As my post indicated. I'm talking about operating systems.
Next time windows doesnt do what you want, give your Microsoft rep a call and see if he can have the source changed and recompile it for you.

If I buy a million dollars worth of HP blade servers with windows 2003 server and the OS blue screens try getting Microsoft to right the problem. NT has been blue screening for 20 years.

There is no guarantee (implied or expressed - as the legal statement says)whatsoever in any Windows operating systems.

If I buy a backup solution from sunguard or veritas, sure I will hold them accountable for performance.

With windows operating systems you get what you get. I dont care who you are. We had 10000 Windows machines at a $60 billion fortune 20 company (cardinal health) and I can confidently say that Microsoft would never address any problems we had in windows XP.

 

Uhg... your not reading what I typed or meant. So did you have support contracts with those 10000 PCs directly from Microsoft? Nope. Just crappy support from the hardware vendor...

MS pitches you an entire new .NET solution for your health care records... front end, back end SQL, the whole thing. They provide hardware specs and recommendations. You buy into the project and roll with it using Microsoft Consulting services... you will get something recompiled or patched if that's what it takes. I've had all sorts of software patched up and a special hotfixes released for peticular issues. You just need to know where and how to press them. Point it, it CAN and DOES happen with nearly ANY commercial software company, and you get it ASAP and with a smile. Open source? Not gonna happen and no C-something-O in their right mind is going to go for an open source project like it.

 

Of course we had support contracts. Part of the contract was that we would always have the latest OS for the next 10 years.

I dont see MS changing their OS because of a compatability issue with some legacy systems you are running. No way. Could you get MS to make a command line only 64 bit operating system that will run on 133MHz boxes?

Microsoft makes Toyota Camrys. Good out of the box and does pretty much what an end user wants. Linux is a 69 camaro that, in the right hands, can kick some serious butt. It sounds like you love letting MS burn through your budget

If MS pitched me a software solution like you describe, it would be 10 million dollars.

Most large compaies develop this kind of stuff in house.

I would tell them I hired 20 people to develop it for me using Linux, MySql, Apache and PHP.

With open source, if you know what you are doing, you can do it your self.

Its technology, its really all the same at the heart of it. Some pay too much for it others leverage the free stuff as there is no ceiling.

Google for example has done this. Their entire technology was derived off open source stuff and their servers farms are out of date x86 machines.

I see where you are coming from. If you pay them enough and bug them enough MS will help. As for being a "business parter" in the true sense, is a different story.

 

 

Apple's market share can't grow because virtually no I.T. manager will deploy proprietary, single-sourced hardware on corporate desktops. This dissuades many software companies from writing for Apple's self-capping market.

 

We agree on something!!!