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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On Wed, 3 Jul 1996, Orc wrote:

> (I hope that you're not also posting this; it's somewhat annoying to
> answer interesting mail, only to find out it's a Cc: from a news
> article.  If this is a Cc:, please think of this as a vote for not
> doing Cc:s)

I generally include the CC to the original author as a courtesy to the
orignal author.  I'm on 5 newsgroups and 4 mailing lists.  I often miss
responses to my own posts.  Especially since this is a holiday and
advocacy groups get full quickly (forcing short expires).

> > I can buy a "Linux Based PC" for a fraction of the price of an identical
> > "Microsoft Solution" because the vendor community is willing to sell the
> > product for only 10-20 times their cost.
> 
> Hmm; where at?  Even at full retail, you're only talking about $100
> difference in prices, and on a $1500 system that's a pretty small
> fraction.

Microsoft sells NT, Office 95, and Internet Explorer for about $1500
(retail).  Linux runs between $15 and $60 depending on the book it comes
with.  Caldera Desktop runs $200.

I can buy a 486/Dx2 for about $400, ad a CD for $60, and slap Linux up for
$40.  Total, $500.  I need a Pentium 133, 32 Meg, and of course the entire
Microsoft Bundle, PLUS visual C++, Visiual Basic PRO, Chameleon, and MKS
Toolkit to come CLOSE to a comparable Microsoft solution.  Total price
(our last system price) - over $6000.  The performance of the two systems
will be comparable.

BTW, Linux on a Dell OptiPlex Pentium 5/90 with S3 accelerator card is
staggering.  Better than a Sparc/20, almost as good as an Indio.

> > > >Anyone who thinks that they must get software packaged with their
> > > >system is deluded.  You do not ever get NT for free.
> > 
> > Nothing is "free", not even Linux.  Assuming my time is worth $50/hour, it
> > costs me $200 to do a "Linux Install" on an unfamiliar PC.
> 
> But remember it's only $50/hour if you don't like doing it.  My going
> rate is about $75/hour, and it only takes me about $40 to build a system
> on a new box.  (compare that to Windows, which has cost me, in real
> money, about $600 in dead hardware, and has taken about 20 hours of my
> time attempting to properly install the god-rotted thing.)

Not that I said an "Unfamiliar PC".  I frequently get some guy who wants
me to slap linux into a PCI bus with an off-brand SCSI controller and
unsupported ethernet card, along with a "propretary" video chip.  It's
ugly but I can get it done in about 4 hours.  On a familiar/kosher system,
with a reasonable fast CD-Rom, using the "Install Everything" option, I
can have a system up and running in about 2 hours.  I start the load, go
out to dinner, and come back in time to run config, which takes about 30
minutes (they never have their IP numbers ready :-).

> The only people who will be terrified at the thought of burning sweat
> equity on a computer are the people who won't care that the preinstall
> of Win95 is costing them another $55 in real money, if they even
> register that bump in the price.

After spending $1500 in Ram, CPU, and Application upgrades, who notices
$50 in "soft dollars"?

> > > >> > I fully
> > > >> > expect that NT will be on 80% of the desktops in the world within 18
> > > >> > months, after the P6 becomes the 1997 commodity chip.
> > > >
> > > >And if not, will you eat crow, or make yet another prediction?
> > 
> > The interesting thing is that Linux might actually be right there next to
> > it.
> 
> As someone who makes his living porting and writting applications on
> Linux (McAfee Virus Scan, McAfee WebShield, Schroedinger's PS-GVB), I
> would certainly like to see Linux gaining a significant part of the
> marketplace.   But I'm certainly not going to hold my breath; Money
> Talks, and the Linux community doesn't have more than a small fraction
> of the $500m/year that Microsoft can use to bribe publications into
> writing favorable reviews of their albatross of the week.

Check their financial report (Edgar or PR NewsWire), they spent over $2
billion in advertizing last year.  They threatened to reduce the number of
full page ads in the Wall Street journal when Linux got some "Good Press".

>    -david parsons

The thing to remember is that Novell, AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve were
"buying silence" to keep the Internet quiet.  They were even buying extra
1 page ads in publications that said internet and TCP/IP were complicated,
clunky, and impossible to use.  This was 3 months AFTER Mosaic was
released.

I was working at Dow Jones when I pointed out to our senior editors that
Netscape had just downloaded 500,000 copies in a week.  Then I reminded
them that I had installed 5 copies using my downloaded floppy.  Suddenly
the 'net couldn't be ignored.

Linux is trickier to track.  People use LILO so that they can run the
"Politically Correct" operating system when the Boss is there, and then
flip to Linux when the boss leaves, to get some real work done.  Most
managers don't even know how to tell if Linux is on a machine.

Since survey companies like DataPro don't count books, survey only Upper
and Middle Managers, and rely on Microsoft's "Presales" quotes as actual
sales, the information is unreliable at best.  Remember, most PCs first
showed up as people bringing their own machines in from home.  By the time 
industry "Experts" actually recognized that people were using PCs at work,
the bottom had fallen out of the Series 1 and 3101 terminal market.


"Two Billion votes from Alibama, where'd all those people come from?"
"They've been sleeping 9 to a room in bunks and tiers"
						Lenny Bruce.


	Rex Ballard



From rballard@cnj.digex.net Fri Jul  5 14:46:06 1996
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