In following some of the trackbacks to the ZDNet article, Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user, I stumbled across an excellent blog, Diary of a Mad IT Manager. As I was reading through the posts, I began to come across tales of the all too typical kind of disastrous, Microsoft-induced IT expenditures that I too had witnessed in my days as a tech support person, and later as a network administrator. For example:

A thought occurred to me today about the state of our computers here. We’re so used to rebuilding them, we’ve gotten better and more efficient at it. I mean, we’ve got all manner of support software designed to do nothing more than recreating and restoring an operating system and associated loaded applications on a computer in as efficient and timely manner as possible. Why? Because Windows sucks so much that we have to reload it on a regular basis.

And so I decided to put the question directly (though a bit profanely): why do corporations persist in using Microsoft products, when they so clearly cost so much more money than the alternatives? His reply, I thought, clearly articulated those reasons.

I replied in turn, and I think the exchange describes fairly concisely, at least in the corporate shop, the reasons for resistance to change: the cost, due to the weight of history, is too high. You may read the full exchange on Mad IT Manager’s blog here, or archived on my site here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Digital Rights / Digital Wrongs, General, Linux, Microsoft Monopoly, Pigopoly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.