Toolkit

Story: Linux club helps firms hide from Microsoft

Posted by: Alex (Wednesday 11 February 2004, 7:16 PM)

I believe the idea is that when MS sees a company/govt looking to move from MS to Linux, MS comes in with some steeply discounted deal. This undoes one of the advantages of Linux: Cost. By hiding this from MS, the company/govt is ideally going to compare the true cost/value of MS vs. Linux. Imagine if you were a company of 500 desktops, and you pay full price for XP($300/copy?) .. and then MS comes in and offers it to you for $50/copy. You have no migration costs, and you got it cheap.

On the downside, you're still locked into all that MS stuff, unless you use Windows, but use other alternatives like OpenOffice, etc.

I do find it interesting that this company offers to hide you from MS, but then "locks" you in to thier smart-card solution.