On: Wed, 20 May 2009 14:18:48 -0500, Michael
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've noticed other posts on this thread recommending .Net
> and VB, as a way to become employed, and maybe thats the
> way to go. I just want to say that (in my opinion) Microsoft
> is a bad investment of your time.
>

I agree, see below.

>
> I've always had somewhat of a minority viewpoint on things
> in general...

I think of myself as more of a "contrarian" than a "minority".

>
> If you truly liked the HP3000, then you will see more
> similarities in the Unix world, and less in the Microsoft world.

I also second this opinion.

I began considering alternatives to HP even before the 2001 EOL
announcement, albeit for our HP9000 servers.
This led to us adopting the Red Hat (RH) Linux distribution running on
generic i86 boxes sometime in early 1998 as far as I can recall.  It
was RH-6.something in any case.  At the time I was a member of
MicroSoft's (MS) Developer Network as well.

Looking at MS today, I see a great deal of similarity in its present
behaviour to that of Hewlett-Packard (HP) beginning from the mid
eighties. Recall that it was then when the founders passed the reins
on to professional managers.  Mr. Gates too is now beginning the
long goodbye and his impetus will not be found in anyone willing to
work for a salary.  The abject failure of Vista with respect to XP
and the doubtful future acceptance of Vista's replacement bring to
my mind HP's over-commitment to Allbase and its decision to
depreciate Image.

The future is something we all back into, usually staring fixedly at
the past for guidance on an invisible and uncertain road.  It is not
given that MS necessarily will fail after Mr. Gates final departure.
But, it is unlikely to remain anything like the company that exists
under his leadership.  For good or bad.

What led me, and therefore my firm, away from HP and MS, and IBM for
that matter, is now nearly as difficult to determine as predicting
the future.  I rather suspect that the demise of the HP3000 figured
prominently.  The shock of that announcement and the realization
that the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we had paid HP,
Cognos, Bradmark and the rest over the past 20 years was no longer
an investment, but now a sunk cost, turned me away from proprietary
software and hardware.  Consideration of the vast amount of labour
that went into our custom application software,  which proved
uneconomic to move to another platform and was therefore obsoleted,
was another factor.

Regardless of the causes, we have in consequence begun moving away
from MS as well as HP.  MS Office is no longer permitted on-site at
our premises.  We instead use OpenOffice exclusively.  While desktop
PCs running XP-Pro presently predominate I am typing this on my
desktop i86_64 duo-core running Linux-2.6.18.  I run all our network
servers on the same OS albeit on various i86 processors.

My journey into Linux land was not without its inconveniences and
disappointments.  RedHat abruptly changed its service and
distribution policies around version 8/9 and a year on their paid
support plan provided no plausible reason to remain with them as a
provider. In fact, it gave a good deal of evidence to the contrary.

Leaving RH led to encounters with other distributions of Linux.
After dabbling with WhiteBox Linux I moved over to CentOS and have
remained with that distribution since.  You can get paid support for
this distribution but I have never found the need.  The CentOS
mailing list is every bit as helpful and as knowledgeable as this
one is for the HP3000.  Sadly, they do not however, appreciate
discussions such as I am writing.

I have written elsewhere about what value that we as a company have
derived from Open Source Software (OSS) and community supported
projects such as  sendmail, vs-ftp, OpenSSL, sshd, the Linux kernel.
And also from the value added efforts of the many Linux distributors
whose package bundles and managers make Linux actually useful.  So I
will not go into that in great detail here.

However, I think that it is wise to recall the tactic that MicroSoft
used in its climb to the top, "embrace, extend and extinguish".
Their preferred means was offering "free-of-price" work-alike
alternatives to paid-for stand-alone packages. Alternatives that,
although free of monetary cost, had some hook that made getting
liberated, once ensnared, economically difficult.

That is a significant point respecting for MicroSoft's future,
because most OSS projects are already free of price.  Further, being
open source, those projects have numerous contributors whose main
interest is quickly getting something that works reliably in a
certain manner. Not what will increase management's stock option
values over the next fiscal quarter.

What does MS have to offer in contrast?  A draconian licensing
policy with a totalitarian enforcement practice to match.  Closed
source software which is sold like detergent: "Buy this year's new
and improved version!" Usually because they did not build last
year's improved version very well to begin with. Prices for software
upgrades which simply do not reflect the value provided. Is this
really the sort of money sucking treadmill that profit motivated
firms wish to mount?

If one is forced to enter unfamiliar territory then it is comforting
to take a map.  Moving from the HP3000's comforting environment to
the wide-world via the MCTS/MCSE route provides one sort of map. To
where remains open to question.  Picking a specific technology such
as dot-net or Java provides a second, albeit overly detailed, map. 
Again to uncertain destinations.  It is also well to consider that
maps do not provide directions.  You can still get lost even if you
know that you are somewhere on the map.

Conversely, one can accept that the future is unknown and therefore
unmappable.  In this case what one requires is a set of skills to
discern difficulties and opportunities and an attitude to approach
them with resolve.  I suggest that mastering skills like Behaviour
Driven Development and Agile Programming Practices, using whatever
languages and OS platforms that are ready to hand, will pay bigger
dividends than relearning how to write COBOL or SPL in dot-net,
Java. Perl, or whatever is the langue de jour.

Further, learning how to locate, evaluate, obtain, install,
configure and use OSS projects on several common Linux distributions
will make you far more valuable to small and medium enterprises than
any programming skill. Routine system administration, including
updates to OSS packages, represents a significant burden for these
organizations.  Being able to switch hats from developer to sysadmin
at mid-day to deal with a server crisis is a skill well worth
cultivating and publicising.

Needless to say, none of this is easy.  But neither is any of it
overly difficult.

Regards,


-- 
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