Oh, no, not The Register - New comment on 10,000 More Microsofties - What Do They Do?

Bill Buchan has left a new comment on your post "10,000 More Microsofties - What Do They Do?":

Amusingly, I'm seeing articles:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/02/windows_vista_upgrades/

that state that you cannot upgrade to Vista from Windows 2000.

Who on earth is still running Windows 2000? As the article says, about 50% of business users out there.

Who now have to "rip and replace" to ugprade.

So why not "rip and replace" to OpenOffice and Linux ?

I take your point about cost to purchase being low, and TCO being the influencing factor. Am I alone in thinking that its easier to manage a bunch of Linux desktops en-masse than a bunch of Windows desktops ?

And how better to learn than to save money on license upgrades and assurance by switching to free software, eh ?

You'll have to train the users (especially "older" dinosaur users on win2k + office 97) in any case..

Its a shame. MS are in the cusp between "old evil Microsoft" with the '80s business model, and the "new cuddly on-line MS" which hasnt actually got off the ground yet.

(And amusingly Balmer is "old", and Ozzie is "new" MS. Must make for interesting meetings)

And the Vista/Office 2007 release is definately old-business model MS... So the old "bait and switch" has to work one last time.

Shame its a long time coming - giving the ABM community much more time and ammunitition...

And lastly - you'd think with another 10k MS employees, they'd ship Visual Studio 2003 SP1 ? No. Still hanging on there - three years late.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/servicing/sp1_vs03/default.aspx

So what are those 10k people doing ? All writing blogs about how cool this new stuff is ? Wasnt Scoble meant to do that - distract customers from the "now" and sell "the future" ?

---* Bill
http://www.billbuchan.com

(Sorry, Bill, I've finally learned that anything that quotes The Register doesn't have much in the way of balance in mind for discussing a Microsoft issue.)