OT: Wow is all I can say...

[Thermodyne]

What makes you guy hate MS so much? I’d really like to know. Their stuff works well, they respond better than most huge corporations. And they really take care of the stock holders, this year was especially nice

The article is meant to show that MS can compete price wise against nix. In the real world they do quite well everywhere except the single desktop. As far as supporting users goes, nix can't tuch them.

As an example: I have a project to roll out Office 2003 with sp1 to 600+- users. It has to upgrade about 100 existing 03 installs to sp1, and replace (uninstall/preserve user profiles) about 350 Office XP and Office 2000 installs. Also it has to make clean installs on about 50 systems that are left over from Citrix and have no Office products installed. All system must have the same features installed and all configurations such as email server and security must be configured at install. Also, existing user profiles must be imported. It also needs to recognize 03sp1 installs and conform them to current standards. In less than an hour, starting from scratch, I was able to build an unattended network install package. One package for all systems and all the user needs to do is point and click. No keys to enter, no activations. And everything was done through a wizard. Stuff like this just does not exist in the nix world.

As a second example. I just completed my third SBS server deployment last weekend. I have yet to need to write or use an imported script for any of the setups. Everything was done with the existing wizards and built in browser interface. FreeBSD and Red Hat Enterprise take a lot more effort to configure. I can do the server side of a SBS setup in about 5 hours, including exchange, ISA firewall, SUS, Corporate AV, and SQL server. Each desktop takes about 5 minutes and remote access and wireless system take about another 5 minutes to configure for certificates and VPN. I use VPN’s and certs for all wireless access now, in large part because of the ease of setting them up with the 03 Server systems.

I have bid about 15 SBS installs, and have yet to loose to a Nix bid. With the exception of FreeBSD, Nix is not much of a money saver for businesses. Especially for businesses that have existing Windows desktops (most by far). And FreeBSD is more than most office users can deal with on their own.