6.1 Barriers to the adoption of open source: personal and professional  (Page 5/13)

I tried to respond by mentioning that not only can support be obtained by Novell, but even Microsoft supports SUSE Linux . I let him know that SUSE would run on his existing Microsoft network. I opened an Microsoft Excel document in OpenOffice Calc. However we quickly devolved into that same old tired debate. Although SUSE Linux provided all of his functional needs and met his usability requirements, we never got past the technical and into the operational.

Based on this I decided to try a little, utterly unscientific, experiment. A little later, when another person asked about my machine—admittedly I was flashing everyone who walked by with spinning desktops, wavy and transparent windows and tiled applications—I informed my subject that he was looking at a pre-release of Windows Vista. Our conversation immediately focused on “Vista’s” new features (the same ones I had shown the previous fellow), but this time it was all about usability and functionality. We never discussed how valuable his support from Microsoft was (I wonder how many tickets his institution has opened?), we never discussed how good the actual operating systems was (did it crash, was it buggy?), we never discussed security (perhaps his campus has never been the victim of a virus?) and we never discussed upgrade costs (I assume it was something he just was resigned to absorb). What were apparently barriers to open source adoption, were accepted as the cost of doing business for proprietary software. The lesson here for me was, “why even bring open source up?”