Novell Still Runs Windows

daria42 writes "Despite Novell's internal migration to Suse and OpenOffice.org, the company admitted today that up to 3000 of its 5000 workers still had dual-boot installations with Microsoft Windows. These users are likely to be migrated to pure Linux boot systems in the next year or so." From the article: "Hovsepian's remarks indicate Novell will have at most a few months' experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor's predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream." Update: 04/11 13:25 GMT by J : At the closing OSCON session, August 5, 2005, Miguel de Icaza talked about Novell's progress. My notes read: "novell's moving 5500 employees from windows to linux. first stage, office->openoffice, is complete. second stage, windows->linux, is 50% complete, proj. 80% by Nov."

Obvious?

Since a fair wodge of Novell's money comes from selling Windows software, I comfortably predict that this won't happen any time soon.

Re:Obvious?

Since a fair wodge of Novell's money comes from selling Windows software, I comfortably predict that this won't happen any time soon.

Since Novell has a fair wodge of business savvy, I agree. The Windows licenses are sunk costs and removing Windows completely would only add more cost to that, with no measurable benefit. So long as the Windows partitions don't get in the way of doing work, it would be a bad business decision to get rid of them.

TFA is pure FUD. It might be useful to know how many Novell employees still mostly use Windows, but there is no value in knowing how many have dual boot capability.

Oh wait... a lot of businesses making the switch to Linux will be dual booting for some time. Looks like Novell is well positioned to provide them with experienced technical support. I wonder if that is accidental or deliberate <sg>?

Still develops products for windows

Windows will probably never completely go away, or at least not for a very long time, since they do still develop products for windows.

Windows? Duh!

I work for Novell, and of course I have a windows machine. I develop software that has to run on Linux, OS X and Windows. All of our developers are in the same boat. If they don't have Windows code, they have NetWare code that needs to be built on Windows. Very few developers don't have code that needs a Win32 box either for development or for testing.

But ask me what machine I use to read my email, surf the web, write code, etc. It's my Linux box. And most of the developers on my team are the same way. And Novell as a company has been WAY better than anywhere else I have worked about having every business app I need on Linux supported by the IT department, and I even used to work for a company whose main business was their Linux distro (no, it wasn't SuSE).

Whine, whine, whine

They make Windows sound like a controlled substance. "Oh man, we're working night and day to get these employees off such a nasty habit. Please don't let this affect your opinion of Novell as a Windows-free workplace."

Windows is a million times less addictive than nicotine. I kicked the habit on my personal computers in junior high while my peers were just *starting* to smoke.

No way

You're trying to tell me that a large corporation with 5000 desktops, who develops Windows software might run Windows on a lot of them? I'm shocked I say, shocked.

Worth checking out

FWIW...

We've just had a vendor pitchfest for a replacement OS for an elderly unsupported RH release in use on about 4000 servers (my employer's a dotcom with piles of machines in many remote datacentres round the world.) We've had Sun pitching Solaris, Red Hat on RHEL and Novell/SuSE. I must say the Novell/SuSE pitch was the most unexpectedly impressive; Crispin Cowan's AppArmor is really, really good (I'm biased: I'm a security geek) and seems to be much more usable than SELinux. Xen also seems to be happier on SuSE than RH.

Sun had a good story now they can say Solaris is really Free, but they seemed very defensive (spent 30 mins showing us balance sheets marked "Sun confidential, internal use only" emphasising they make lots of money and aren't about to go bust. But we would definitely be a relatively small customer for Sun, whereas I'm more convinced that Novell would be prepared to go the extra mile to keep us happy.

Personally I'm going to be trying SLES out on at least one machine at home, alongside OpenBSD and Mandriva, regardless which OS our beancounters plump for.

Who cares?

I get it - they aren't fully converted. But then - they do DEVELOP software that runs on Windows. And their tools will only succeed if they can integrate into a Windows environment.

The accomplishment is that they are all dual boot and they use OpenOffice.org. Period.

No obstacles, only opportunities.

I can see why they haven't migrated yet. There are a few business apps, mostly vertical applications for ticketing, billing and invoice, that need to be run on Windows. For instance, where I work, we use a proprietary ticketing system that is unlikely to be ported to anything that isn't Windows. It enters problems on a customer's account, and assigns the problem to the appropriate technician, who then updates the ticket as needed.

