Rex Ballard wrote:

snipped
pfft
yawn
ridiculous

When did Ballard anoint himself to be some kind of an expert's expert?
This is a totally ridiculous post. What the hell? He is no expert on
anything. The continuous and ridiculous lip dribble out of COLA people
is beyond anything normal.

Tom Shelton pulled this Usenet boner:

Makes me wonder what adobe will say if OOo ever becomes truly
competitive in the market place....

What, you mean like, making a lot of money?

Things have changed. CEOs are pushing the CIO to get as much return as
possible out of the budget they have. Even IT integration and Web
Services engagements require more aggressivev pricing. This puts more
pressure on everybody to keep capital expendatures down. When the
executive has to fly coach, in the center seat, for 6 hours, because the
company is cutting costs and he can't get a free upgrade, that's not a
good time to ask him for the equivalent of 20% of the payroll budget to
upgrade everybody's PC from Windows XP to Windows 7.

On Oct 20, 5:14 pm, "Kholmann is aka little 'Petey Toro' OLAY!"
To... at (no spam) toro1.net> wrote:
Rex Ballard wrote:

snipped
pfft
yawn
ridiculous

When did Ballard anoint himself to be some kind of an expert's expert?
This is a totally ridiculous post. What the hell? He is no expert on
anything. The continuous and ridiculous lip dribble out of COLA people
is beyond anything normal.

I just say things you don't want others to hear.

I remember back in 1987, I worked for a large international hitech firm
and while visiting the Australian head office in Sydney, I stopped by the
IT department and had a chat with the IT guys.

I noticed that they had a couple of boxes of the latest Microsoft Excel
on a desk and I eagerly asked when they would be rolling it out to the
interstate offices, who all had a very old version.

You'd like everyone to believe that Windows 7 is so great that
everyone will upgrade immediately, paying $2,000 per machine so that
the OEMs will make lots of money, and that nobody will get laid off if
the company shells out all that money, and that Windows 7 will make
them so productive that even if 20% of the staff is laid off, the
remainder will be so productive that the would never even consider
sticking with Windows XP or adding Linux.

Windows 7 is looking more and more like "Same Stuff Different Day".

Microsoft has been making outrageous promises for Windows ever since
1984, when they announced Windows 1.0 on the NEC PC.

And year after year, Windows has dissappointed, offering inferior
product to it's competitors, whether that was Apple Mac, SCO Unix, OS/
2, Red Hat, OS/X, or Ubuntu.

Sure, there's lots of memory grabbing eye candy that gobbles up all
the memory, CPU, and disk it can so that there is no room for
Microsoft's competitors, but is it really better?

Was Word for Windows 3.0 really better than WordPerfect?
Was Excel for Windows 3.1 really better than Lotus 1-2-3 for Unix?
Was PowerPoint for Windows 3.1 really better than Corel Draw?
Was Project 1.0 really better than MacProject, SunProject, or CA
Superproject?
Was OLE 1.0 really better than FrameMaker?
Was DCOM really better than CORBA?
Was DHCP really better than ARP?
Was ActiveX really better than Java Applets?
Was Notepad really better than VI or Brief or Emacs?
Was IE 2.0 really better than Netscape 5.0?
Was SMB or CIFS really better than NFS?
Was FAT32 really better than ext2?
Was NTFS really better than ext3 or Reiser?

Was lots of threads and slow context switches really better than
ultrafast context switches that protected memory from corruption by
other processes?

Microsoft has killed the competition completely in every market it
entered -

as far as the Windows PC is concerned. Often Microsoft's
"innovations" resulted in security holes, vulnerabilities, and
reliability problems.

The result is that most of the REAL innovation has moved to Linux and
Unix.
Microsoft puts out cheap knock-offs that have "enhancements" designed
to:
1. Lock out competition
2. Make it easier to access information on user's machines.
3. Make it easier for Microsoft to squeeze even more money out of
the OEM
4. Make it easier for Microsoft to squeeze even more money out of
the CIO.
5. Make it LOOK like a competitor's vastly superior product.

