Linux misses Windows of opportunity (australian article)
 

Crest Electronics chose a Linux operating system, then seven months on, the company chose to abandon it for Windows. Adam Turner explains why.

Abandoning Linux for Windows was not a move Crest Electronics made lightly but in the end the decision was strictly business.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/next/l...586780339.html

Hmmm. If SAP will, possibly, refuse to support a patched RH system until you roll it back to a previous version, whay wouldn't they have the same rules for Windows boxes?

Seems to me that they are producing semi spurious reasons. And that they thought that Linux would fix every single one of their problems. I'd be interested in seeing a follow up article with the same firm in 7 months time to see what problems, if any, they encountered.

It sounds to me like this (original) "inherited decision" was not made too carefully. If the bottom-line purpose of a particular box is "to run SAP," then as he said, "the OS doesn't really matter as long as it is stable," and of course, as long as it is certified by SAP. The box isn't there to run Linux, or Windows for that matter: it is there to run SAP, and to do it (as much as is possible with SAP ... :rolleyes: ...) "in 'fuhgeddaboudit' mode." If one OS isn't delivering the goods, for whatever reason, switching it makes perfect sense.

I agree that it will be interesting to follow-up with this organization in another six months' time. The root cause of "an un-reproducible error" is not likely to go away. It probably will turn out to be a hardware error... it could even be the fault of a sometimes-unstable power supply voltage.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) for software of any type is, really, extremely high. It is often under-estimated, especially by contractors. In this case, the company's decision to "cut bait" is, imho and as much as I love Linux, justifiable.