[ale] Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district

[Jeff Lightner]

Politics is easy - Management often does what they perceive as "cheapest" not "best".   

 

I used to work for a company that had a whole chain of sites using SCO Xenix (That's right XENIX not UNIX) 1.0 on AT&T 286 processors.  

Later the guy who had been with the company during the install came back to the company.  I asked why the heck he had done that.  It turned out they had spec'ed 386 machines running AT&T 386 UNIX but right before the install AT&T discontinued one line of 386s in favor of another that would have bumped the cost per site.   He was in a meeting where the woman who was in charge (later famously going to prison for saying only little people pay taxes) noted that she'd just gone through a cost increment on another (restaurant systems) upgrade and wouldn't tolerate one for the hotel systems.   The Xenix on 286 was the result.  It worked albeit not as well as the original solution would have.   The fact that the users had to backup using tar on 5 ?" floppies was only one of the daily costs that resulted from this capital cost "savings".  

 

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Sid Lane
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 2:20 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Microsoft Windows ousted at California school district

 

they're clearly not uber-geeks but I give them credit (especially non-IT management) for not panicing at the 1st percieved challenge (even though it shouldn't have been one).  any ground gained is unlikely to be lost which is why you see the smear/FUD strategy from M$ (a la Massachusetts)... 

I wonder how this slipped under their radar?  or it is possible that it didn't (M$ tried a smear) and the decision makers actually decided to trust the IT people?

anyone know the politics behind this?  call me cynical but I have a hard time this decision was made purely on merit (or at least that it didn't have some red herrings tossed at it)... 

On 3/1/07, James P. Kinney III <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> wrote:

The transition is a good thing but the software costs they paid for are
a shame. They paid a license fee for each thin client that connected to
the terminal server (based on what suse says on their SLED 10 pricing
page http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/howtobuy.html  at the very
bottom).

Then they purchased a Citrix-alike tool to provide access to Micro$oft 
stuff hosted on M$ Terminal server when tsclient is a standard shipping
package in SLED (and Fedora and ...).

And they they bought Wyse terminals...

Ok. So the wyse Linux terminal is probably a lot better than the HP 
T5125's but...

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 10:45 -0500, James Taylor wrote:
> Nice headline to read on a rainy morning.
>
> http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1245710,00.htm
>
> -jt
>
>
>
> James Taylor
> The East Cobb Group, Inc.
> 678-697-9420
> james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com
> http://www.eastcobbgroup.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________ 
> Ale mailing list
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--
James P. Kinney III
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC
770-493-8244
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
< jkinney at localnetsolutions.com <mailto:jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> >
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7

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