Toolkit

Story: Life after Microsoft - One firm's complete conversion to open source

• 
• 

If only it were that easy. Perhaps the guitar strings industry is one that doesn't have millions of dollars and hundreds of careers tied to an existing IT infrastructure. In most companies that have CEOs, the very idea of upgrading just the client load can be a year-long effort. Converting the back-end (servers and apps) that run the business to an alternate OS is a decision few companies could make without some serious contingency plans, lots of patient users and an unknown quantity of trucks containing sacks of cash. ($100K would be serious chump-change)

The story doesn't really say why Mr. Ball was humiliated by the experience. We shouldn't be humiliated by our own mistakes. Hopefully it wasn't just because he got caught with unlicensed software; a responsibility of his IT group.

The only way the transition was a breeze: If the abacuses would have really been a viable Plan B. But even with that, training required to roll-out 10,000 new abacus-based clients wouldn't be trivial.

All said, I think I would like to work for an IT group in the guitar strings industry.

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread