Quitting Microsoft cold turkey is a Ball

Sterling Ball's story of how his company quit using Microsoft products and switched to Linux is one of the wildest tech stories I've read this year.

Ball's company, the guitar string maker Ernie Ball, was raided by the Business Software Alliance for possessing unlicensed software and then used as an example in press releases and customer mailings. He was so angry at the treatment that he told his IT department to purge Windows and other Microsoft products from the company:

I said, 'I don't care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses.' We won't do business with someone who treats us poorly.

Today, he wants to thank Microsoft:

I know I saved $80,000 right away by going to open source, and each time something like (Windows) XP comes along, I save even more money because I don't have to buy new equipment to run the software. One of the great things is that we're able to run a poor man's thin client by using old computers we weren't using before because it couldn't handle Windows 2000. They work fine with the software we have now.

2003/08/20 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Cool! Way cool! Bullied into Linux :-)

#1 · Georg Bauer · 2003/08/21

If you can't do the time don't do the crime!

#2 · LP · 2003/08/21