Very Computer

: Ok... I have a few questions... Large OEM? And who might those be?
: TechData? Infinity? And who do they typically sell to? Which end user out
: there buys 100 copies of operserver today?

: Let's use an example instead shall we? This "Large Client" Grand Cayman
: Government ran SCO for some time.  Recently, they have replaced SCO
: installs with 28 or more NT Servers running over 250 NT Workstation and
: Win95 Nodes at 1 location. Now, let's analyze Mr Liebermann's
: calculations and proposed SCO business plan.

: The average time that it took to bring a crashed SCO system there was
: approximately 2-3 days..sometime 1 week, due to either unqualified and/or
: unavailable support from SCO Large OEM marvelous annual contracts. SCO or
: the Large OEM cannot possibly support this type of environment without
: the smaller customer-from-hell who's livelyhood depend on client's such
: as these. The customer-from-hell is "exactly" who should, will and always
: provide the end support to the install base.  SCO is in the business of
: "making software" and insuring that there is support for those very
: customers-from-hell which ARE the ones suppoting the install base.  Large
: OEM's can't do it, they can't be on-site diagnosing problems, not can
: they do it in any way comparable to the small-customer-from-hell who is
: willing to go out there in an instant to save their reputation.

Nuts. There goes my dream of eventually supporting Unix in Cayman.

Patrick is right about this guys. Even those who dumped on him most
sounded depressed the last few posts lamenting that they have little
hope for SCO changing its errant ways, and even admitted to NT
installs.

SCO WAKE UP!!!!

: No disrespect to Mr. Liebermann at all, but his plan is an investment into
: tomorrow's suicide.
: You are dead wrong sir.  Likely the bulk of their money was indirecty
: received by the Large OEM, but the fact is, That market was generated by
: the multitude of small enterprise everywhere back in the Xenix Days and
: grew from there. SCO developed their x86 technology precisely for that
: market.

Accurate.

Unix is the better solution, but SCO's internal communication is abysmal,
as many people inside SCO, their resellers, consultants and customers
in general who have to negotiate that labyrinth all agree.

Somebody with some smarts needs to kick some ass!

NationsBank still has lots and lots of UNIX floating around.

--
Thanks!
Jeff Hyman
President
                                .--.
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There's a germ of truth there, but NT is easier to use in ordinary
administrator's use, also.  What's missing, of course, is
the command line control (though that's coming) and the access
to anything low-level.  There are points that can be made
to argue this, but at this time I don't think anyone can really
disagree that a skillful Unix person can accomplish more
than their equally skilled NT counterpart.

But so what? To exaggerate a tad, all that MOST sites need IS
installation.  That's as true of Unix sites as it is of NT
sites.  Again, we can have little skirmishes here and there,
but the battle goes to Microsoft: it's generally easier
and quicker to get a MS network up and doing useful work
than our Unix counterparts.

One reason is that Unix is always behind the curve.  When
EIDE drives came out, it was ages before there was anything
available from SCO to handle them.  But it isn't that sort
of thing that frustrates me: it's the stupid little things
that should have been nailed down and made "easy" years
ago.  This newsgroup tells the story plainly.  The same
complaints, the same problems, go on here year after year
after year.  How many thousand times more do we have to
tell people about "mx#0" before it gets into the rlpconf?
How many times do we tell people that netconfig has left
conflicting entries in hosts before somebody fixes it?
How many more people with give up trying to configure
PPP when all that 99% of them want is a simple connection
to their ISP, a connection that MS manages to accomplish
nearly flawlessly with a minimum of information from the
user?

True, we have much more control over our setups, and have
the ability to do so much more and tweak more performance
out of it.  We can control every aspect of our PPP connection,
from the modem initialization on.  Do most folks give a
damn?  Nope.

Not that we should ever lose that control.  We shouldn't.
But 90% or more of these things are simple, and the people
using them just want to get on with the show.  MS gives
them that; we don't.

Quote:> Less money to pay for less education (necessary).  The power is
> sacrified  over lower professional technical knowledge.  Not to sound
> arrogant or claim superiority at all, but it sickens me to no end to
> see a major  corporation's MIS department ran by GUI monkeys who has
> never seen a command line in their lives. Why hire pro's when you can
> hire high-school graduates? Besides, power and efficiency is not an
> issue...

