Fe Fi Fo Dum, I smell the blood of a <dead> CFO...
For a lot of people this article will be a little abstract and invite the kinds of threads one has seen so far - many of the same arguments and platitudes. Configuration errors in application...not ______ fault; their support didn't try hard enough, or know enough _____; it's Oracle, or they didn't know enough about it _______, etc...
None of that matters. One can take Unices/Linuces experts - I mean hard core, "if you dare run X-Services, you're a sissy and a fool; let's write our own distro" kinds of people and it will still either fail or cost a heck of a lot more than using .NET and Microsoft's "Platform." I see it every single day. Why? Simple...it just takes longer - no matter how skilled; no matter how devoted, it just takes too long to get the job done with OSS. Even for people who know; even for people who just dig the CLI [and we do, really].
One of two things happens. One does it all internally and the line item costs on the P&L are too high and not worth it, or one uses external companies and those same external sources have to take too much per client to succeed commercially. Either way, it costs too much and cannot be justified. It happens slowly, but at the same time quickly...one looks down and notes that line item and pretty soon the CFO sounds more like Hal - an example and a reason for it all.
Doesn't matter how or why when in the end it fails; when in the end, the guy signing the checks says, "No more." In our case, it is even more personal and more tragic, because as we have succeeded [using .NET], we've been able to underwrite friends and colleagues not at all unlike the examples used in the article [only worse]. I can actually see the conversations - masked by the polite language used. In our case, we've been both the experts and the guys signing the checks and we do say, "no more." Gawd, it is maddening - I can just about see the configuration files that were left as defaults that tanked them, too - doesn't matter [seen them before; fixed them before], it just takes too long and costs too much.
It is so much simpler - OSS: "but you can x, y and z..." .NET Platform: "Yes, and I can pull my own teeth, too, but why would I want to; point is, I don't have to." OSS: "but it isn't my fault; it's Oracle; it was Apache's config file..." CEO: "Tommy, I really could give a flip at this point; all I know is that a bunch of kids using .NET have kicked our backsides in at a 500x multiple and since moving to them and listening to them, it all works and it flies; this is over." OSS: "but we could have, should have, would have...." .NET/CEO: "Hey Chris, hand me that drivers disk so I can burn this thing down and put W2K3 on it."
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