OSNews

The author wrote:

"Imagine the Sales Department using Windows and the Public Relationship department running on Linux. In case someone uses OpenOffice and asks for help on adding a web link to a document, a Sales Department employee will be unable to assist so support will take over meaning money and time spending on something trivial."

The way I see it is this -- the OS is a tool, but standardizing on one tool is best for support reasons (as the author illustrates in the above excerpt).

So, while many (most?) of the OS vs. OS arguments tend to be somewhat religious, some of them are certainly centered around this basic premise: it is efficient to standardize on one tool, but no single tool does the job for everyone efficiently, so each faction within an organization will likely argue for the tool that is efficient for THEIR needs.

This is actually a reasonable and appropriate argument, IMHO. Pick the tool that works best for you, and if you can convince other people to use it, too, you get to work efficiently AND avoid inter-OS compatibility issues (training, support, document sharing, application costs, etc.).

Of course, it's easy for me to say this, since (a) I have yet to find a single OS that allows me to work efficiently in all my tasks, and therefore (b) my company has kindly provided enough workstations and laptops that I can run as many OSes as necessary to cover all of my tasks efficiently.

Which, incidentally, is why I'm writing this on Win2K, listening to CatFive on OS X, and submitting files into CVS on Linux.