I’ve been saying this a lot today: Give. Me. A. Break.

I wouldn’t know where to start.

From “Microsoft paid SCO to sue IBM” to:

Well, if sending as many as five people around to as many as 3,500 Windows PCs to remediate each virus outbreak could be said to affect our TCO, then yes, I guess viruses, worms and trojans do tend to add substantially to the cost of doing business. At approximately $25.00/hour per person, that must come to… Well, enough to make it cost effective to begin a desktop Linux pilot program…

I’m sorry. If you have 3500 desktops, you’d damn well better have:

  • Patch management
  • Imaging
  • PXE-boot capabilities
  • Anti-virus
  • Context-scanning of your internet traffic
  • Multiple zones
  • Internal and extrnal firewalls

Which would:

  • Update your computers automatically, which is where 98% of viruses get in anyways
  • Protect your boxes if they are unpatched
  • Allow you to reimage a box in minutes if it did get infected
  • Check your internet traffic and email from viruses before it even gets to the desktops
  • Protect entire areas of your company, and the internet / WAN’s / etc, from any viruses that do happen

I’m just curious (really). If Linux TCO cost is lower, why aren’t we seeing a large number of companies that have actually moved their desktops to Linux? We hear about all kinds that are thinking about it, have decided they will or are commissioning studies. I don’t hear about very many that have done a succesful move from Windows to Linux.

The reasons are clear, and obvious, beyond the TCO argument. There is just too much that can go wrong. And the cost to prevent against issues is larger than the pure hardware / licensing cost / installation / training costs, etc.

It’s really the same reason we don’t simply roll out XP or 2000 to all of our desktops. We could do it in 3 days. But what about documents that are kept in non-standard locations? What about apps that users forget they have installed? What about the weird customizations which cause innumerable issues, especially when you’ve wiped all the data from the hard drive?

The reality is that there isn’t any easy way to move all users from one OS to another OS in a large environment without simply hoping your users have:

  • No custom apps
  • No undocumented apps
  • No files stored in weird locations

Moving OS’s arbitrarily is simply too complicated and risky on a large scale. Whenever we’ve tried, we’ve found that 3/4 of desktops require personal attention to the point where it’s cheaper to simply migrate them manually and keeping ALL hard drive data backed up.