> So, really, what makes otherwise cost-conscious people and businesses,
> especially outside the US, fork over good money to Redmond for their
> overpriced and poorly debugged crap?
"No one gets fired for buying Microsoft [or Cisco, or formerly - IBM]."
Most of these decisions aren't based on [software capital] cost or "bugs". Applications drive OS purchase decisions and there are a lot of business applications which are developed on and for Windows [only].
End User computing is based on total cost of ownership. Microsoft could double the amount we spend on them via software capital and expense in maintenance agreements, and it would still be cheaper than what we spend on the staff and tools necessary to fix user-generated problems and respond to user requests (shhhh don't tell Bill Gates).
Matt
-- GnuPG Key ID: 0xC33BD882 aim: beyondzero123 yahoo msg: beyondzero123
My top-level question about Sept. 11 is, do we really want to live in a world in which U.S. intelligence can detect every half-million-dollar, 20-person, two-year activity?
-Whitfield Diffie