Barrapunto

Salut,
Sinner

-------Mensaje enviado------

From: xxxxxx@yyyy.zzz
To: comments@ragingbull.com
Subject:On the article 'Cyberstock Investor Report 01/16/01
Date: 12-Feb-2001

Mr. Chet Demback,

From what you say in the article it looks like open source companies are the only ones that are doing bad.

Well, now that even Cisco is not doing that well (and they foresee a worst 2001), PC-market sales in the 4Q-2000 are down, sales of OEM MS-Windows 2000/Me are down, MS-Office-2000 is only at the 10% of the expected upgraded rate..... Just check PC Magazine from February 20th, 2001.

*All* the information technology market is going down, after the failure of the "dot coms". It is not a localized , open-source only thing. Let me put some light on why is it. Let me show you the biggest markets: Home users and Corporate users.

Home consumers don't seem to feel the urge to upgrade from their 400MHz-range computers to 1 GHz range computers. Why?

Will they be able to surf the net faster with giga-hertz PCs? No. Instead, they invest in broadband Internet access.

Will the bundled OS and software will be easier or less error-prone? No. And they already know the one that they posses. Why change it?

Will it be cheaper? Nothing is cheaper that using what you already own.

Let me tell you about my home. There's 2 computers at home. Now we have DSL. One computer has changed the OS, yes, but it has gone to Linux instead of to Windows2000. Maybe I will get more RAM and another hard disk drive (total of $300). But no new computers (at $1,200 each, they are a bad deal).

This is why home consumers do not need to upgrade an already reliable computer. And this is why even Dell is laying off employees, sales are down and the results of Microsoft will be plainly bad. Microsoft is highly dependent on OEM bundles.

Then, at the corporate level is the same story. There's no real added business value to a new upgrade of MS-Office or Windows. Changing the OS and /or the office suite is a nightmare of testing, probing, adapting, training, dll version checking, applications that worked now hey do not work, there's a need of new licenses for the new '2000' version of the product... I know what I'm talking about.

Let me talk about our company, with ~2,000 users and using a WAN.

I was in the team moving from Win 3.1/Word6.0 to Win95/Office95. And then form Office95 to Office97. There was a lot of men-hours invested, lots of tests and lot of time complaining for the new problems, not all of them solved with the patches (the ones called sr1, sr2, sr2b), so we had to provide home-brewed workarounds. After some years, the company now has a working and quite stable system. The users are already trained in this system. There are existing training courses for new employees, with teachers that know the courses, existent material and so on..

If there's a change in the OS or Office suites for the users, it will be IT-hell. And the IT management doesn't want to spend the existing money on something new that does exactly what we already have now... but with greater hardware demands. And this would mean more training, some time running with errors (this means angry users),...

The IT management considered and declined the 'upgrades'. Instead, with that budget, the company is going to go web, upgrade the intranet, upgrade application servers and database servers, upgrade 'venerable' machines, invest in new home-developed products... This means more services for the users, more applications available for the users and a reliable system available to the users. We exist to please the users and make sure that the system works 24/7/365. Users do not care if they have Windows95 instead of Windows2000. They care for doing their job.

The IT management, on the other hand, is considering dumping the MS-NT servers. At least, most of them. They are expensive licensed, the support is expensive (and not that good, even with MS Priority direct support as development partners), there's too much downtime (any downtime is too much), they've been proven unsecure in a MS-virus and MS-haters crakers world, ... and they eat lots of resources.

We are trying Linux boxes and other Open Source solutions. They are easily integrable in the existing network, we can do progressive replacement, they are sound and nearly virus-free, with the same men-hours applied to a Linux server, we are getting less down-time, less viruses, more security, our own support team (combined with external support team) that is fast and not that expensive.

Also, the localization in our language is better with non-proprietary solutions. For a cheaper price, we access the source code and we can localize the software to our language needs. This is very important to our users. And we can do it ourselves.

So, as you see, everyone has its problems. Not only one part, but all of the IT industry.

Regards,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

P.D.:Please forgive my English, as I am not a native English speaker.