Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[James Knott]

Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> Inertia is a very powerful obstacle, arguably more powerful than
> Microsoft's marketing or technical issues. People have career
> investments in doing things a certain way (and decision-makers have had
> more time to go down one specific path than their underlings). More
> often than not, the complaint "Linux doesn't work properly" really means
> "Linux doesn't work the way I'm used to".
> 
> It's not enough for open source alternatives to be better than
> proprietary counterparts. They have to be compellingly better in order
> to get people to change direction. This is often simplified during
> update cycles, when the cost of sticking with the chosen path itself
> requires new expense in software, training and support upgrades. The
> task is also made easier when the proprietary version is badly botched
> -- and yet look at the hard time Firefox has had getting a significant
> market share despite all of IE's well publicized security holes.
> 
> We are up against senior IT staff with political and social turfs to
> protect, asses to cover, aversion to change, and a reluctance to
> implement technology that new employees will likely know better than
> their longtime managers. Given all that, combined with the lack of
> marketing muscle of "Linux Inc", and I don't think the pace of growth is
> anything to be ashamed of.

It's amazing how much garbage some people are willing to put up with.  I
recently started supporting Windows users, at a large company where they
use Outlook.  Until now, I had never *EVER* heard of people routinely
losing large amounts of email.  Outlook uses one large PST file for each
personal folder.  When these folders get much beyond 750 MB they tend to
corrupt, with little hope of recovery.  The "Inbox Repair Tool" rarely
works, so if there's no backup, the messages are gone.  Outlook also
tends to "forget" where the PST files are.  When that happens, the user
has to recreate the personal folders in Outlook, by reconnecting to the
PST files.  These people have come to accept this as normal!!!???!!!
Why can't some people realize what a garbage product Outlook is and go
to some other app?  Just about everything else is far more reliable.  In
all the (almost 30) years I've been using and supporting computers, I've
never heard of mail disappearing due to anything other than finger error
or hardware failure, until now.
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