[ossig] Re: [myoss] Another Case Study from M$

[Dinesh Nair <dinesh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 31/01/2005 11:52 Jason Lim said the following:
> Another bad story.
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/business/casestudies/linkpage4208.asp

point form rebuttal. anyone with the time is free to use these to write a 
counter to that case study:

1. " The founders of the company were “hard core” Linux supporters and 
obviously Solinique reflected their ideals by offering Linux solutions 
exclusively to customers. "

there were obviously not "hard core" enough to be technically competent to 
run Linux and by extension start offering commercial services on it. their 
failure seems to be centered on their incompetency in Linux rather than 
Linux itself.

2. "The company did make some headway among its SME customers, deploying 
file and print, and email servers on various Linux distributions such as 
Red Hat, Free BSD and Slackware."

the last time i checked, FreeBSD is /not/ a Linux distribution, but hey who 
am i to question the Linux gurus at solinique.

3. " With the majority of Solinique’s Linux customers opting for the free 
Linux distributions and applications, the responsibility for support falls 
on Solinique. Which turned out to be a double edged sword.

“With Linux, it is very much self-service as we are basically on our own. 
We spend a lot of time trying to get the information to resolve technical 
issues. There is a lot of trial and error involved and its like doing our 
own research,” says Er."

this seems to be the clincher. they were trying to build a service based 
business model around an open source distribution, and then complain that 
/they could not do their job/ well enough to make it work. which part of 
/supporting a customer/ did they not understand ? as a "Malaysian IT 
services company", dont they have any competencies or were they nothing 
more than box pushers and resellers ?

4. "Though Er has plans for his technical staff to do development work to 
upgrade the company’s solutions, they have been too tied up with daily 
operations of supporting their Linux customers."

they can't handle linux and sourcing/researching for solutions and now they 
want to develop software ? ROTFLMAO !

5. " He advises his customers not to use freeware “if you have to deal with 
outsiders.” “You don’t want to get into a situation where you rush off for 
a crucial meeting for a big contract but forget to save your Star Office 
documents in Microsoft Office format.”

66% of the web uses "freeware" and open source to serve their web pages and 
deal with outsiders. what's this guy saying again ?

6. " Currently Solinique has about an equal share of revenue from both 
Linux and Microsoft-based customers. He is optimistic that income from the 
Microsoft side of the business will grow faster than Linux in the coming 
years."

oh wait, if Linux was all so bad, then why is half his revenue coming from 
Linux then ? surely 50% of his customers weren't idiots ? oh wait, which 50% ?


-- 
Regards,                           /\_/\   "All dogs go to heaven."
dinesh@alphaque.com                (0 0)    http://www.alphaque.com/
+==========================----oOO--(_)--OOo----==========================+
| for a in past present future; do                                        |
|   for b in clients employers associates relatives neighbours pets; do   |
|   echo "The opinions here in no way reflect the opinions of my $a $b."  |
| done; done                                                              |
+=========================================================================+


---------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe: send mail to ossig-request@mncc.com.my
with "unsubscribe ossig" in the body of the message