Written 2006-02-02
On a server administrator mailing list to which I subscribe, one discussion thread involved the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) difference between Macs and Windows PCs. The talk had turned to how the inadequacies of Windows provided employment for so very many people. Several network administrators said that their support staff had doubled or even tripled after making the switch from Mac or Unix to Windows. (Entire companies, of course, exist solely to help people cope with the deficiencies of the various versions of Windows.)
Here are two quote from one poster, a Systems & Networks Architect.
Note: ‘colo’ means a co-location facility, a place you send your servers to be located near a major Internet connection.
“At a notable colo in NYC a notabl search engine company has racks and racks of WinBlows machines. They constantly need rebooting. So much so that they have three dedicate ppl at the colo at all times, on stool/chairs w wheels rolling up and down the aisles rebooting machines as they crash. This keeps quite a few people in a nice warm environment and off the street too.”
and
“Our USTS side of the business does support Windows systems, some at some very large nation-wide, distributed enterprises. They love us. Why? Because every day we save their company from disaster. It doesn’t matter that the systems we moved them from never had these issues and were stable and kept their business running reliably, to them we’re magic b/c we can save their ass every single day. And we do.“
Another poster wrote:
“This exact thing happened at a site I worked at a few years back.
Same deal, the shop was primarily unix based (engineering/manufacturing company) and was using a single unix mail server to support roughly 12000 users. New CIO [Chief Information Officer] gets hired and tells the IT [Information Technology] staff to move to Exchange [Windows Exchange mail server] so they did. It took 23 Exchange servers to do that same job and they had to hire a staff of like 8 people (2 per shift) to sit in the ops center 24/7 to reboot the proliants [Compaq ProLiant servers] that went down. Funny.”
When I hear of managers who make the switch from more reliable Mac or Unix systems to Windows, I have to believe that when they were growing up, their mothers never asked them, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?!?”
“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” — Emos Philips