[thelist] Microsoft's Relevance Fading?

[Andy Warwick]

On 2002/09/10 09:45 pm, "Frank" <framar at interlog.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, 7:23:40 AM, you said:
>
> The question arose from another: If I were planning a
> internet/intranet network for a government, a public sector client,
> is it still safe to recommend MS products?

I imagine the real issue is not whether you use MS products, but that the
data is held in proprietary MS formats.

Although on a personal level I don't like MS business practices, nor their
recent licensing changes, I have no problems using their products if - for
that use - they are best of breed. Excel and Word have a place on my hard
disk.

What is more of an issue is that - where possible - I will store data in a
vendor-neutral or open-standard format.

If you want to look at in terms of images, I use Photoshop to edit files,
but the finals and intermediate files are stored as TIFFs, which any image
editing program can open. So if Adobe went under and Photoshop was no longer
available, I could at least find an alternative.

> If you were in charge of re-designing and re-building a large
> portion of your government's web sites, would you feel comfortable
> in recommending that your government to spend several million
> dollars in MS products? Remember that this will have ramifications
> for at least 10 years affecting (at the very least) hundreds of
> people working on it, and millions of users.

On those timescales whatever product you recommend will be out of date by
the end of it's useful life, whether it be hardware or software. At that
point the issue becomes migration to the then-current technology.

It is never a good idea to tie your own company's fortunes on the fortunes
of another, so if the proposal was that 'we'll store all the data as MS Word
documents and Powerpoint files I'd say that was incorrect advice. If - at
the current time - on the other hand, Word or Powerpoint gave you the best
product for presenting standard-complaint data structures, I'd say go for
it.

If you went completely open-source there is still the chance Unix and Apache
won't be about in 10 years. (At least not in their current form.) Open
sources' true advantage here is that should MS go under it is much harder to
translate the data when their products are no longer available; if you have
the source code at least you can get in and patch it to convert your data
into the latest 'standard' format.

Andy W