Re: Why Tech-Writers Should Know About Open Source Technologies

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Kenneth,

I disagree to some extent with your analysis. Microsoft is not likely
to be successful with any licensing scheme that reduces their income,
since that would have a tremendous impact upon their stock price--and,
significantly, upon the value of stock options with which they attract
and keep many of their top people.

Enterprise-class businesses are also unlikely to pin their business
upon such a hosted model if for no other reason than security, as you
surmise.

I believe an extremely significant development is the current move by
the State of Massachusetts to require a movement to the Open Document
formats for their public documents. So long as Microsoft does not
support such a cross-platform standard, they begin at a major
disadvantage as more entities begin to consider the long-term
information accessibility issues. Information lifecycle considerations
alone mean that more IT directors will begin to realize the same thing
that Massachusetts has--that many documents will need to be accessible
for the indefinite future, and that risking information to proprietary
formats is a terribly risky proposition.

Multiply this aspect with the level of trust in a third party you
would have to have to use a hosted service. You would be completely
unable to assure that you will have such indefinite access to your
data. That would be particularly foolhardy on many levels, not the
least of which is the legal requirement to maintain information.

David

On 9/15/05, Nuckols, Kenneth M <Kenneth -dot- Nuckols -at- mybrighthouse -dot- com> wrote:

> 1. As Bruce said in a post yesterday, corporate IT and Finance
> departments are going to embrace OS and expand its implementation
> radically. Cost would be a factor in this scenario, but security may be
> a factor as well--with so much of the global computer infrastructure
> operating on the Microsoft platform, 90% of the globe's computers and
> companies have the same vulnerabilities to viruses, worms, and other
> nasty "cyber-terrorist" attacks that can bring electronic communications
> and the commerce that relies on it to a grinding halt.
>

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