4 ms·

With respect, and I don't mean this as a personal dig but rather a statement of fact as I perceive it, I don't think you understand how business works. None of

With respect, and I don't mean this as a personal dig but rather a statement of fact as I perceive it, I don't think you understand how business works. None of what you say above makes any sense in the real world. Absent a clear, true and significant competitive advantage not a single responsible business owner would make the reckless move of switching platforms. And, BTW, these advantages go far beyond cost. Frankly, in the end, if you have a real business, cost isn't as significant as function. And, by "function" I don't mean how the software works. I mean how the enterprise functions, with software being one set of tools at your disposal. Simple example: Hire office workers familiar with and trained on MS Office tools, of course on Windows. Now hire 1,000 of them. Shove them in front of Ubuntu Linux with Libre Office. The productivity dip will be significant and it might last a while while they learn both a new OS, new GUI and new tools. And, of course, now you have the potential for one or many compatibility issues as you communicate across departments or with other businesses. So long as you don't use MS Office compatibility, by definition, will always have a question mark next to it. And, if there are tools that depend on MS Office you have a serious problem. One example would be domain specific Excel add-ins. Yet, that's not the worst of it. This forced switch at scale causes the company to lose focus and have to concentrate on something totally unrelated to what it is they do for several weeks. Not only is that bad, that's irresponsible. And, in the end, what do you gain? Nothing. Actually, no. You gain problems and potential problems. The kinds of things you might regret in six months or five years as documents and work accumulate. "If it works, don't fix it" is sage advice.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
Your post can be summarized as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." But now 30 years later, hardly anybody is buying IBM -- they don't even make PCs anymore and there are more than a hundred commodity server customers to each mainframe customer -- because the more and the longer people say "you have to stick with the incumbent" the larger their competitive disadvantage becomes because they know they can get away with it. The only question is, do you want to be the company that spends $1 to avoid $1 in costs and disadvantages sooner, or do you want to be the company that waits until later, gets even more locked into the incumbent and then has to spend $100 to avoid $200.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

Your post can be summarized as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." But now 30 years later, hardly anybody is buying IBM -- they don't even make PCs anymore and there are more than a hundred commodity server customers to each mainframe customer -- because the more and the longer people say "you have to stick with the incumbent" the larger their competitive disadvantage becomes because they know they can get away with it. The only question is, do you want to be the company that spends $1 to avoid $1 in costs and disadvantages sooner, or do you want to be the company that waits until later, gets even more locked into the incumbent and then has to spend $100 to avoid $200.