MS Exchange server on FreeBSD?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
> Duo writes:

> Not for many corporate managers.  They don't care whether it's
> Microsoft or not, as long as it's the best tool for the job.  People
> don't usually
> reach the upper levels of management in large corporations by
> indulging emotional attachments to one vendor or another.
>

You don't seem to understand how large corporations work, at least where
IT is concerned.

What your basic large corporation does with IT is they go down to
Costco and buy cheap technicians off the rack for $25-30K a year,
and assemble an army of them who do nothing other than run around
and fix people's stupid problems (I can't print, my machine is making
a funny noise, my machine says it's infected by a virus, yadda yadda.)
and they contract with some place in Punjab to forward the internal
IT extension to.

They then tell those people that if they want to ever make more than
$25-30K that they need to get their MCSEs.  The corporations know that
90% of the techs don't have the motivation to actually go do this,
they use the MCSE purely as a weed-out mechanism, so they never are going
to be in a situation where they are paying an army of techs $60-70K
to run around and answer dumb questions.

Then the higher ups in IT are your basic 50-70K a year folks who
have obtained their MCSE's and spent a few years in the army that runs
around fixing stupid problems.

But of all these people, none of them are really what you would call
top-drawer IT people.  Every once in a great while one of the 50-70K
a year people figures things out, and quits then goes to work as a
consultant
making $120K a year, or goes to work in a small company making 50-70K
a year but with complete freedom to do what they want.  Those are the
top-drawer
people - but of course they are taking a giant risk that they may not
have enough customers for the year, of they may make a wrong choice and
drive the company to ruin.

Anyway, the $50-70K a year folks in the big companies are generally the
ones who aren't completely blind stumbling around, they are starting to
wake up.
They may be playing with an Open Source product at home or some such.
But they are not anywhere near ready to deploy a sophisticated solution
like a UNIX solution on their enterprise, they lack the self confidence
and the knowledge.  Instead, they are buck-passers, and do what they
are told.

At the very tip top of the big company IT is the CIO making 200K or more
a year.  This is a guy that is top-drawer.  He's usually come from a
CIO position at a smaller company and quite likely was originally one
of those $50-70K'ers who figured it out and went to a small company to
run their IT so he could have no interference.

He knows perfectly well that he could save a shitload with an Open Source
UNIX solution.  However his problem is he has an entire department of
buck-passers under him who don't want any serious responsibility, and
if they ran into trouble during a big project, they would sit down and
cry if they didn't have a 1-900 number with a pay-as-you-go support tech
on the other end of the phone who would kiss them and tell them that
Mommie would make it all better.

He also knows he couldn't fire them and replace them with a group of
$120K consultant-types who have proved their mettle, first of all because
the company wouldn't pay for it, and second of all because all of those
people would be gunning for his job.

Nor could he fire them all and replace them with a group of 50-70Kers
who could handle themselves, because all those people are running the
IT groups of smaller companies and wouldn't tolerate being told what
to do by him.  And even if he could get them, they would also be gunning
for his job.

So he is stuck with the group of mediocre people, and since he cannot
spend all his time holding their hands, the next best thing is to buy
them a support contract with Microsoft and tell them to go deploy
Microsoft solutions, and if they run into a problem, call Microsoft.
Then if the people in that group even with all that assistance still
cannot make things work, he can fire them and bring some of the
cream of the crop out of the $25-30K a year army up into the next tier.

That is how things work in IT in large companies and that is why those
companies go Microsoft so often.

>
> So does Microsoft.

Do you know how many different product suggestions that Microsoft gets
every year?
It is in the tens of thousands.  They pick a handful of these to use for
new features each release then wave them around as evidence that they are
listening to the customer.

>  That's how it stays on top.
>

Microsoft stays on top because it is a monopoly.  Legally and actually,
it is
a monopoly.  And monopolies stay on top because there isn't anyone else
who competes against them - because nobody else can get a foothold in a
monopoly market.  It has nothing to do with customer loyalty.  Most
people
hate the phone companies for example but none of the local phone
companies
have gone out of business as a result.

> It's all a bit amusing, since I remember when Microsoft was
> the underdog
> and the Great Satan was IBM or DEC.  The names change, but the game
> remains the same, and the flying accusations are just as baseless
> today as they were back then.
>

The accusations were just as accurate back then as they are now.

Monoplies are bad for customers.  That is a known fact and it is why
the anti-trust laws exist, and are enforced, in the United States.
It is why monopolies are regulated, because we realize that regulation
is a poor substitute for a healthy market, but it is the only thing
we can do about monopoly markets.

>
> You need a stroke of good luck before someone working on open source
> will talk to you.
>
> I'm still waiting for solutions to my SATA and SCSI problems.
>

You were given things to try and do to solve the problem.  You didn't
like
the suggestions and you haven't even tried any of them, so you still have
the problems.  Don't blame this on the rest of us.

>> The Exchange solution might be best for a gold partner with M$, but
>> overall, a very poor solution, which locks you into a feature set,
>> and a company that has shown little concern for its base of
>> customers.
>
> The success of the product would seem to belie your claim.  A lot of
> organizations and users really like Exchange.
>

Even the strongest Exchange supporters don't like the expense of it and
would love for it to be cheaper.  Your allegations don't hold water.

>
> I have yet to see anything on microcomputers that I'd call a real
> DBMS, but perhaps someone out there is coming close.  Eventually
> they'll reinvent what mainframe programmers knew thirty-five years
> ago.
>

MPC  (http://www.mpccorp.com/) which was created from Micron
when they sold their PC business and merged with Interland,
is currently making and selling hardware that is the descendent
of the old Netframe servers.  This hardware utilizes the
same redundancy of the "old mainframes" of yesteryear.  So,
from a hardware standpoint, the hardware has been reinvented.

And from a software standpoint, you are crazy.  The DBMSs of
today, Oracle and so on, are far better than anything that the
old mainframe programmers worked on.  Even some of the open source
DMBS like Postgres are better than a lot of what the old mainframe
programmers had to work with.

>
> Open-source developers tend to care about doing stuff that's fun, and
> ignoring stuff that isn't.  So if the features you want are fun to
> write, you'll get them; otherwise you won't.
>

That is true but what your missing is the variation in people, just
about every feature is "fun" somewhere to someone to write.

And also many of the biggest Open Source solutions are becoming
hybridized,
like MySQL AB, and so you do in fact have paid developers working on
stuff.

But in any case, if you force someone to work on something they don't
think is fun to do, your just asking for a terrible product.  Your also
asking for your expensive developer to quit on you right at the worst
time
and go elsewhere where he can be paid to work on something he likes to
do.

>
> I think it is professionally irresponsible to let one's emotions drive
> one's choice of vendor or product--particularly when one is being paid
> to make recommendations on these.  If one can't choose the
> best tool for
> the job with a cool and objective head, it may be wise to move to
> another career that one doesn't take so personally.
>

Well yeah, that is a great idea.  Unfortunately it never works in
practice.  You go pay a Mirosoft consulting house to make product
recommendations, they are going to recommend Microsoft stuff.  You
go pay a Linux consulting house to make product recommendations you
are going to get Linux stuff.

You go pay an ISP to recommend a mailserver and they are going to
tell you to setup your people to use their server for the mailboxes
and pay them to host mail.

Ted