Quote:>Intel will fix the inefficiency of MS's lousy code.

I sometimes see a problem in the Unix community that I don't
observe much in MS, and that's prissy folks who are very
concerned with the "rightness" of code.  They remind me
a bit of the Apple evangelists who told us all how our
user interfaces "must" work a few years back.  The code
must be "efficient", even when there is no reason for
it to be.  It must be "portable", even when there is no
intention of running it on another platform.  And of
course, everything must go in /usr/local :-)

MS writes shlock code.  MS writes inefficient code. MS
scatters their *anywhere and everywhere.  You can't port
most MS programs even if you do have the source. But so what?  
It's unimportant.  What's important is making the 90% part easy.
Satisfy 90% of the users and the other 10% have to fall
in line.  Then, slowly, MS fixes and adds features, slowly
satisfying the 10%.  In the meantime, our Unix boxes work
from the other direction, having overjoyed the power hungry
among us years ago, and slowly, slowly, oh so painfully
slowly, adding the ease of use that makes the majority
happy.

--

SCO ACE
Microsoft MCSE
http://www.veryComputer.com/

X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

:       A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal had a story about a major
: deal Netscape had with one of the Big Five accounting firms (KPMG, I think)
: to standardize on Communicator, NS Suite, etc. The firm advised Microsoft
: they were likely to go with Netscape. Over subsequent weeks MS brought in
: the Big Guns, offered one sweet incentive after another. In the end,
: though Netscape had been advised the deal seemed to be theirs, Microsoft
: won out. Netscape was never aware of what was going on behind the scenes.

This sort of thing happens with _every_ big deal. The vendors quote
to get themselves onto the short list. Then the buyer will publish the
short list, and ask the vendors to sharpen their pencils and come
up with a better deal. If MS came up with a better quote and
Netscape did not , then Netscape are not ready to play in the majors.

--
Danny Aldham           SCO Ace , MCSE , JAPH , DAD
Ban the neutral zone trap. It's killing our National sport.

Quote:> This newsgroup tells the story plainly.  The same
> complaints, the same problems, go on here year after year
> after year.  How many thousand times more do we have to
> tell people about "mx#0" before it gets into the rlpconf?
> How many times do we tell people that netconfig has left
> conflicting entries in hosts before somebody fixes it?
> How many more people with give up trying to configure
> PPP when all that 99% of them want is a simple connection
> to their ISP, a connection that MS manages to accomplish
> nearly flawlessly with a minimum of information from the
> user?

Quote:> MS writes shlock code.  MS writes inefficient code. MS
> scatters their *anywhere and everywhere.  You can't port
> most MS programs even if you do have the source. But so what?
> It's unimportant.  What's important is making the 90% part easy.
> Satisfy 90% of the users and the other 10% have to fall
> in line.

--
eric
_________________________________________________________________
I'm an excellent driver.                        "Dustin Hoffman
                                                Rain Man "

A whole lot of discussion was cut out about certain features lacking in
SCO... let me just say that they are all available under Linux,
including the DHCP server.

And we know that SCO actually approves of Linux being deployed where for
some reason Openserver can't be, rather than surrendering the site to NT
completely.

In any case most of the code is fairly portable to SCO once you have
the right GNU environment...

Let's just do it, folks. Knowing Linux is synergistic for deploying
(and redeploying) SCO product.

Max Southall
PRN Infosystems
Miami FL

<snip>>

Quote:>  Look, my sister (50+) just bought her
> first ever computer complete with internet access, the only questions she
> had to answer was username and passwd, then click connect and she was up
> and running, no hassle, no editing, nothing (she couldn't manage that anyway).

Quote:> Do you honestly expect SCO or any other Unix vendor to dictate to you which
> ISP you are to connect to?

BTW that was the point of my post, ease of installation, user friendly.

--
eric
_________________________________________________________________
I'm an excellent driver.                        "Dustin Hoffman
                                                Rain Man "

Quote:

> I very much suspect that had she elected to install OSR5,
> the installation wouldn't be quite as easy. (Proven here in this newsgroup
> by the amount of mail generated by a simple PPP connection) If you don't
> believe me, do a Dejanews search for 'connection to ISP or PPP config'