Comments on: Microsoft's eye on open source

Software giant's Martin Taylor soldiers on, evangelizing that open source may not be all it's cut out to be.

Quite agree with Mr. Taylors' reasons

To be honest Linux is the great pieceofcrap. Uncomfortable, not more productive than other OSes, working with it people spend more time doing less.

Usually they are people who do not have enough money to use better products.

[lwvirden]

Cost of ownership lower for Windows?

How in the world would one find that the cost of ownership for Windows is lower? Certainly one may be able to find certain types of software for Windows that is not yet available on Linux. And there is a cost of ownership for Linux. And that cost may be steep initially, if one has only Windows admins who only know how to click on wizards and call Microsoft if that fails. However, the ongoing cost of ownership surely is less, overall, once one has gone through a conversion process.

TCO argument is moot

Well, from a strict business point of view, TCO *is* probably the single most important factor indeed. That is, if one's conceptual domain revolves solely around ROI, shareholders benefits and profits.

When one considers a scope a little larger, say the domain of collaborative work, then the argument is moot. I am sure MS knows all of that, but their best strategy is the good old "divide and conquer". Taken alone, a company or organization has a limited amount of resources and intellectual capital and it certainly makes sense to some of them that Linux is not worth the hacking (given Windows involves close to no hacking compared to Linux, a point I am sure a lot of people can prove wrong).

The point I want to draw attention on is that when organizations, which usually happen to share a great deal of use cases, *unite* to collaborate to get things done, then they can lower their TCO and at the same time make a sustainable software investment.

The TCO argument will work so long as organizations see their relations to one another solely on a competitive basis. In a world of individualism and corporate glorification, collaboration will remain a minor activity until other things start factoring in. One day or another the "societal costs" associated with the current economic model will factor in, as is currently apparent in the ongoing unveiling of environmental/health costs we have imposed on ourselves because we haven't accounted for them in our previous economic development models.

Sustainable development also applies to the software world.