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Neil Williams wrote: > On 12/10/06 17:02:25, Rob Beard wrote: >> though. There was one company (I can't recall their name) who just >> delt with Windows 2003. The guy I spoke to was friendly enough but >> said that they make money from Microsoft products because they go >> wrong. > > Nothing wrong with that - after all, if their customers can't see the > problem . . . . And that from a Pharmacist.... ;) The secret is to pay people when the IT supplied works, and stop paying them when it doesn't. Or pay them a fixed amount with agreed levels of performance, and so the less work they need to do, the better off they are, so it is in their interest to make it work as seamlessly as possible. Interestingly the Chinese use to have a similar approach to medicine. I agree with the David, this isn't about choice of OS, this is choosing contracts that don't reward bad performance. The classic call-out fee plus time, is a bad model for many IT purchasers, precisely because it does reward poor performance. You know the third time you get the same plumber out to work on the same boiler within 6 weeks, that maybe it isn't going well. But I've seen companies get their IT contractor in much more frequently, just to sort a file server, or a simple database application (CRM). Problem here I think is poor expectations, and lack of purchaser clue. Although I do remember one Microsoft security incident that was billed to resellers as a chance to "make money" fixing the flaw Microsoft has left in. That one did stick in my throat, as though whilst I was working for one of those resellers at the time, the whole approach is so wrong. This cuts both ways of course, one client who paid me on this basis hardly got any work out of me at all one year. On the other hand his computer system (at least the parts I was responsible for - OS and database) were available for 100% of Office hours during that year. They weren't unhappy, although I think they were wondering what their previous, and their other IT suppliers, were doing wrong. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html