On Sunday 05 August 2007 13:54, Satish Alwani wrote:
I am not totally all anti MS and stuff. Thats not the way I think, but honestly its all about the freedom of choice. People today are looking more towards an iMac than they did some years ago. Why? Well, thanks to vista believe it or not. As the old saying goes, immitation is the best form of flattery, people know that vista is a pure rip off of the mac tiger. However, their main concern for moving out is backward compatibility with their existing OS applications. What they fail to realize isthey can get most of it working today either through the likes of Wine or virtualizing your old existing windows.
What they fail to realize is that they are in deeep trouble using M$ software (as well as most other closed software). Backward compatibility is the least of the problems and merely a red herring they are chasing. The faster you ditch closed formats and closed software the safer u are.
In which case you are free to migrate while at the same time giving you the option of moving back and forth with a live system. Whats this got to do with pushing linux. EVERYTHING! Vendors and users alike are sometimes unaware of the power of virtualization and what Wine has to offer. Most office people today mostly use spreadsheets, word documents, and emails. Offices mostly run on intranet solutions. Most other applications they have access to are mostly written in Visual Basic. Of which these applications do seem to run fine on wine. If they do have any other applications, they can always boot into windows and use it as and when they need to, encompassing the security of the host OS onto the guest os within a sandboxed environment.
As long as u cant convert your data - which is what this discussion highilights - no amount of virtulisation is going to benefit you. Infact it is only going to increase your pain.
Ofcourse the possibilities of this could be rather endless, as organisations which can look towards thin client computing, mostly dont due to their dependency on windows environment. This factor can eliminate that as well.
If vendors and users are aware that their choice of moving can be complimented instead of complicated by dual boots etc.,
You are lulling yourself into false comfort. M$ shenanigans deserve only contempt. History is repeating itself with the current ODF /OOXML saga and the stooopid Microvel deal.