But here's the deal... for all of its slowness, awkward GUI implementation, dubious reliability and stratospheric license and support contracts, all it really does is read and update database records. It's a LAMP application with out the L, A or P.

Here's a bigger deal... almost all vertical client/server apps can be replaced by a web-based application. Almost all of them do nothing but update and display database records.

Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?

Why not indeed.

This is where the new growth in the IT industry is headed. Already, most of the tools I need to interact with the vast and varied store of corporate data are web-based utilities. Admittedly, I work on the technical side of a major ISP, and we tend to be more elightened about such things, but really... Linux on the desktop will be a reality sooner rather than later.

The trick isn't porting applications to the Linux desktop, but to the Linux server.

Makes sense.

There are likely some departments within Novell that still are dependent on Windows for third party apps. Like an accounting or payroll department perhaps. Are there enterprise level Linux apps that would support them? Not trying to flame. Just a question.

Re:Makes sense.

Well yeah like Peoplesoft, Oracle financials, JD Edwards.... The problem for those guys is Excel Macros not their core apps.

It's not like they haven't already paid for it...

Just because Novell is offering Linux doesn't make it heresy that they have boxes with Windows dual-booted. If they've already bought their licences for Windows, MS is already paid. Not exercising the licences they own out of protest isn't going to make a dent. Meanwhile, their devs need to be able to run stuff on Windows, so it kinda makes sense that they have Windows at their disposal.

Speaking as someone who lost a number of potentially productive days trying to get Windows 2000 SP4-slipstreamed to install on a 250G harddrive without crapping out at boot-time when it saw a partition beyond the 128GB barrier, Linux is looking better every day. In fact, after spending five minutes in Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE, the chameleon won and is now installed on my hda4. But I still need Windows to run a few things...yes, mostly games, and a few college websites that just have to have IE6. But I already own Win2K, and I'd be silly not to use it just because MS is an idiot sometimes.

Keeping Windows around for the things Windows is good at makes my computer more powerful. I don't support MS, but I'm not going to rend my nose to spite Bill's face.

Windows, or at least, the Microsoft Operating System, is never going to go away. If Linux seriously erodes Microsoft's position, they'll sink their pentillions of dollars into making a solid, quality, viable OS product. So don't mind Novell, or myself, for installing SuSE and Windows next to each other. You need not be a zealot or a martyr to be a soldier.

Developers + PSE's

Since Novell actively supports and develops Client32 for Windows, Groupwise for Windows, Zen for Windows, etc I hope they'll keep[ some Windows boxen around for developing and testing purposes. And since their PSE's support accounts that run Windows, those cats need to be using dual boot and/or virtualization setups as well. I say don't focus on how many desktops they didn't migrate to 100% Linux, focus instead on how many they did. I'm also willing to bet that if Novell weren't an IT company that had to develop and support software on Windows, they'd have migrated a much greater percentage of their desktops.

Wine

Until wine is in decent shape, it is pointless to approach general public to switch. While it will never run 100% of the applications,
it is not necessary. It just a larger fraction of the applications than it currently does.

Having said I was surprised to see how far it has come. I tested several niche applications used in the insurance industry with codeweavers. None of them had a problem. While I am not ready to recommend wine as an option in our company, I have a hope that
in future it can become a reasonable recommendation.

Report

I wonder if they are generating a report of the migration (positives and negatives).
And if so, will they publish it?

Novell Still Doesn't get it

This is slightly offtopic....but

First to dispense with TFA: since they are developing stuff for Windows, they will never be rid of it, nor should they. So they will always run Windows in-house to some extent.

But why can't they sell their product to other people? They have all the right parts to replace a Windows/Active Directory infrustructure. They have a desktop (Suse), they have a respected directory server (eDirecotry/NDS), they have general purpose servers (Suse), Zenworks to mananage it all, and they have an entrenched legacy product (i.e. a foot in the door) for which they can provide an upgrade path. Most importantly, they have them integrated seemlessly in their Open Enterprise Server. But they still can't get the sale. Its because their pricing provides no advantage over Microsoft A Novell Open Enterprise Server per user license per year is $230 retail. A MS Win2K3 10 user CAL is $1199 retail (or $119.9 per user). That's retail. MS, being the bigger company, has the ability to come even lower in enterprise or site licensing. Sadly, Novell doesn't seem able to do the math.