Microsoft has spent $4 billion a year in advertising, $2 billion a
year in legal fees, and $2 billion a year in legal settlements, to
keep Unix/Linux off the corporate desktop. They've been doing it
since 1991. That's 18 years at $8 billion a year - about $144 BILLION
to keep Linux/Unix off the market. They already have the OEMs "locked
in" and any OEM who doesn't want to submit to Microsoft's total
control, can quickly find themselves unable to sell ANY machines with
Windows (as happened to Compaq in 1996).

Microsoft doesn't have to spend money to get YOU to buy Windows, it
comes with the machine, whether you want it or not. The CIO decides
what goes on your corporate workstation or laptop, and you just have
to suffer with the consequences of their decisions.

Yet Microsoft spends $72 BILLION on advertising - to keep the media,
especially the trade media, from covering Linux or Unix favorably.

The problem for Microsoft is that OS/X IS UNIX!!!

The cat's out of the bag!!! and practically every reviewer is saying
"I'd rather have UNIX!!!"
When they say "I'd rather have a Mac", they are saying I'd rather have
UNIX.

Linux is like the girl who isn't all that pretty

Many CIOs are in much the same predicament with Microsoft. They
started using it because it would help the company be more productive,
but now any attempt to go to something less expensive, like competitor
products, generally results in embarrassing audits and questions you
don't want to have to answer.

On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:15:38 -0700, Rex Ballard wrote:

snip


Things have changed. CEOs are pushing the CIO to get as much return
as possible out of the budget they have. Even IT integration and Web
Services engagements require more aggressivev pricing. This puts
more pressure on everybody to keep capital expendatures down. When
the executive has to fly coach, in the center seat, for 6 hours,
because the company is cutting costs and he can't get a free
upgrade, that's not a good time to ask him for the equivalent of 20%
of the payroll budget to upgrade everybody's PC from Windows XP to
Windows 7.

So true. Another great article Rex!

I remember back in 1987, I worked for a large international hitech
firm and while visiting the Australian head office in Sydney, I
stopped by the IT department and had a chat with the IT guys.

I noticed that they had a couple of boxes of the latest Microsoft
Excel on a desk and I eagerly asked when they would be rolling it out
to the interstate offices, who all had a very old version.

(Note: I personally switched full time to Linux in 1997.)

Their answer stunned me.

"Never", they said !

He went on to explain that the sheer cost of upgrading the 500+ seats
was way beyond their budget, and we would be stuck with that version
of Excel forever. Only IT would be upgrading their machines to the
latest Excel in head office.

In Australia in 1987, things were booming, and most companies were
doing very well. The Australian government had mandated compulsory
training for all employees etc, and life was good, but that did not
mean that this huge international company could afford 500+ upgrades
to Microsoft Excel!

Nowdays, there is *no major excuse* for upgrading to the latest
version of decent Office software, because Open Office is Free.

However for Microsoft, the situation is far worse than ever, because
if companies didn't have the Excel upgrade budget in the boom times,
they sure won't have it now, in times of recession, just as Rex has
said.

On Oct 20, 4:08?pm, Chris Ahlstrom <ahlstr... at (no spam) launchmodem.com> wrote:
Tom Shelton pulled this Usenet boner:

Makes me wonder what adobe will say if OOo ever becomes truly
competitive in the market place....

What, you mean like, making a lot of money?

No, like popular enough to cut into Adobe's profits.

I fully expect a 3ghz quad core w/ 8 gig of ram to be the bare minimum
for w7 by the time the first service pack arrives, and to be unable
to handle the bloat of the next SP.

Terry Porter wrote:

Since when did a obnoxious troll have any rights to say *anything* on
COLA ?

When does a self righteous ass-hole clown on his fucking white horse
and in his fucking golden chariot, a COLA ass kisser, control
anything or anyone?

This fucking son of a bitch who does he think he is?

AZ Nomad wrote:

I fully expect a 3ghz quad core w/ 8 gig of ram to be the bare minimum
for w7 by the time the first service pack arrives, and to be unable
to handle the bloat of the next SP.

I fully expect you to swallow your own tongue in a spasm of stupidity.

You're an idiot's idiot, NoNad.