>>In spite of Pat's post (50-user intranets! ...Netscapes intranet deals are in the 10,000-50,000 user scale), Netscape is the price leader by a factor of almost three over BackOffice or Notes. The rest about per-processor charges etc, is salesman mumbo-jumbo. Netscape comes in under $100, and it embraces Office applications.<<
I have to grimace every time I see the rags and adverts report on how "cheap" it is to deploy vendor XX's solution (be it Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, Corel, etc.) The cost of buying the hardware and software is trivial! What we spend most of our money on is:
training. Everyone's used to office95 and the win 3.1 (and only slowly win95) explorer, am i supposed to tell my client they need to send all 5000 employees to a 1 day seminar on "how to use this exciting new desktop metaphor"?
deployment. plug & play isn't, server-based-upgrades aren't. I've had numerous salesmen come into my office, show me the greatest automated deployment software (SMS, Sun's UltraServer, Hummiingbird X11, etc.) and have it fall flat on its face when tried out in real world. For some reason or another a glitch is exposed that takes lots of time to debug and ends up having holes. Also upgrade costs are massive (and don't tell me that communicator will require less memory or hard drive or CPU speed than nav 3.0)
partner support. Millions of programms know Visual Basic and win16 (and slowly win32) programming. The only people who seem to know java are 16 year old hackers. I can also depend on many VARs and dealers locally to help out when I get stumped on windows issues. I see no such infrastructure in place for this network revolution.
Netscape is great at moving at the pace of a rabbit, but the real world is still moving at turtle speeds. I hope they don't run so fast that everyone looses sight of them.
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