This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.

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harvey9 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.

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Moru 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.

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wtch98 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.

It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.

	▲	astura an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"

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f1shy 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…