They should take the chance that they could make up the difference in revenue by going with volume over price. More licneses for less each, instead of fewer licenses for more each. They have to realize that every Windows installation is going to lead to an Exchange installation instead of a Groupwise installation. If they could build the market share in the network products, the revenue in services and add-on products will follow.

Dual-boot means nothing in and of itself

When I was working for Novell, I started my move to Linux by installing it on the second drive in my laptop and dual-booting; it was the easiest way to start with Linux and preserve the data on my Windows volume. I booted into WIndows very few times after that, and the last few times I realized that I really hadn't needed to. But my Windows volume remained intact (and unused) for months, until it was worth my time to re-format the volume and do a clean install of Linux. So I was officially in "dual boot" status for months, but using Linux 99% of the time.

Having said that, the transition at Novell had its high and low points. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the services on the company intranet shifted from supporting WIndows/IE only to generic browsers. I was disappointed in the quality of the GroupWise client on Linux (not that I was wild about the Windows version...), and the lukewarm support for the Evolution client on the GroupWise servers.

Oddly, the thing that made the Linux move easier for me than many of my co-workers was the fact that I am an OS X user by preference. Of course, the terminal was not a mystery, and I was more accustomed to accepting that similar things are sometimes managed very differently on different platforms.

One constructive criticism I would leave Novell with is that they could learn a lot from Apple about making *nix palatable to the desktop user (specific example: printing), but, from where I sat, it seemed as though Apple was completely invisible to Novell.

Non-story

This has to be the biggest non-story I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Seriously, did ELSE anyone read that summary and just think, "Wow, who cares what Novell is doing OS-wise internally?".

Yes, I realize that this story is here for the purpose of reporting on another company converting to a pure-linux environment but the way the story reads, at least to me, is that Novell should be ashamed of itself for not doing it sooner or something.

Not trolling, just saying...

Dual boot?

I can't imagine why they would even want to dual boot if they could run something like VMWare and just virtualize Windows. Rebooting just to run a piece of software seems a little odd, unless it is a game that doesn't run well in VMWare. Something is fishy about this claim, methinks.

-matthew

Novell internal use of Linux and Windows

Disclaimer - I work for Novell.

The migration away from Windows and Microsoft Office was always a phased approach.

Office --> Open Office first (Novell is now standardised across the company on OpenOffice 2.0)

Windows --> Linux workstations for those that can; based on business function, application needs and the 'savviness' of the user

Right now I'd say that a large proportion of development, test and technical people are using Novell Linux Desktop as their primary desktop. I can see this just by working with people in meetings.

I can't comment on the overall number of people using single boot Linux, dual boot or just Windows; all I can share is what I see - lots of people using Linux on a daily basis.

The next phase is 'filling the gaps' - seeing how knowledge workers and those with specific applications can move. The release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 in mid-year should help with a lot of these issues.

Remember - just like any project choose the visible, realistic goals - that's what Novell's IS&T team have done.

Management nightmare?

But how are Novell's middle managers going to play with their Gantt charts from Microsoft Project?

No sh**, Sherlock

No shit that they have to keep windows boxes around to develop with - for the developers. Maybe, just maybe, they are talking about all their NON-development activities like accounting, CRM, the receptionist, etc... converting to Linux. This is SO not worth the elevated BP to debate any further.

freedom of choice

I thought the whole point of an alternative to Windows was to have a choice. Why are they in such a hurry to eliminate Windows from their company? Keep it for the win32 developers and remove it for all the others. No big deal. If all your developers do win32 and POSIX development, then paying the "Microsoft tax" is the cost of doing business. But if you want to get down and dirty, you could take a play from the Microsoft playbook. Make the POSIX version of a program as good as the Win32 version, and then gradually improve the POSIX version over the Win32 version, and then make up some BS excuse like "Windows can't handle it and Linux can," which may be true, but it doesn't have to be.

The'll always have to run Windows to some extent

Novell will have to keep Windows around for as long as they have to:

  - produce Windows software
  - support existing product
  - maintain support contracts with legacy clients (see previous point)
  - need to interoperate with Windows (although based on SuSE 9.3 and 10, they did little testing of KDE/Samba integration with Active Directory in recent release, it took a fair bit of tweaking on my part to make it work)
  - Need to make Evolution work smoothly with Exchange
  - Need to work out migration paths for clients who wish to move away from Windows

In other words, their support reps, development staff, and quality assurance labs will always need to keep Windows kicking around, very likely everything dating back to Windows 98 up through the current Enterprise Server, along with associated peripheral products like SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, and so forth.

