As I pointed out elsewhere...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| AnonymousCoward Feb 05, 2005 5:50 PM EDT |
...many local (Western Australia) wholesalers will sell a complete bare machine. This means that you save around AUD$120-$180 per machine up front, being the wholesale price of XP Home, Pro, '98 or 'ME. The largeish (for WA) wholesaler I chose advertises Microsoft on their front page, too, so we're not talking about an isolated rebel here. All it takes is not buying from Dell or whoever. That kind of undermines Mr CTO's basic premise. BTW, I think the ongoing offering of '98 for sale is eloquent testimony to 'ME's quality. (-: |
| tuxchick Feb 05, 2005 6:01 PM EDT |
If Mr CTO lives in the US, then it's a big duh that all of the major PC vendors are in the iron microshaft fist. I don't particularly care for the article- come on, what CTO goes shopping for hardware on dell.com? Nonononooo. A real CTO, or IT manager, or whoever calls up their sales rep. But it is telling that even IBM is very timid with desktop Linux. Ole billy's got 'em by the shorts. |
| PaulFerris Feb 06, 2005 2:30 AM EDT |
sorry to point this out but I think the man has an interesting point -- he's taking a practical tact to the whole "Does Linux Really Save Corporate America Cash" problem. The thing that has always pissed me off about using Linux in enterprise corporate America -- he's hit the first problem. When you get to ordering the hardware the vendor often passes along the cost of Windows "hidden" in a bundle. Where he was wrong (and I'm emailing him on this subject) is that when you're ordering bundles of hardware as a large corporation, you can be very picky about what's in those bundles. A supplier worth its salt isn't going to quibble over your removal of Windows XP server, for example, in this day and age (too many customers using Linux for them to accept it as normal). I'm not guessing about this at all -- this is direct experience. In the most recent example I needed 8 rack-mounted Intel servers of a Well-Known-brand. I went through the items on the bill of sale a line at a time. These were standard issue Intel boxes for where I worked -- I had no choice of supplier, as the Intel server support team would have to know the hardware inside and out. More on that choice in the next few paragraphs (which you can skip if you're not interested in why a large corporate shop would only buy through a Dell, IBM or HP). I easily removed the Microsoft products -- they were listed clearly as line-items. Here's where enterprise problems are different from you as an individual. You might be tempted to look at the bundled cost of these rack mounted servers and say something like "I could build a white box for way less than this! " You would be right and wrong at the same time. You might *aquire* a box for less, but you'd have to educate someone in the datacenter on how to manage it, where to get upgrade parts, how to put it into the rack, because it's slightly different -- oh, your box, it does have Lights-out-management, now doesn't it? Did you remember to make sure your supplier could get you parts for it in 3-5 years? What they can't guarantee that? When it's just you managing the thing, you can do all kinds of cheap shortcuts to acquire hardware. When you've got thousands of people depending upon that piece of hardware, a team of specialists that do nothing but manage your hardware (and thousands like it) you suddenly develop completely different rules of aquisition. A company like Dell, HP or IBM is who you buy through because you need someone used to selling hardware thats supported in multiple years -- completely supported down to the nuts and bolts. They have to understand the specific needs of enterprise type aquisition. This is why the author of this piece chose those vendors. Where he went wrong was in his method of acquiring prices. Now, back in the dark ages (1999, to be exact), I remember ordering an IBM thinkpad 600e through corporate sourcing, strictly to run Linux. I made it clear to our purchasing agent that the needed the OS to be removed or whatever supported Linux shipped with it. And it took about 3 weeks for he and I, going around and around with the IBM sourcing agent, to determine that I was going to have IBM support on Redhat Linux 6.1 (i think it was, memory fuzzy here...) , but the thing was going to ship with a bonafide copy of Win NT -- no way to remove it at the time. Pissed me off at the time, but I really needed a working laptop to do my job, and I wasn't going to get a non-IBM product through sourcing. |
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