Sorry this is slightly off topic. On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 6:55 AM, Jeff Kinz <jkinz at kinz.org> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 05:51:15AM -0700, Al Sparks wrote: >> Oh and the qmail server? My employer went Exchange. And slowly >> but surely, the IT there is becoming more Microsoft with Linux >> becoming more of an outlier. It's probably time for me to find >> another job. It's hard, because I've been with them a long time. >> === Al > > Or its time for you to make a direct presentation to the upper level > management showing that the number of direct staffers needed to > administer an MS environment is between 15 and 300% higher than > a corresponding UNIX/Linux environment. > > Why "Upper management" and not IT management? Because IT management > BENEFITS from having more staff to manage. When your headcount > increases and your budget is larger, your management importance > and status goes up and you become recognized as a "peer" of those > who may become the next CEO. > > UNIX/Linux is bad for the IT empire builders because it is good for the > rest of the company. It reduces costs and headcount while increasing > increases reliability and security at the same time. > > > Jeff Kinz Jeff is correct.... If you look at the IT manpower and how the org charts play. The windows support staff will map out to more managers and more managers of managers. The side effect is that the audience of any presentation will be level mismatched. Windows oriented managers will be pitching budget and needs two or three levels above a Linux support staff doing the same work simply because the staff size mismatch. At a previous Unix based hardware computer company I did some curiosity driven research and noted that the company had more staff (mostly contractors) supporting windows for the internal "needs" of the company than the company had support staff (both hardware and software) for the paying customers. The organization structure was disjoint and difficult to map.... At times a windows support person would show up to fix "something" I would look at the name tag and try to find what group the person was in and most often I would not have considered it a windows support group. Much of the Unix support was done in the spare time by a handful of folk where the Windows support was managed by a 'staff'. Very different staffing and management model.... Also there is the comfort factor -- schools teach Windows stuff in computer science departments. Managers and sales staff that can type know outlook, excel and word. To complicate this, legal requirements mandate lots of stuff. In the 'free' software universe we live in it is hard to comprehend how much money is spent to guarantee that all software is legal. Compliance in this regard costs a lot. Of interest the Unix community and the Windows world have very different security models. For the most part Unix is transparent while windows is opaque. There is a reason that VMS was so popular.... -- NiftyCluster T o m M i t c h e l l