Dennis Gallien wrote:
On Wednesday, December 07, 2011 05:13 AM Per Jessen wrote:
Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
On Wed, 2011-12-07 at 17:38 +1000, John Bennett wrote:
Or they just can't get the support from any "other than Windows" suppliers! Our company has just gone through the process, and were SERIOUSLY looking at a Linux solution (in particular, Novell).But after months of trying to get support, both off the web and locally (Qld, Aus.) we gave up and have gone for another Microsoft solution. Really frustrating!
In our company, they are doing all this stuff with sharing documents and such. Sharepoint, I think it is. Once you start the MS path with that, you are pretty much committed. In a company of 8000 engineers, reworking all that document integration is not likely to happen.
Yet a larger company is much more likely to be able to carry out a successful migration. Of course, a larger company will also have far more inertia and many more well-placed MS people to stop any such ideas well in advance. :-(
Ah, this thread continues to live on . . . my feelings won't be hurt if the following is longer (and it is long, you've been warned) than your schedule permits :) . . .
Per's comment above re "inertia" deserves a lot of consideration. It is *huge*. IMO, this is the most useful and relevant comment in this thread.
All the talk about this or that detail, while certainly very important to the users affected, as well as to those with broader experience like ourselves, are in the big picture just that . . . details.
It seems that often the distinctions between the data center and the desktop, and between businesses vs consumers, get blurred. And yet, inertia is the critical factor in all these market segments. The difference is in the form that the inertia takes.
For a business, switching costs are typically enormous. As Per also observed, the larger the company, typically the better equipped it is to handle migration. It is also likely to understand switching costs better - and the difficult to quantity soft costs, and risks (mostly non-technical), that can easily be larger than direct costs like sw conversion. Mgmt understands this. Anyone having worked in sales for one of the big hw/sw vendors mentioned, knows that virtually every new deal is primarily a matter of how to displace the incumbent. Discounting your way to winning occasionally works, but it's too expensive. In most cases, in the end, it's a matter of convincing whomever writes the check that the long-term benefits outweigh all the difficult switching costs (or convincing whomever the economic buyer delegates the decision to). It's a very high hurdle.
Smaller enterprises don't have this sophistication. But the inertia is still there. They only know what they know, and they don't know what they don't know. And unlike big companies, they don't have to resources let alone disposition to find out. That's not flippant; it just describes the mind-set. If a supplier has a monopoly position, it is the default. The business will decide based on comfort, safety, and money. Comfort comes from what you already know and safety from what everyone else uses. So the cost/benefit decision takes a simpler form, but the hurdle is there nonetheless.
By the way, in the public (govt) market segment, the issues are largely the same, but with politics being a much bigger factor. Some national and state govts have, or at least have tried, to adopt Linux. A few have succeeded. But in most cases, the push-back has been enormous. Helped by the incumbent, who will neutralize much of the price advantage with discounts, making the hurdle in this cost-driven segment extremely high.
In the consumer desktop market, inertia is nearly everything. The Linux world has touted "free" and "freedom" forever. In this market, with very little traction. The comfort and safety factors, rightly or wrongly, far outweigh not paying for Windows in most geographies. And the typical Windows user only cares about the app s/he uses, not the bevy of free stuff available. Concepts such as "open source" are meaningless. Sure there are exceptions, but the percentage is extremely small.
So why has Ubuntu been successful? First, define "success". Relative to Windows? That's ridiculous. All of Linux on the consumer desktop combined barely moves the needle. Why has Ubuntu been more successful compared to other distros? Because it has done a better job with comfort and safety for its target user.
I contributed to the Ubuntu project for ~2 yrs following release. Canonical put a lot of money and resources behind it. There was no democracy; Shuttleworth made the important calls, even about details. And there was a very tight focus on attracting typical Windows users, mostly younger people, with a lot of outreach in emerging markets. The key was rapidly building a large community providing excellent support and good documentation, and then building on top of that. The system wasn't remotely what SuSE and Fedora were (but Novell & Red Hat's desktop target was really the business end-user anyway, not the consumer market). Other commercial attempts failed (including mine, btw). Ubuntu "just worked", just enough (barely at first), for its target audience. It achieved awareness and mind-share. It became the default in this space. And so, roughly speaking, it is the incumbent. If openSUSE wants to attract the same new Windows users as Ubuntu, it will automatically be compared to Ubuntu, and it will have to overcome the inertia factor that Ubuntu has created.
That begs the question, does openSUSE want the *same* users as Ubuntu?
Bzzzt! That BEGETS the question. (i.e. it leads to the question). Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which you assume the conclusion to prove the conclusion (I.e. "This holy book is true because it says so." THAT is begging the question). -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org