A quote from the article.

I think the "lie, cheat, and steal" is appropriate. Actually, in my circles, Microsoft is really ticking off many corporate customers with the required registration stuff and the push to deny corporations the advantage of the OEM Windows License. (Read Brian Livingston in Infoworld and you will get the idea. Basically, if you're a "corporate customer" will 500 or more employees, your OEM Microsoft licenses you received when you purchased the machines are "invalid" and you ARE REQUIRED to purchase new Windows licenses at full retail price. I'm really hoping a big company will take Microsoft to court on this one, and fight it down to the point where Microsoft has to pay billions in settlements.... )

My boss said in a meeting today that when he talks to "clients" (Fortune 1000 grocery and pharmacy companies), they are VERY INTERESTED when he talks about our Unix (HP-UX), DB2, and Java system. He said today in the same meeting that we probably LOST a major Fortune 500 contract in 1998 because we were running NT 4.0, SQL Server, Delphi, and PC Assembler at the time. Reliability and scalability were the driving factors.

Now, word is getting around our industry about our new infrastructure, and the customers are starting to call us. We're about to close a nice contract hopefully in the next couple of weeks for even more work!

The other "disincentive" for Microsoft is that the licensing goons visited us about 1 1/2 years ago, and tapped the corporate coffers to the tune of about $125,000 for a 53 employee company. For a 53 employee company!

No wonder he was interested in talking with me in May when I interviewed! No wonder he hired me right away and we've been buying Unix hardware, DB2, Java, and hiring programmers ever since!

He doesn't want to tap the coffers for another $125,000 next year. In two years, we could be completely Unix/Linux and have the corporate customers lining up to do business with us... At least I sincerely hope so!

Glen Austin

We have two Windows-based systems in our company which represent two of our four "core" businesses. I am currently working on the fifth and sixth "core" business, which we hope to have online early next year. The two new businesses are in Unix.

There are already plans to replace 3 of our 4 "legacy" businesses with Java or Delphi replacements (we can run either Windows (Delphi) or Linux (Kylix)). They will be able to run on either Windows or Unix/Linux. The "last" business will probably just go away, because it isn't profitable.

Our largest legacy moneymaker (a huge Windows kludge) was down twice last month, once with Nimda virus, and once with a programming bug. Each time, the client suffered through a multi-hour outage, on what we advertise to be an "almost realtime" system. The client visited us this week. The visit was primarily to handle how we were planning to achieve HIPAA compliance, but the outages came up in the conversation. The client brought a representative from a big 8 consulting firm. With the recent departure of the company's CIO, I am very concerned that the outages have put one of our "core" businesses at risk of being taken over by a big 8 consulting firm. I know how these consulting guys work and having them visit us was just the start of them pitching a project to replace us.

Now, this Windows kludge was poorly designed, poorly coded, and is poorly monitored by our processing staff. And the second outage was due to several programming bugs in the code. The bugs weren't caught because the owner of the company had a single "senior" programmer develop the project and did not follow a process of code review and inspection for defects. This same error would have also caused the code to fail in Unix.

The other outage was caused by the Nimda virus, something that definitely would NOT have happened, had we been on Unix.

We are having code reviews now, but we haven't gone back and reviewed all the "legacy code". The problem is that a "legacy code review" would cut into our new projects, and the owner feels that we need to deliver these new projects for us to stay in business.

Glen Austin