Do people buy software because it's expensive, though? Is there really some social benefit in announcing that you've been ripped-off? I don't see it.
Many, many, years ago Hewlett-Packard had an e-mail server. Quite a good one. It needed upgrading to deal, but it was basically sound, it was also popular, and sold quite well. However, HP decided to throw the product (HPmail) away. This was simply because, by so doing, they could get a deal with Microsoft to pay much, much less for their software licenses. This was before the days of Linux, and before the days of Apple's OS/X, so, as they saw it, they didn't have much choice, other than to use Microsoft's desktop. It does explain why there aren't many companies offering competitors to Microsoft exchange, though.
However, as everybody knows, well, everybody technical, you don't need exchange at all. You can give your users Outlook as their client, if they really want that, rather than the better solution of Mail on a Mac (much, much cheaper to support, much more reliable, much faster and much easier to use, of course - so, actually, hugely cheaper in terms of ROI an TCO), but use Linux, free, instead of exchange and have a much faster system.
Also, we know from Edward Snowden, even with a firewall, your exchange server is an open book, a complete security disaster, if you worry about security at all, you'd certainly not have one.
Are there any kickbacks? Do IT people who manage to get their employers to buy Exchange get any money or other inducements from the distributors or from Microsoft?
I'd truly like to know, because it's important to know from a governance perspective. A company is obliged, under governance, to make the best use of company assets - paying for an inferior product is poor governance. If this happens, or has happened, a company is also in danger of prosecution under the UK bribery act - if it has any offices in the UK.
The pharmaceutical industry has paid thousands of millions of dollars in fines, over the past few years, for bribing doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, chemists and others to promote their drugs and force expensive, and often inferior, drugs on us.
When I started work in the Unisa Editorial Department in the 1980s we used Atex, a commercial publishing system used by most newspapers at the time. It was a mainframe system, with dumb terminals, but it had a messaging system, so that you could discuss things with colleagues, send files to other people's queues and so on.
ReplyDeleteThen Atex was bought by Kodak and Kodak was disinvesting, so we switched to microcomputers and XyWrite, a wordprocessor developed by the people who had developed Atex, so it operated in a similar way, but was much faster.
The trouble with microcomputers, though was that they had no messaging system, and the only way to transfer files was by floppy disk (not even stiffies in those days). We persuaded the university to give us a Novell network for our department, and I then discovered Pegasus mail, which worked like the old Atex messaging system, and Brainstorm, which was a conferencing system rather like a BBS or an internal Usenet. They filled the gap quite nicely, and both were free.
Then other departments began to be networked, and the Computer Services Department wanted us to use a thing called Da Vinci as a messaging system, which was expensive, clunky, and far inferior to Pegasus. They disdained Pegasus because it was free.
They also later made us switch to WordPerfect instead of XyWrite, even though it lacked the essential editing functions that we used in the Editorial Department, inherrited from Atex. I suspect it was because no one in the Computer Services Department was getting kickbacks from XyWrite, which, as a word processing system still hasn't been bettered, more than 25 years later.
I still use Pegasus for e-mail, it's still free.