From: Ad 

I had a chat with a mate who works in the ICT dept who was one of the NHS
new Tech reviewers....inc vista & Suse Linux


Hummm....

A) I had no idea the driver situation for Vista was so poor....basically
the older kit (of which the NHS has lots & includes scanners etc.etc.)
will not be made vista compatible if the kit is no londer in production/for
sale. i.e buy vista & you may have to buy new scanners, printers, card
readers (secure NHS cards not memcards), fingerprint scanners etc.etc.
& that's before possibly having to buy lots of new PC'es"

i.e. forget the "high price of vista".....wrt getting a the shiny
new disk from MS....that's almost negligible when put against the cost of
the h/w.....

B) Apparently this is what impressed em most wrt Linux i.e. that Linux out
of the box has vastly better driver support & what's more old stuff
will work.

Role reversal or what....I wonder when the windows weanies who used to
natter on about how poor linux's driver support was will now complain about
vista.....


C) The DRM & Activation stuff is still not sorted to their requirements
(i.e. in a "life critical environment" vendor created degradation
is not acceptable).

D) It's sufficiently different that moving XP > Vista is no different
than moving XP > Suse in terms of user retraining.


He certainly gave the impression that MS have screwed the pooch on this one
& that inculcated arrogance leading to "take it or leave it"
was to blame. i.e. the MS HQ think that "leave it" is not an
option ergo they can do anything they like & the user base will have to
take it.

The chat moved back onto the actual reason for our chat following words to
the effect of "the only question wrt vista is is linux good
enough/will it be good enough when XP is EOL & the answer to that
appears to be yes.....now back to the subject in hand....".

Adam

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