What???? My boss dropped this bomb on us last week. I was shocked. There was no context for that remark. No one had brought this up seriously before. There was talk about migrating from Netware to AD. There was talk of VDI. There was even a rumor about Macs. But this was new. My first thoughts were:
- how well did my boss think this out?
- Am I willing to go to war with our users?
- Am I willing to take such a high profile risk for really no return?
- There’s a good chance that this is going to suck.
After the meeting adjourned, I took a moment to find out when Windows XP goes “End of Life.” It turns out that XP goes End of Life April 8, 2014. Also, I don’t foresee a justifiable reason to upgrade to Vista in the next three years. That means that a Desktop Linux project doesn’t make financial sense until at least 2011. That gives us three years to migrate off of XP.
I took the rest of the day to think about it and brought it up the next day. I found out that my boss hadn’t really thought about it at all. He was just throwing the idea out there as something to think about long term. He understood my point of view and I think that’s going to be the end of that for a while.
Coincidentally, that afternoon I received the InfoWorld Editors Newsletter titled Is Desktop Linux for Real? from Steve Fox at InfoWorld. Freaky huh?
Techno babble from an IT guy named Harry 