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Any serious discussion of moving US businesses off Microsoft stalls when it reaches the "non technical" departments. I put "non technical" in quotes because ma

by sounds 13y ago

Any serious discussion of moving US businesses off Microsoft stalls when it reaches the "non technical" departments. I put "non technical" in quotes because many of the people in HR, Accounting, Marketing, etc. are very tech-savvy. Marketing folks, for example, would love an all-Mac office setup, but they generally have to have Windows PCs for Powerpoint, Visio, and CRMs, to name a few. HR needs their IE6 in-house apps. Accounting can't even hire anybody who wants to try getting their work done on a Mac. I realize I'm not even talking about Linux here; I think that just underscores my point. Does anyone have a counterexample? Because I would pay top dollar for a Linux solution to these problems, but haven't seen anything worth buying.

Spearchucker 13y ago
Your problem isn't technical, it's financial. Moving away from Windows and Office means converting all the organisation's documents to another format, re-training users in the new OS and productivity suite, re-writing VBA scripts (which often doesn't work well). Then you'd have to de-couple the entire organisation from Active Directory. And refactor (at best) or re-write (at worst) all custom in-house apps that rely on either Windows or Active Directory. It's just too expensive.
TheAnimus 13y ago
>I realize I'm not even talking about Linux here; I think that just underscores my point. I've seen about 10-20% Linux use and about 0% Mac use in industry (Finance - Buy and Sell side). YMMV. Linux is incredibly popular because people claim (rightly or wrongly) that they can have a lower latency setup. R-Project is very popular with people because they can have engineers customise it in ways not possible with Mat Lab. But at the end of the day it all falls back down to MS Excel. Apple don't have any enterprise ready tools for managing a system of 50,000+ client PCs and 30,000+ servers. So they don't get a look in, save the few iPads that are just perks and never used for any work that I've noticed.

by sounds 13y ago

Spearchucker 13y ago

Your problem isn't technical, it's financial. Moving away from Windows and Office means converting all the organisation's documents to another format, re-training users in the new OS and productivity suite, re-writing VBA scripts (which often doesn't work well). Then you'd have to de-couple the entire organisation from Active Directory. And refactor (at best) or re-write (at worst) all custom in-house apps that rely on either Windows or Active Directory. It's just too expensive.

TheAnimus 13y ago

>I realize I'm not even talking about Linux here; I think that just underscores my point. I've seen about 10-20% Linux use and about 0% Mac use in industry (Finance - Buy and Sell side). YMMV. Linux is incredibly popular because people claim (rightly or wrongly) that they can have a lower latency setup. R-Project is very popular with people because they can have engineers customise it in ways not possible with Mat Lab. But at the end of the day it all falls back down to MS Excel. Apple don't have any enterprise ready tools for managing a system of 50,000+ client PCs and 30,000+ servers. So they don't get a look in, save the few iPads that are just perks and never used for any work that I've noticed.