Replacing Linux with Windows saves £1 million

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 04 December 2008 03:05

Business IT - Open Source

Don't the major distributions such as Red Hat, Ubuntu and SUSE provide for automatic updates? And aren't some of the updates automatically delivered to Windows systems for Microsoft's benefit rather than the customers'? (Think WGA.)

So again we'll give this claim a question mark rather than a tick - after all, there might be something about equipment hire that certain Windows consultants understand better than anyone else.

Application software is another area where you have to question the like-for-like basis of comparison.

"Previously we had to go through the rigmarole of converting customer-facing documents from OpenOffice to Microsoft Office Word or Excel," said Fleming.

Huh? OpenOffice reads and writes Word and Excel files!

Still, Speedy Hire isn't the only company in this business to experience user-acceptance problems with OpenOffice. Earlier this year, The Standard reported open source consultant Lindsay Holmwood telling the linux.conf.au conference that Kennards Hire experience significant user backlash over the introduction of OpenOffice because the role of Microsoft Office documents had been underestimated.

And when it came to the software used in the hire operations, the comparison was between an old 'green screen' proprietary application (and haven't we all seen those running behind the counter on a Windows PC) and a modern GUI application, Microsoft Dynamics AX.

An apples and oranges comparison? Please read on.