Sales folks? Receptionists? Accountants? IT staff? They can very easily get away with running only Linux or UNIX variants.

Changing your focus of business away from an antiquated product like Netware, acquiring the rights to UNIX AND becoming a Linux solution provider takes guts and a lot of pain goes along with it. They're lucky staying with Netware as their primary focus for so long even after Microsoft used their monopoly status to gain entrance into the server environment (and made Netware integration a bit difficult) didn't kill them. Now their main threat is that they're going head-to-head with IBM in the marketplace now in several areas, and personally I hope that Novell wins because Novell has real products to offer, while IBM is surviving primarily on services now.

They'll never get rid of Windoze

I'd be surprised if Novell do manage the transition to Linux desktops. They sure as hell won't be using their own products on the servers: Many Novell web products only work with IE on the client. Last time I checked, M$ don't produce IE for Linux

Booting from Hard Disks

Booting from hard disks, how primitive!

5000 terminals with hard disks ensures plenty of hardware failure.

Diskless terminals (not thin clients) *should* have been the future.

Sadly the Lunix crowd is stuck with NFS, never mind.

Re:fisrt prost

and still not laid...

Re:Zenworks or what?

Just use LDAP, or even NIS.

Re:Not to be dense or anything

Novell's shift from Windows and Office to open source software was first begun in March 2004, while microsoft's honey pot was only released on the 3rd of this year?

Re:I'll tell you why: The high cost of training

i'd generally agree, but this should be less relevant in a business setting (it's a safe bet that those 3000 people are sticking with windows for quake 3). like they said in the article, things like porting macros from MS office probably aren't worth the immediate effort. along with that, any office i've worked in would be stuck with a bunch of legacy MS Access databases that would have to be converted too, and as far as I know there wouldn't be any easy way to handle reports or forms from Access using open source tools.

Re:I call bull

However, Linux is closer to desktop readiness this year than ever before.

Re:Zenworks or what?

When I was in High School, we just used NIS (and NFS-mounted home directories). When the school decided to "upgrade" (after receiving a contract with Dell) to new WinXP/AD boxes, we actually had an easier time "breaking the rules." The complex system of policies was easily circumvented, although this was all moot since a virus (which, as of my graduation, was still not completely resolved) knocked it all down anyway.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

The only reason that Linux isn't viable on the desktop is because Microsoft locks people into their proprietary standards. If you have a bunch of documents in MS Office, or you exchange documents with those who use MS Office, then you can't really get rid of it. You can't expect OO.o to be 100% compatible because they had to reverse engineer the file format, and there's no way to get it right. Microsoft can't even stay compatible with itself across versions, how is OO.o supposed to get it right? Same thing goes for many other things locking people in, like Exchange to name one. The software on Linux is great, and would be a lot better if we didn't have to spend half our time reverse engineering Microsoft's file formats, and implementing proprietary extentsions that Microsoft has wedged into the few standards it chooses to even recognize.

Re:Zenworks or what?

*nix has been managable across a network longer than Windows has even known what a network is. *nix was designed with the network in mind...

I call meta

Face facts folks, Linux still isn't ready for the desktop, and Novell, despite their loads of marketing, knows it.

If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, there's no such thing as "ready for the desktop". I see absolutely NO criteria of "desktop readiness" that (a)applies to Windows, (b) doesn't apply to Linux and (c) is an attribute solely of the operating system.

Where Linux adopters run into trouble is C. The problem is what economists call "network effects": if you need software X, and provider of X only targets Windows, then you need Windows.

The point of a company like Novell migrating to Linux is to help create a Linux market for X, or its competitor X'. But until X or X' is available on Linux, then you're stuck with dual boot.

Re:I call meta

If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, there's no such thing as "ready for the desktop". I see absolutely NO criteria of "desktop readiness" that (a)applies to Windows, (b) doesn't apply to Linux and (c) is an attribute solely of the operating system.

