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>> When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.

When your company reaches a certain size, auditors and such will put an end to that.

"This gets backed up where?"

"Where's your antivirus?"

"Why aren't you using _STANDARD_PRODUCTS_?"

etc

Your auditors are asking about specific software???

Ours never did. Processes, yes, specific brands? No way.

Yep we only install virus scanners at email gateways to make the exchange servers not die. The virus scanners are for windows, never had any auditor for sox or pci ask about software, sounds like a shit auditor.

Our PCI auditors like to see anti-virus on every machine, Windows, Linux, Mac, or Unix. That might not be a requirement, but every year they ask to see our AV solution for everything.

From our PCI implementation documentation I don't see any requirement of AV on every operating system.

Asking doesn't necessarily facilitate the need to do that thing necessarily.

Also: The success of BYOD suggests that things aren't quite so fixed. And seriously, if you're concerned about viruses, you're going to REQUIRE Microsoft products?

"I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss."

Hahah - If i had a penny for every time I've heard that. I'm an apple user myself - but MS offers all of what you are describing your daughter to be using as well - in fact I know many companies are already rolling their staff onto Office360 and so on. As for google docs etc - if you ever had to really crunch data - nothing comes close to Excel even today. I'm not saying they should keep doing what they are doing - I do think it's foolish to assume that they dont know whats going on in the world outside and aren't capable to grow with it.

"ever had to really crunch data"

Most people don't, that's why it doesn't matter. I volunteer as treasurer of a cub scout pack. We switched from Excel to Google docs spreadsheet. We're using about 1/1000th the power and limitations of google docs, and google's capabilities are expanding faster than our needs are expanding. I don't care if Excel would be "better" because we'd only need 1/100000th its capabilities or it would take 20 times longer to learn how to use.

Most business tasks run into exactly the same scaling issue.

Business decisions are never made by qualified techs on the basis of pessimism, they're always by completely technologically unqualified managers in a hurry on the basis of optimism.

It doesn't matter that Office360 does blah blah blah -- the next generation of office workers aren't using it now, and that's a problem for Microsoft.

I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.

> I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.

But Microsoft is not ignoring Google Docs. The Office web apps are also free, have more features than Google Docs, and have better compatibility with Office files. Microsoft is even bundling desktop Office for free with certain tablets, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro.

There have always been cheaper products. Microsoft even used to sell one. Back when Office was $500, Works was $100. And yet -- even back then, companies opted to pay the extra money for Office.

The only difference now is that the lower-priced product is free. But as a percentage of the worker's salary, Microsoft Office has actually gotten cheaper over time.

I have some kool-aid I'd like to sell you.

Desktop versions are close irrelevant to this discussion.

Office web apps are completely irrelevant, I think. I've never met anyone who has ever used them. 100% of people I know who use web apps use Google's.

No, thanks, I prefer to drink water. Sounds like you bought too much Kool-Aid. You must be tired of drinking it. I recommend that you return it to the store.

Office 365 (not 360) already generates over a billion dollars in annual revenues -- and that includes the desktop versions of Office. Even the consumer version of Office 365 Office has already sold about 2 million subscriptions.

And there are 50 million users of the Office web apps. If you don't know any of them, then perhaps you should think about whether your own experiences are skewed, and unrepresentative of what's actually happening out in the marketplace.

>When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.

I am inclined to agree. Already I can see the difference in the new interns and new hires at my job. Many of them are using chrome books at home so they tend to use chrome plugins to do everything at work.

Also professors and departments at universities are starting to use open source products in their curriculum as opposed to the traditional Microsoft suite. Even the school I graduated from uses google for email.

These are the kids that change their tools whenever a better one comes along. They are exactly the people who CAN be won over by the first better client they see.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).

You should try Thunderbird. I switched from Outlook a few years ago and have never looked back.

Here we go, and I use Thunderbird and would switch to Outlook (if it would be available for Ubuntu..)

Thunderbird can't provide a mail link as the Mail.app does. That is the only thing I miss since I switched from Mail.app.

I am of same age as your daughter but I use MS product and Mac. Your daughter must be stupid to abandon MS. That's the problem we have truly.

Care to qualify that otherwise pointlessly insulting post?