Re: NT5 [you may know it as Windows 2000]

[Calum Morrell <calum@xxxxxxx>]

As my last email, MARKETING! Microsoft are fantastic marketers, they
don't just aim at the techies they go for the jugular - management and
directors. The poor little finance director, convinced by an unyielding
swarm of drivel that NT will save them money and perform wondrous tasks
that no other os could even conceive.

On the home user front, MS has been absolutely essential. It's been the
constant bloated nature of upgrades that have reduced the cost of
hardware to manageable levels for the average person. Over 4 years ago I
paid £2500 for a P5-166 16Mb Ram, 2.5Gb HD, 4 Mb Matrox and reasonable
sound card with a super fast 8x CD-Rom [which I'm typing on at the mo,
albeit slightly upgraded]. For the same money today I can have a dual
1Ghz Athlon based system with 512Mb RAM and 72Gb HD with a 32Mb Dual
Monitor based G450. Microsoft is directly responsible for this, and to
all those succurs that fall for the marketing and upgrade every time I
say - THANK YOU, I can built my Linux based neural nets to faster than a
Cray C90 ot T3D for around £20,000 instead of £10,000,000 upwards.

But now I want stability, functionality and a manufacturer who cares
more about the user than profits. It's difficult for any commercial
organisation to get this right, hence GNU-Linux with millions of
developers working for nothing more than people using their software.
Don't quote me the number of estimated developers on Windows or Linux,
because a lot of them are the same people.

Finally, I don't know the size of your business, but I do know the costs
involved in a successful, well planned NT migration. You may like to
consider finding another software house who is willing to comply with
your needs and not expect you to follow them. Don't forget to add in
support time, re-training, users licensing and business integration
costs to your proposed costs.

If you go to NT, I hope you have a far more successful transition than I
have seen elsewhere.


Calum

Mark McCall wrote:
>
> > The sad thing is Novell is loosing market share, and yet they
have a
> better
> > product, certainly from the client's point of view.
>
> That's a true statement John but strange when you look at it.  Why is
it the
> "the evil empire" continues to take market share when it's
products are
> supposedly so bad?
>
> We have a Novell Server in work too but we are probably going to have
to
> change to NT when the next version of our Till software moves away
from DOS
> to a Windows system.
>
> M.
>
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