Well, see, as of a month ago, I still had to hand edit a text file to get wireless working on my laptop. That gets filed under "not ready for the desktop". While it may seem simple to you to type 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get upgrade' you have to keep in mind that *average* users don't ever want to see a command prompt. You're also correct about (c). You can't get Quicken for Linux, and GnuCash doesn't magically talk to my bank for me.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

Novell is a company that develops Windows products, as well as Linux and Netware. They are ALWAYS going to have Windows workstations there. We have a number of Novell DSEs at our company and they ALL run NLD or Suse 10 on their work laptops, and use Vmware to run Windows as needed.

Other Novell support staff needs Windows boxes around to support customers.

I don't think it's possible for them to be 100% Windows free. Their business demands that they run some Windows boxes.

What is "desktop ready"?

I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean? I have the notion that it means something different to everyone. I've been exclusively running Linux on my desktop for over 3 years, and exclusively on my laptop for over one year. I have a Linux system at my workplace, and so does almost everyone else on my floor. Are there occasionally problems with running Linux on my desktop (including problems related to the fact that I'm not running Windows)? Yes, of course there are. The amount of problems may decrease, but will never be fully eliminated (IMHO). I can usually find a detour or alternative to the problems that I face now though, so its not a huge deal. And I can state for a fact that the amount of time I spend fixing problems with my Linux desktop is much less than the amount of time I used to spend solving similar problems on my former Windows machine.

So I consider Linux is already "desktop ready" for me. I think that for the most part, regular people can do just fine if Ubuntu or another user-friendly distro is completely setup for them and they are given maybe a 30-minute tutorial on how to access the web, e-mail, etc. So who are we talking about here? Who does Linux have to be "ready" for to be called desktop ready? Those idiots that call in to tech support asking which key is the any key? The elderly who don't even know what a mouse is? Or just your normal, average computer user? And if so, who is a normal, aveage computer user anyway?

Sorry for the early morning rant, but this term has been bothering me for quite some time. :p

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

Exactly which piece of software can't you live without? You said after OpenOffice the choices were limited but for the life of me I just can't think of a single business app without a linux runnable replacement. Perhaps you work in an unusual environment but I'm just a little curious what these mysterios apps are.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

Er... mysterious apps? Just because you don't know of any doesn't mean they don't exist. For example:

AutoCAD - yup, very mysterious this...

StruCAD / XSteel - not quite so well known pretty much the only choices for 3D detailing in this industry.

On top of that we've got our CAD/CAM control software, can't see us moving to a Linux version of that. You need dedicated software to run well over £600,000 worth of machinery, taking data from the above packages. Can't see that running on anything but Windows for the forseeable future.

Re:Zenworks or what?

What are you talking about? You can do the same things with LDAP and/or Kerberos. For
you old-schoolers out there, NIS and a carefully structured environment will give you most
of the same advantages.

If you serve all your binaries over the network (nfs, snfs, sshfs, afs, etc) and do the same
with home directories and shared data directories, then managing an office of Linux machines
is an absolute breeze. All you've got to do is make sure each machine boots and knows where to
get authentication information (LDAP, NIS, Kerberos). Add netbooting, and you only have to
worry about having a boot image for each hardware set.

Now, if you're talking about an office of Linux computers where each user has root access to
his machine and is allowed to do whatever, well, then it's pretty much like running an
office of Windows machines with no AD and policies in place.

The training myth

The oft-hyped training issue is a complete myth in my experience.

My parents (age 70+) are happily running Fedora Core 5. training was neglible. They e-mail, surf, and play games with no problems at all.

My present company is completely linux-based using thin-clients. Training issues? None, nada. Complaints? None, nada. No issues teaching people to use Linux, no issues teaching people to use OpenOffice.org, or Gaim, or Evolution, or any of the other applications we use.

We are a medical facility. Our staff are trained to treat patients and are by no means computer people. They just want the computer to work so that they can get their jobs done. And you know what? That's exactly what it does.

Linux is not perfect, but neither is Windows. Each is better at some things than the other. Your comments are simply ignorant.

Re:Inspector Clouseau strikes again

I know you're trolling but you're obviously not very knowledgeable in business. It doesn't have to be the year of Linux for Novell to make millions. And guess what? We still haven't had "the year of Linux" and Novell is making millions! In the last year they've signed with a few governments. That alone is enough to drive the company for years. They have plenty of customers. In the last years they've had bigger problems with management than linux, IMO.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

FUD FUD FUD!

For any mainstream application there are 5 applications of the same type to chose from in any given Linux distro. Most of the software available for Windows are "crap" utilities or program that don't live up to the hype printed on their boxes. If there is an application problem in Linux it is that their are too many applications to chose from...

