The MS easy rider crashes again
Source: NEWS FORGE
The stories of users migrating from Microsoft Windows to a Free Software alternative (or attempting to do so) have usually had one large sticking point: The alternatives are much harder to learn than Microsoft Windows. Conventional wisdom says that when GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and others become as easy to use as Microsoft Windows (or when Microsoft's EULAs become too unreasonable), the migration will be inevitable, and it will be a good thing for all. I beg to differ.
My own tale began during my last job, where I worked as an IT trainer in a small firm whose name I shan't mention. My duties included teaching clients (one-to-one), maintaining the training computers, and occasionally making sure the server was still running OK. The whole office ran on Microsoft NT4 and Exchange. All the training and staff computers ran Windows 98, and we used Office and Outlook for most of our work.
It seemed like a happy solution on the surface, because everything was integrated and worked. But there were cracks in that picture, due to the philosophy that has consumed the IT industry ever since the a marketing department managed to put the words "easy" and "computing" in the same sentence.
To begin with, we didn't really only use Microsoft product. We had a package called Janna to manage our contact database, and then had a horrible time switching between Janna, Outlook, Word, Excel and a filing cabinet to keep track of things.
