Interesting day today, I'm still a little in shock. I just finished installing $60,000 worth of Microsoft software on my work machine. I am still having problems grasping how much that is. I keep trying to tell my self I could buy two nice cars for that amount. Or how about 10 vacations to Europe. Or 1200 copies of GTA Vice City. Or 400 years on my EverQuest account. And God only know how many starving people it could feed. Yet, to my employers, this is only a drop in the multimillion dollar bucket we hand to Microsoft every year.
Why don't we just change to Linux, you say? Oh no, that would be far too expensive. At least that's what they keep telling me. Everything I installed has a comparable Linux solution, which would take a bit more time to install and configure including extra time for coding exactly what we want, but is FREE! But almost 10 years ago someone made an arbitrary decision to use Microsoft servers that sent us into this fiscal downward spiral.
People have been trained and certified in all sorts of Microsoft products. Retraining them would be costly. Only a select few are well acquainted with Linux and it's potential. Most have the idea that if it's free it must be crap. Occasionally, some rouge will inflate his testicular regions long enough to attempt an assault against the pom-pom waving hordes screaming "Ra, Ra, Microsoft!" only to be squashed by the standard rhetoric, that's the way it's always been done. Still, the longer we continue down this path the more costly it will be to change in the future.
And this sixty g's isn't even money well spent. All of this software is only for one function, designing web application in C#, something I can already do in PHP! Ok, I know the whole bashing Microsoft thing has been way over done, so sorry about all that, but I really needed to vent a bit. Thank you, drive threw.