On Thu, 2010-01-21 at 23:19 -0600, James Hess wrote:
On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Gadi Evron <ge@linuxbox.org> wrote:
It is not as if there are a wealth of alternatives. There are still many cases, where IE or MSHTML components are a pre-requisite, to access a certain product that is important to the user. A canonical example, would be:
Intranet apps, web-managed routers, switches, firewalls, or other network infrastructure that can only be administered using MSIE version 6 (ActiveX control, or old HTML relying on IE features) -- probably devices with old software. Mail readers such as Outlook with MSHTML components embedded.
Luckily, in the last 18 months especially, I've seen several different corporate requirements tender specify __against__ these (huge) problems, at least in non-US contracts. The first-hand argument I've heard for this is that it can actually reduce the tendered proposal bottom line and TCO, quite the reverse of what you would assume (probably by more lateral thinking by the Tenders) Notably, ActiveX was proscribed, followed recently by Silverlight. Certainly, the first firm to do it about 3 years ago has now written it in to EVERY request as standard text. Granted these are only around half-to-1M US$ tenders, but it's a (small) start. If this actually improves the general market/quality/usability of devices it's yet to be seen by me and my circle; maybe they are all just niche companies. They use lots of Sun/EMC/Brocade and similar. Yet, I have to say that the kit they end up installing is much easier to work with for Beasties and Tuxheads; far fewer VMs or Wine just to use IE or some obscure app (to us, that is) so a much faster/more familiar job-flow, and less gotchas/misconfigs. Still, no complaints from MS trained/based engineers that I've heard of that get contracted-in, this isn't super-uber-BOFH stuff. I was truly shocked the first time I read "Standards Compliant" and "BCPs/RFCs" in a corporate acquisition tender pack, for sure. YM<will>V. Gord