I'm not knocking Windows though....i'm a Windows Developer. I'm also a avid and experienced Linux user...who always has his FUD radar on...

Re:Zenworks or what?

Zenworks for desktop management + red carpet for patch management.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

This is only another proof that successful companies don't waste money on removing facilities that are no longer useful but don't get in the way.

An emerging migration strategy from Windows to Linux is

1. Dual boot
2. Mothball Windows partitions
3. Replace desktop hardware with Linux only boxen at end of service life
4. Maximize profits all the way along

Oh wait... you know that. You're only trolling, right?

[too early-- need more coffee...]

Re:I'll tell you why: The high cost of training

I dunno. 'URPMI OpenOffice.org' seems far easier to me than finding, downloading, executing and specifying paramaters, which is easier again than convincing myself to part with the money for the latest MS Office.

When i made the move over to Linux i wasn't at all a 'Linux Geek' (i still don't think i really am, aside from liking the CL), but maybe that's why i don't see these 'obvious' pitfalls. I switched because my Windows CD was scratched, and it occurred to me that it would be easier to download a Linux one than a new Windows one.
Since then, i've used my PC for exactly what i used it for when i had windows, and i've had no problems installing anything. 'course, i don't try to upgrade the kernel, port software or hack software. I do web-browsing, instant messaging, e-mails and word processing.
I also write HTML and Fortran, which, with Kate and GCC, is far easier and cheaper than anything i found in Windows, but i didn't look too hard in windows (they came bundled with Linux).

Re:The Bright Side...

Maybe HP figured since you cheaped out on your OS you'd have a few spare bucks to spend on a printer other than their absolute bottom-of-the-line color laserjet, which isn't "new" by any stretch of the imagination.

HP offers linux drivers for every color laserjet they make starting with the 3600 series and going up. So apparently the only asshole around here is the one who spends $250 bucks on a color laser and expects it to have features no other printer in its class has; and then shits on the company for his own cheap ways.

Douche.

Re:Windows - Necessary Evil?

I've just one small suggestion for an edit: Leave out the "Necessary" from the subject line.

Come to think of it, that leaves you with a redundancy: Windows/Evil.

Re:Zenworks or what?

Zen 7 does a fine job of managing Linux desktops and Servers.

Re:Zenworks or what?

AD and policies - hahaha.

Novell uses Novell ZENworks Linux Management internally to provide updates and patches to servers and desktops running Linux.

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/linuxmanag ement [novell.com] for details.

Re:Inspector Clouseau strikes again

Perhaps if Oracle bought Novell they would then have the power to give MS a true run for its money. Novell's Desktop Linux, OpenExchange with an Oracle DB back end and Evolution as the email client. OpenOffice/etc for the office suite. Opera or Firefox as their browser and Oracle, while still supporting Unices and Windows, has their own tuned Linux distro (SLES) to push their databases out on. This would be good competition for both Redhat AND Microsoft.

Re:I call bull

Face facts folks, Linux still isn't ready for the desktop, and Novell, despite their loads of marketing, knows it.

Either this guy is a troll or doesn't know Novell at all. Since when has Novell been know to do a lot a marketing? Or even a little for that matter?

Re:Some of the migration problems are subtle

"Lots of accountants rely on macros that are hard to port over."

For whom? The accountant? Any programmer who knows any macro language can probably do it in minutes.

This is why the real issue is IT policies. Mission-critical stuff should not be done in macros on a proprietary platform. It's just fucking stupid.

Re:I'll tell you why: The high cost of training

Anyone who modded this as a Troll doesn't deserve their friggin mod points.

I'm a Linux weenie, but the points above are very very true, and no manner of indepth analysis of the "rights" and "wrongs" of how things are done today will change the reality of what and how computers and their OSes function. We have reached a point where a computer is not a difficult device which requires a degree to operate. It is able to function as simply as a "device". I don't need to know "how" a microwave oven functions to be able to use it, and use it safely and easily.

And, this mentality is the vast VAST majority. Rattling the sabre about "you should *understand* the workings of your PC" rank up there with "you should *understand* how microwaves function" so I can use my oven. If I *wish* to learn, then I can - but nobody should be forced to do such, and this unrealistic expectation to do such will only continually to hamper the cause.

Every wondered why Ubuntu has rose to where it is today?