Office -
Equivelent that is as stable as Microsoft Office XP, I give kudos to
those developing server solutions (Apache, etc.), but I get a little
bitter when people say OpenOffice or Abiword is better then Microsoft
Office.
Security is another issue, people say, "Microsoft Products are so
Insecure," times are changing, they are stiffening this up, but there is
a huge obstacle here, you have how many people hating Bill Gates and
Microsoft and very few people attacking the open source world. We know
that there are holes in the open source environment, go look for
yourself, they are there and they are ready to be exploited, but it
isn't 100 million people hating open source, it is a 100 million hating
Microsoft, turn the tides on that figure and I bet we find more holes
then you would ever imagine. Turn America loose on open source and
implement some IM clients and we'll find some holes, I am sure.
I agree, there are many points to be argued here, but I hope that maybe
there is some englightening factors about the amount of research that
goes into the product and development at Microsoft. Don't forget the
30,000 jobs MS provides and how much they influence how much your job is
worth as a technology person. They have a substantial influence I would
imagine (positive impact) with setting the standard at a tech job being
worth $70k w/ early retirement, without outliers like that we would see
tech jobs lower then that. Mechanics already make more then we do. ;)
Honda bills out at $70.00/hr.
Sincerely,
Jeremy C. Hansen
PS. If you want to chat about this some more I'm interested in what
people have to say. This is kind of just a brain dump and I thought
that maybe it would be worth pointing out.
------------------------------------
This is the Juneau-LUG mailing list.
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to juneau-lug-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the
word unsubscribe in the subject header.
Other related posts: