Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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Stan Beer
Monday, 10 April 2006 05:01
And
OpenOffice.org allows you to save that newly liberated data in the
world's only open standard XML format, in nice clear, easily parsed text.
Which is why OpenOffice.org was selected by the National Archives of
Australia as the platform of choice for the long-term storage
of our country's documents of importance. A job that surely can't be trusted to Microsoft's proprietary formats.
I
could go on. Firefox is available on Windows, while Internet Explorer
isn't available on Linux. The Gimp is available on Windows, while none
of Microsoft's graphics apps are offered for Linux. Scribus, an
excellent entry-level desktop publishing suite runs on Windows. MS
Publisher
doesn't return the compliment for Linux. Apache? MySQL? PostreSQL?
Sendmail? All run on Windows as well as on Linux. Microsoft's IIS, MS
SQL Server and Exchange, refuse to consider Linux. Programming
languages? There are perhaps 50 open source interpreters and compilers
which support Windows - not one of Microsoft's supports Linux.
While
Microsoft goes out of its way to curb your every opportunity to migrate
away from Windows, the open source community makes every effort
to be platform agnostic and ecumenical, once again, giving you as a user, control.
The
upshot of all this comparison? If there's a reason why you're finding
it hard to migrate to Linux, if there's a reason why you find Linux
difficult or strange, if there's a reason why you can't find Linux apps
that can read your data, the answer is you. You're the one who didn't
think before adopting one piece of the mono-platform proprietary jigsaw
puzzle after another - be it a lock-in user-interface, data or document
format or OS-specific app. By not thinking clearly, carefully and with
some serious mid-to-long term critical analysis, you've locked yourself
into paying way more for what is now commodity software technology.
Is
there a way out? Is there a way to migrate most of your business to
mainstream open source commodity software technology? You bet. Here's how.
Most
organisations need to don strategic thinking caps when it comes to
migrating away from Microsoft Office or Windows. Very few know how to
do this. Moving away from either Microsoft franchise is a multi-year
exercise, and unless you plan to make it happen, it will never just
'happen'.
Unless businesses take it upon themselves to continuously refresh their
outlook on what technologies exist out there which can
offer them
platform and application flexibility in future, they wont have the
vision and long-term planning necessary to strive for change.
Here's
what I mean by this. When it comes time to decide upon that next
application or software solution your business needs, make sure that
the technology you choose can run on more than just Windows. Same goes
for the next software procurement. And the next. If you do this for
long enough, say 3-5 years, you will likely end up with few
applications which are locked into the Windows-only API.
Your
next step should be to introduce Firefox on your Windows desktops.
Migrate all your Internet Explorer bookmarks and user data, shake out any
IE-only dependencies your business has and banish IE use for every site
except that handful that are IE-specific. You'll be amazed at the
reduction in security issues through this simple step....more
This article is also available here
Also see
Novell: it’s the Linux desktop user stupid – part 1
Maddog says desktop the final frontier for Linux
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Microsoft Office 365Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars on almost any device.  |
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